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What happens when that applies to ISPs determining what goes over their wires? We have a privately owned public square at this point. Further entrenching that
by Natsu 6y ago
What happens when that applies to ISPs determining what goes over their wires? We have a privately owned public square at this point. Further entrenching that power seems unwise.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoYou're moving the goalposts.
- Natsu 6y agoFrom what to what? Both are private ownership of public spaces.
- BrianOnHN 6y agoMake the internet a public utility. It's been discussed here before. Maybe search "municipal broadband"
- threeseed 6y agoSo in your hypothetical world there is some conspiracy between the thousands of ISPs which will work together to decide what content peoples see. Even though consumers will simply move to another ISP just like they are free to move to another website.
- Natsu 6y agoThousands? There are only a handful of ISPs at the top and, oh yeah, the last time they made a plan to collude, it birthed Net Neutrality. So I'm not sure what part of it happening before makes it seem unlikely to happen again.
- three_seagrass 6y agoCommon carrier laws prevent that. The same reason FedEx can't open your box and halt your shipment of UPS swag. And no, Facebook is a website and app(s), not a common carrier.
- Natsu 6y agoThis isn't about what is, but what should be. What makes Facebook different from FedEx that it should censor messages between willing participants? Also, I note that you didn't list MasterCard, which has been known to cut perfectly legal businesses loose... and that's a very small industry. You have what? Visa/MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, pretty much.
- three_seagrass 6y agoBecause Facebook is not an ISP nor a FedEx. They do not provide a service that ships information. Now, you can muddy the semantics by saying, "Isn't every website an information shipper?" and even then the answer is still no, that still does not make them a common carrier. There are what people want Facebook to be, which is some system supporting of their own political views, but the bad faith arguments to project Facebook into being an ISP are not sound.
- manigandham 6y agoWhy are the arguments not sound? Why is a private company maintaining communications between 2 billion people not possibly a common carrier?
- bleepblorp 6y agoWhether Facebook is an ISP or not isn't material to whether it should be a common carrier. Facebook's social function is as a distributor of broadcast information and carrier of peer-to-peer information for two billion people. Further, network effects mean that Facebook's size makes it a natural monopoly. There is no shortage of historical evidence that unregulated natural monopolies are bad news for everyone except their owners, and, given that Facebook's function is the distribution of information, the natural path for regulation in a free society is a common carrier designation.
- zo1 6y agoYou didn't answer the question from OP. "What makes Facebook different from FedEx that it should censor messages between willing participants?" Of course Facebook isn't a UPS or a mail carrier, etc, we know that.
- mr_toad 6y ago> ISPs determining what goes over their wires? ISPs shouldn’t even be able to see what goes over their wires. Facebook is not an ISP.