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Here's the thing. Are "platforms for speech" so important? Are they as important to our society as say, basic infrastructure? If they are, we should treat them

Here's the thing. Are "platforms for speech" so important? Are they as important to our society as say, basic infrastructure? If they are, we should treat them like how we treat electricity and plumbing, housing and transportation, education and healthcare. Imagine if our roads were maintained and monopolized by a tech company. Every driver would be a "user" to milk cash out of, either through subscription or through ads. It's a bit of a stretch from your original idea, but maybe you're suggesting for government to run social platforms OR heavily regulate them instead.

pojntfx 7y ago
This. The internet is a basic service and should thus be ran by the people.
ohduran 7y ago
I'm afraid that no innovation would come after that: there would be simply no incentive to improve the Internet as it would be, because eventually it would be "nationalised" so to say, and profit will max out for Internet companies. I'm all for thinking of ways to tackle the issue with Facebook and Twitter's monopolies, which are a special form of one in the sense that the technology to build similar platforms is more or less open source, but the ability to gather together millions of people isn't. But let's not kid ourselves and be led to unintended consequences out of it.