7 ms·

> Fine, whatever, their house their rules When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from

by trangus_1985 5y ago

> Fine, whatever, their house their rules When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules". Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?

throwaway6734 5y ago
There are multiple other ways to contact people. I haven't used facebook in almost a decade and have zero issue communicating with people
bragh 5y ago
If you do not like the rules set by them, you can always build your own social network.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  This is like saying if you don't like the rules you can build your own multinational telephone network. There's a reason telecoms are subject to common carrier rules and I don't see why tech monopolies should be any different.
  - bragh 5y ago
    I think you are seriously and intentionally misunderstanding the point. So far it was completely fine for Facebook to ban whoever they wanted and it was justified by them being a private company. Anybody who complained about it was told that they can build their own social network/cloud provider/payment provider. Somehow now this is bad... Ridiculous.
    - macksd 5y ago
      Different people on the Internet will say different things. You can't really assign one collective motive to everything on the Internet and then say it's hypocritical.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.
      - riffic 5y ago
        > Facebook is a utility hardly.
      - pengaru 5y ago
        > Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big. This can't happen to utility monopolies: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-added-70m-new-users-during-facebook-outage https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-... If your claim were true, everyone would just be stuck suffering and beholden to Facebook's ability to fix their service for lack of options.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      It's fine if you're a small or medium size business that commands at most single digit % of the market. Facebook dominates ad spending and reach to the point that you can't just build your own, because they have a de facto monopoly/oligopoly over digital ads. Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.
  - Imnimo 5y ago
    My understanding of common carrier rules is that they want to avoid a situation where a railroad or telephone operator who controlled the only available line could charge exorbitant rates to customers who had no alternatives. I don't really see how the same concern is true for Facebook - we have lots of options to disseminate information online.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    The crucial difference is lack of a right of way. The thing which creates an actual monopoly instead of the language degradation of monopoly to mean "But it is big and I don't like it!".
- postsantum 5y ago
  If you don't like this privte outrage, just ignore it or start your own
- macksd 5y ago
  And your own social network will fail because of network effects. If Facebook can be as terrible as they have been and retain their users, it's really because of their users that they're being propped up with a successful business. I gotta say at that point even I start thinking they owe their users more than a free market exchange would imply. Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"
  - riffic 5y ago
    > network effects If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here: https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/ https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/ These protocols exist today. This is a W3C recommendation as of 2018-01-23: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
  - new_guy 5y ago
    > And your own social network will fail because of network effects Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine. And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.
    - macksd 5y ago
      Burning down Facebook? What on Earth are you talking about? It makes it easier for users to remove their own accounts across multiple services. It's a common interface to features the social networks themselves provide. This is the opposite of a bad actor.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Fun argument, now try asking Apple why they're against Jailbreaks if they "technically provide the same services the phone could already do"?
- munk-a 5y ago
  If you don't like the rules of English you can always invent your own language - sure you won't be able to talk to anyone but isn't that freedom enough?
willis936 5y ago
This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.
- lsb 5y ago
  Cigarettes are obviously bad for people's individual health, but we don't rely on individual responsibility to ensure children don't purchase themselves cigarettes.
- subsubzero 5y ago
  I cut facebook out of my life almost 5 years ago before it was "cool" to do so. Its like junk food or cigarettes or anything else that is net bad for a person. I would say let people decide for themselves if they want to use it and you hope they make the smart choice of just saying no to facebook and all its toxicity that comes with it.
- yosito 5y ago
  > they are not important They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    I loathe Facebook and am hesitant to take its side on any issue. But if you cannot be bothered to ask your "contacts" for a phone number, email address, Telegram, whatever, I don't see why it is Facebook's responsibility to ensure you have access to these people 24/7.
slx26 5y ago
Yeah, I always defend there should be a "law of scale". When you start making your own project, taking a risk, spending hours and hours working on something, it's fair for a single individual to have the right to make any calls in what they are doing. But when it expands to thousands of workers and millions of users (or even much, much less), your responsibilities and reach can not be the same anymore. Saying "I built it" is no justification. The growth and the contributions that are making something possible, users included, do not support the logic of "my house my rules" anymore. This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.
retrac 5y ago
> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines? Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege: > AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'" > Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service. It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)
- prepend 5y ago
  > It was illegal It wasn’t an arbitrary choice by a private company. That’s a big difference. A stupid rule by a highly regulated monopoly is very different from a stupid rule by an unregulated monopoly (maybe member of oligopoly).
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Right, the point wasn't whether you can literally imagine that happening. The point is that it's obviously bad.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bduerst 5y ago
riffic 5y ago
lol, ma bell did exactly this and more.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
root_axis 5y ago
Nah. Nobody needs to use FB to communicate, there are many dozens of available communication platforms, you can't even sign up for FB without a phone number anyway, this idea that FB is some critical communication infrastructure is totally false.
- croes 5y ago
  For some countries Facebook, Instagram and WhatApp are the internet. Official entities and company use them as the only form of communication with the citizens and customers.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    Sure, this exists, but it's extremely rare, it's more of a talking point than an accurate representation of reality.
    - croes 5y ago
      It maybe few countries but many users
throwawaysea 5y ago
All these large technology platforms are as ubiquitous as utilities, as powerful as governments, and as unregulated as can be. Their network effects and access to capital gives them unusually strong protection from competition, and also the ability to just copy smaller competitors with impunity. After all, what legal action could a cash-tight startup take up against a behemoth with a war chest in the tens of billions of Dollars? Given their size, scope, and the lack of healthy competition, they need to be reigned in. We need to treat social media platforms like we treat telecom services - as common carriers. And we need to treat other large tech platforms as public utilities as well. Clarence Thomas on treating social media as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-public/ https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p... Eugene Volokh on treating social media as common carriers: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media-as-common-carriers/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...
pengaru 5y ago
Facebook isn't a monopoly, as evidenced by their recent outage resulting in 70M new Telegram users overnight. Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network. But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.
krapp 5y ago
>When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules". Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules. >Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines? That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.

