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Is it time for Twitter to be considered a utility? ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if

Is it time for Twitter to be considered a utility? ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if you consider an ISP to be a utility today, then there was a point where that kind of service became a utility.

holler 6y ago
Why? I'm not a fan of that idea as I'd rather find ways to spur new competition. Also, anyone can live without Twitter or any social network, whereas its harder to live without electricity, water, etc.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
Historically, utilities/public services are things that have a natural monopoly, which absolutely applies to ISP/other wireline telcoms (city franchise licenses), mobile cell service (limited competition due to spectrum auctions and the need for enough nationwide spectrum to be accumulated to launch a viable service), water, sewer, power, gas, etc. It might apply to things like undersea cables, although there isn't really a natural monopoly (plenty of space under the ocean) and those primarily connect two privately owned datacenters. It applies to other services such as post office and city trash where either laws (private express statutes) prohibit competition for the sake of making the public service more profitable, or where taxes force the customer to "buy" the public trash pickup, making even the best-run private enterprise unable to compete. It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).
- guscost 6y ago
  You could technically set up a mesh network and bypass the ISP too. I don’t think that argument is aging well, since it depends on some essential distinction between “telephone wire” type infrastructure and “server farm” or “installed base” type infrastructure. Why should we assume that a global content management and delivery network, broadcasting 500 million messages every day, is trivially replaceable? The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it. Indeed, it seems that just as there are natural monopolies over physically exclusive infrastructure like roads and cables, there are natural monopolies over network effects and attention/mindshare.
    - Meph504 6y ago
      I think the argument on monopoly is getting muddied, a monopoly isn't based on consumer's choosing a preferred service, but that they have no choice of provider. Twitter is popular because people choose to use it, but they have the choice to use other services, or to attempt to create one, and compete with the current popular one, the difficulty of succeeding in the field doesn't change if it is a monopoly (unless of course the service provider can suppress any competitor from entering the market.) Was MySpace a monopoly? it dominated social media at its peak, and not has been completely surpassed.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        There were other operating systems for PCs besides MS Windows in the 1990s, but Windows was still a monopoly. Yes Myspace was a monopoly until Facebook opened to tbe public because it was the only way a bunch of people were willing to communicate for a while.
        Meph504 6y ago
        I think you might want to do some double checking on your history. Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers. And My Space wasn't a monopoly, there was a parade of social networking sites of various popularity and success starting with bolt in the late 90s and most directly before MySpace was Friendster. Compare these applications, to say power companies, or ISPs in much of the US. The difference is really clear.
- curryst 6y ago
  I would actually argue that social media forms natural monopolies. The network effect creates an enormous advantage for incumbents. > It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. It is quite simple to create software that mimics Twitter, sure. It is very, very hard to create a platform like Twitter. That further reinforces it as a natural monopoly to me. You can even look at how the companies rise and fall; typically if the incumbent fails, they do so entirely, and the new competitor eats all of their lunch (i.e. MySpace and Facebook, Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, etc). There are very rarely situations where a new competitor comes and splits the market share; they either take it all, or they get none. > There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." There absolutely is. "I have to use Twitter because that's where everyone I want to talk to is, and they don't allow any interoperation with other social networks." It's fundamentally the same thing, and treating them like a utility would involve forcing them to treat their platform like utility poles. They can charge a fee to the other companies that interoperate to recoup their costs and get some profit, but they have to allow the interoperation.
geofft 6y ago
You might enjoy Elizabeth Warren's proposal about designating "platform utilities": https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big... But that aside (and I think she's using "utility" in a slightly different way), I think it would be a huge mistake to say that our approach is to regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and so forth) as is. That just cements their oligopoly: either your regulation calls out these companies by name (and therefore needs to ensure they retain power to work), or it imposes a regulatory burden which makes it even harder for competitors to replace them. This would be a serious unforced error for people who think that Big Tech is run by their political/ideological opponents. It would also be a practical disaster (imagine government-regulated Twitter spam detection), and IMO it would reflect an abandonment of the ideal of liberty. Rather than providing some structural reason why we need to regulate Twitter, we'd be regulating them baed on their effects - that they did something we don't like, and we don't know how to stop it other than telling them to not do it. It feels like it violates the spirit (though probably not the letter) of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder. A sibling comment points out the "natural monopoly" argument for regulating ISPs as utilities. That's an argument on structure (there can only be so many ISPs and there's a huge up-front cost to becoming competitive), not effect, and in fact the argument for Net Neutrality was that companies could act in unwanted ways in the future, not that they did. Our fundamental model for Twitter should be that it's just a company, and it could be replaced by some other company, and if we think that's infeasible, that's the bug in the market that we should fix. We should not resign ourselves to some government-guided-Twitter monstrosity - either you get regulatory capture or you get a private company whose product priorities swing with every election. My personal thesis here is that Twitter is simply too big, and that companies should be barred from growing beyond a certain size (of revenue, employees, or some similar measure). We can break them up like we broke up the trusts of old, and in fact like the trusts of old, they'll probably generate more GDP broken up - without the giant incumbent distorting the market, there's a more meaningful and direct profit motive on each resulting piece as well as more room for innovation by new companies, and therefore more general room for economic growth. That would be regulating the structure of the market in a generic way, and it would specifically regulate it in a way that promotes the ability of the non-government parts of society to have primary responsibility in shaping society. There is an alternative political model where the government is closely involved in making sure that social media is run in a way that promotes the society the people want (in the government's opinion). WeChat and Weibo run under this model. That model seems to be unpopular in the US (I recall something recently about trying to ban WeChat), and I hope we don't decide that they had it right all along.
root_axis 6y ago
It's not a utility though, utilities are primarily designated as such due to their extremely high infrastructure costs, twitter is just a popular website and nothing about the qualities of it make it similar to a utility.

