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It's trying to solve the wrong problem. If there's a monopoly, it should be busted. Not declared a new government agency.

ufmace 6y ago
IMO, the problem is that some fields are natural monopolies. This has long been known to include things like electric utilities, water, etc. I don't think anybody but the most crazy extreme libertarians objects to these types of companies being heavily regulated by the Government. The question is, should this apply to internet companies, and how? It is a bit tricky. I think there is a solid case that, once social networking companies get to a certain size, there is a dominating network effect that makes them sort of like natural monopolies. Thus I think there should be some kind of regulation of their behavior. Maybe not as strict as other types of natural monopolies, but I think they have too much power to be allowed to just do whatever their owners feel like.
- Natsu 6y ago
  One way to solve this would be to regulate only the largest platforms. So maybe this different kind of net neutrality only applies to Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, domain registrars, ISPs, large cloud providers and other significant privately-owned infrastructure, but not to every random bit player with no real market share. Otherwise, what happens if the ISPs decide that, say, Net Neutrality cuts into their profit margins, so they're just not going to route traffic for the sites that are politically antagonistic to them right before the election? Sure would be a shame if something happened to that site of yours, huh?
mindslight 6y ago
The difficulty is that communication networks form natural monopolies due to Metcalfe's law, unless we legislate APIs for open connection and federation. Which is probably above regulators' capabilities, and definitely above our political capabilities. The most straightforward way would be to mandate that web services had to allow API access for everything the web interface does, so users could use client software to aggregate multiple services. But this would undermine websites ability to make money off adspam, which while great, means it's politically a non-starter.

ufmace 6y ago

IMO, the problem is that some fields are natural monopolies. This has long been known to include things like electric utilities, water, etc. I don't think anybody but the most crazy extreme libertarians objects to these types of companies being heavily regulated by the Government. The question is, should this apply to internet companies, and how? It is a bit tricky. I think there is a solid case that, once social networking companies get to a certain size, there is a dominating network effect that makes them sort of like natural monopolies. Thus I think there should be some kind of regulation of their behavior. Maybe not as strict as other types of natural monopolies, but I think they have too much power to be allowed to just do whatever their owners feel like.

Natsu 6y ago
One way to solve this would be to regulate only the largest platforms. So maybe this different kind of net neutrality only applies to Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, domain registrars, ISPs, large cloud providers and other significant privately-owned infrastructure, but not to every random bit player with no real market share. Otherwise, what happens if the ISPs decide that, say, Net Neutrality cuts into their profit margins, so they're just not going to route traffic for the sites that are politically antagonistic to them right before the election? Sure would be a shame if something happened to that site of yours, huh?

mindslight 6y ago

The difficulty is that communication networks form natural monopolies due to Metcalfe's law, unless we legislate APIs for open connection and federation. Which is probably above regulators' capabilities, and definitely above our political capabilities. The most straightforward way would be to mandate that web services had to allow API access for everything the web interface does, so users could use client software to aggregate multiple services. But this would undermine websites ability to make money off adspam, which while great, means it's politically a non-starter.