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You might enjoy Elizabeth Warren's proposal about designating "platform utilities": https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da32

by 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.

guscost 6y ago
Why not put a protocol in the public domain and let service providers implement it, like email? Is there something about broadcast communication that makes impartiality or neutrality impossible? Even if the broadcast protocol is based on follow/subscribe interactions? This is an interesting subject!
- geofft 6y ago
  That's a great idea, and I think if private individuals (either businesses or open-source hackers or whoever) want to do that, they should! But I think if private individuals (again, including business) don't want to do that, they shouldn't be compelled to! No law makes an email provider use SMTP; they do it because the industry / the market has settled on it. (Imagine if nobody could use STARTTLS until it got approved by the government!) Twitter is running a product, which includes broadcast communication as a component, yes, but also includes lots of other components: the idea that the product is structured as short messages with "retweets" and "likes" (distinct from Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, email, etc.), limitations on message size, the idea of "Verified" and the choice of whom to verify, the discovery page and curation, showing "Who to follow" and curation of that, the data model of threading, the whole concept of hashtags, a "Home" view where the timeline goes sideways, images and video and audio and alt text and link previews, encrypting traffic to their site, not encrypting DMs, etc. And part of their product is determining what their rules are about what's on-topic and what's off-topic (whether you count it as spam or as harassment or as whatever else). Absent a compelling reason otherwise, I don't think the government should be in charge of any of those decisions. I don't agree with all of those, and I certainly don't think it's impossible for them to make better-in-my-opinion decisions. But that's not for me to decide, nor is it for the FCC to decide. Come to think of it, that's probably the underlying principle behind the US (and many other countries') political philosophy: the default is that choices are in the hands of individuals, including groups of individuals who make a company, and the government overriding that is an exceptional case that requires a strong justification. It's not the only model - monarchies and authoritarian states follow the approach that everything is in the hands of the ruler / the party, and liberty is granted as an exception when there's an argument for it.

by geofft 6y ago

guscost 6y ago

Why not put a protocol in the public domain and let service providers implement it, like email? Is there something about broadcast communication that makes impartiality or neutrality impossible? Even if the broadcast protocol is based on follow/subscribe interactions? This is an interesting subject!

geofft 6y ago
That's a great idea, and I think if private individuals (either businesses or open-source hackers or whoever) want to do that, they should! But I think if private individuals (again, including business) don't want to do that, they shouldn't be compelled to! No law makes an email provider use SMTP; they do it because the industry / the market has settled on it. (Imagine if nobody could use STARTTLS until it got approved by the government!) Twitter is running a product, which includes broadcast communication as a component, yes, but also includes lots of other components: the idea that the product is structured as short messages with "retweets" and "likes" (distinct from Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, email, etc.), limitations on message size, the idea of "Verified" and the choice of whom to verify, the discovery page and curation, showing "Who to follow" and curation of that, the data model of threading, the whole concept of hashtags, a "Home" view where the timeline goes sideways, images and video and audio and alt text and link previews, encrypting traffic to their site, not encrypting DMs, etc. And part of their product is determining what their rules are about what's on-topic and what's off-topic (whether you count it as spam or as harassment or as whatever else). Absent a compelling reason otherwise, I don't think the government should be in charge of any of those decisions. I don't agree with all of those, and I certainly don't think it's impossible for them to make better-in-my-opinion decisions. But that's not for me to decide, nor is it for the FCC to decide. Come to think of it, that's probably the underlying principle behind the US (and many other countries') political philosophy: the default is that choices are in the hands of individuals, including groups of individuals who make a company, and the government overriding that is an exceptional case that requires a strong justification. It's not the only model - monarchies and authoritarian states follow the approach that everything is in the hands of the ruler / the party, and liberty is granted as an exception when there's an argument for it.