holler 6y ago

Why? I'm not a fan of that idea as I'd rather find ways to spur new competition. Also, anyone can live without Twitter or any social network, whereas its harder to live without electricity, water, etc.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

Historically, utilities/public services are things that have a natural monopoly, which absolutely applies to ISP/other wireline telcoms (city franchise licenses), mobile cell service (limited competition due to spectrum auctions and the need for enough nationwide spectrum to be accumulated to launch a viable service), water, sewer, power, gas, etc. It might apply to things like undersea cables, although there isn't really a natural monopoly (plenty of space under the ocean) and those primarily connect two privately owned datacenters. It applies to other services such as post office and city trash where either laws (private express statutes) prohibit competition for the sake of making the public service more profitable, or where taxes force the customer to "buy" the public trash pickup, making even the best-run private enterprise unable to compete. It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).

guscost 6y ago
You could technically set up a mesh network and bypass the ISP too. I don’t think that argument is aging well, since it depends on some essential distinction between “telephone wire” type infrastructure and “server farm” or “installed base” type infrastructure. Why should we assume that a global content management and delivery network, broadcasting 500 million messages every day, is trivially replaceable? The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it. Indeed, it seems that just as there are natural monopolies over physically exclusive infrastructure like roads and cables, there are natural monopolies over network effects and attention/mindshare.
  - Meph504 6y ago
    I think the argument on monopoly is getting muddied, a monopoly isn't based on consumer's choosing a preferred service, but that they have no choice of provider. Twitter is popular because people choose to use it, but they have the choice to use other services, or to attempt to create one, and compete with the current popular one, the difficulty of succeeding in the field doesn't change if it is a monopoly (unless of course the service provider can suppress any competitor from entering the market.) Was MySpace a monopoly? it dominated social media at its peak, and not has been completely surpassed.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      There were other operating systems for PCs besides MS Windows in the 1990s, but Windows was still a monopoly. Yes Myspace was a monopoly until Facebook opened to tbe public because it was the only way a bunch of people were willing to communicate for a while.
      - Meph504 6y ago
        I think you might want to do some double checking on your history. Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers. And My Space wasn't a monopoly, there was a parade of social networking sites of various popularity and success starting with bolt in the late 90s and most directly before MySpace was Friendster. Compare these applications, to say power companies, or ISPs in much of the US. The difference is really clear.
curryst 6y ago
I would actually argue that social media forms natural monopolies. The network effect creates an enormous advantage for incumbents. > It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. It is quite simple to create software that mimics Twitter, sure. It is very, very hard to create a platform like Twitter. That further reinforces it as a natural monopoly to me. You can even look at how the companies rise and fall; typically if the incumbent fails, they do so entirely, and the new competitor eats all of their lunch (i.e. MySpace and Facebook, Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, etc). There are very rarely situations where a new competitor comes and splits the market share; they either take it all, or they get none. > There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." There absolutely is. "I have to use Twitter because that's where everyone I want to talk to is, and they don't allow any interoperation with other social networks." It's fundamentally the same thing, and treating them like a utility would involve forcing them to treat their platform like utility poles. They can charge a fee to the other companies that interoperate to recoup their costs and get some profit, but they have to allow the interoperation.

geofft 6y ago

You might enjoy Elizabeth Warren's proposal about designating "platform utilities": https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big... But that aside (and I think she's using "utility" in a slightly different way), I think it would be a huge mistake to say that our approach is to regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and so forth) as is. That just cements their oligopoly: either your regulation calls out these companies by name (and therefore needs to ensure they retain power to work), or it imposes a regulatory burden which makes it even harder for competitors to replace them. This would be a serious unforced error for people who think that Big Tech is run by their political/ideological opponents. It would also be a practical disaster (imagine government-regulated Twitter spam detection), and IMO it would reflect an abandonment of the ideal of liberty. Rather than providing some structural reason why we need to regulate Twitter, we'd be regulating them baed on their effects - that they did something we don't like, and we don't know how to stop it other than telling them to not do it. It feels like it violates the spirit (though probably not the letter) of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder. A sibling comment points out the "natural monopoly" argument for regulating ISPs as utilities. That's an argument on structure (there can only be so many ISPs and there's a huge up-front cost to becoming competitive), not effect, and in fact the argument for Net Neutrality was that companies could act in unwanted ways in the future, not that they did. Our fundamental model for Twitter should be that it's just a company, and it could be replaced by some other company, and if we think that's infeasible, that's the bug in the market that we should fix. We should not resign ourselves to some government-guided-Twitter monstrosity - either you get regulatory capture or you get a private company whose product priorities swing with every election. My personal thesis here is that Twitter is simply too big, and that companies should be barred from growing beyond a certain size (of revenue, employees, or some similar measure). We can break them up like we broke up the trusts of old, and in fact like the trusts of old, they'll probably generate more GDP broken up - without the giant incumbent distorting the market, there's a more meaningful and direct profit motive on each resulting piece as well as more room for innovation by new companies, and therefore more general room for economic growth. That would be regulating the structure of the market in a generic way, and it would specifically regulate it in a way that promotes the ability of the non-government parts of society to have primary responsibility in shaping society. There is an alternative political model where the government is closely involved in making sure that social media is run in a way that promotes the society the people want (in the government's opinion). WeChat and Weibo run under this model. That model seems to be unpopular in the US (I recall something recently about trying to ban WeChat), and I hope we don't decide that they had it right all along.

root_axis 6y ago

It's not a utility though, utilities are primarily designated as such due to their extremely high infrastructure costs, twitter is just a popular website and nothing about the qualities of it make it similar to a utility.