throwaway6734 5y ago

There are multiple other ways to contact people. I haven't used facebook in almost a decade and have zero issue communicating with people

bragh 5y ago

If you do not like the rules set by them, you can always build your own social network.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
This is like saying if you don't like the rules you can build your own multinational telephone network. There's a reason telecoms are subject to common carrier rules and I don't see why tech monopolies should be any different.
- bragh 5y ago
  I think you are seriously and intentionally misunderstanding the point. So far it was completely fine for Facebook to ban whoever they wanted and it was justified by them being a private company. Anybody who complained about it was told that they can build their own social network/cloud provider/payment provider. Somehow now this is bad... Ridiculous.
  - macksd 5y ago
    Different people on the Internet will say different things. You can't really assign one collective motive to everything on the Internet and then say it's hypocritical.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.
    - riffic 5y ago
      > Facebook is a utility hardly.
    - pengaru 5y ago
      > Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big. This can't happen to utility monopolies: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-added-70m-new-users-during-facebook-outage https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-... If your claim were true, everyone would just be stuck suffering and beholden to Facebook's ability to fix their service for lack of options.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    It's fine if you're a small or medium size business that commands at most single digit % of the market. Facebook dominates ad spending and reach to the point that you can't just build your own, because they have a de facto monopoly/oligopoly over digital ads. Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.
- Imnimo 5y ago
  My understanding of common carrier rules is that they want to avoid a situation where a railroad or telephone operator who controlled the only available line could charge exorbitant rates to customers who had no alternatives. I don't really see how the same concern is true for Facebook - we have lots of options to disseminate information online.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  The crucial difference is lack of a right of way. The thing which creates an actual monopoly instead of the language degradation of monopoly to mean "But it is big and I don't like it!".
postsantum 5y ago
If you don't like this privte outrage, just ignore it or start your own
macksd 5y ago
And your own social network will fail because of network effects. If Facebook can be as terrible as they have been and retain their users, it's really because of their users that they're being propped up with a successful business. I gotta say at that point even I start thinking they owe their users more than a free market exchange would imply. Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"
- riffic 5y ago
  > network effects If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here: https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/ https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/ These protocols exist today. This is a W3C recommendation as of 2018-01-23: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
- new_guy 5y ago
  > And your own social network will fail because of network effects Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine. And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.
  - macksd 5y ago
    Burning down Facebook? What on Earth are you talking about? It makes it easier for users to remove their own accounts across multiple services. It's a common interface to features the social networks themselves provide. This is the opposite of a bad actor.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Fun argument, now try asking Apple why they're against Jailbreaks if they "technically provide the same services the phone could already do"?
munk-a 5y ago
If you don't like the rules of English you can always invent your own language - sure you won't be able to talk to anyone but isn't that freedom enough?

willis936 5y ago

This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.

lsb 5y ago
Cigarettes are obviously bad for people's individual health, but we don't rely on individual responsibility to ensure children don't purchase themselves cigarettes.
subsubzero 5y ago
I cut facebook out of my life almost 5 years ago before it was "cool" to do so. Its like junk food or cigarettes or anything else that is net bad for a person. I would say let people decide for themselves if they want to use it and you hope they make the smart choice of just saying no to facebook and all its toxicity that comes with it.
yosito 5y ago
> they are not important They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  I loathe Facebook and am hesitant to take its side on any issue. But if you cannot be bothered to ask your "contacts" for a phone number, email address, Telegram, whatever, I don't see why it is Facebook's responsibility to ensure you have access to these people 24/7.

slx26 5y ago

Yeah, I always defend there should be a "law of scale". When you start making your own project, taking a risk, spending hours and hours working on something, it's fair for a single individual to have the right to make any calls in what they are doing. But when it expands to thousands of workers and millions of users (or even much, much less), your responsibilities and reach can not be the same anymore. Saying "I built it" is no justification. The growth and the contributions that are making something possible, users included, do not support the logic of "my house my rules" anymore. This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.

retrac 5y ago

> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines? Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege: > AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'" > Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service. It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)

prepend 5y ago
> It was illegal It wasn’t an arbitrary choice by a private company. That’s a big difference. A stupid rule by a highly regulated monopoly is very different from a stupid rule by an unregulated monopoly (maybe member of oligopoly).
tshaddox 5y ago
Right, the point wasn't whether you can literally imagine that happening. The point is that it's obviously bad.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bduerst 5y ago

riffic 5y ago

lol, ma bell did exactly this and more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

root_axis 5y ago

Nah. Nobody needs to use FB to communicate, there are many dozens of available communication platforms, you can't even sign up for FB without a phone number anyway, this idea that FB is some critical communication infrastructure is totally false.

croes 5y ago
For some countries Facebook, Instagram and WhatApp are the internet. Official entities and company use them as the only form of communication with the citizens and customers.
- root_axis 5y ago
  Sure, this exists, but it's extremely rare, it's more of a talking point than an accurate representation of reality.
  - croes 5y ago
    It maybe few countries but many users

throwawaysea 5y ago

All these large technology platforms are as ubiquitous as utilities, as powerful as governments, and as unregulated as can be. Their network effects and access to capital gives them unusually strong protection from competition, and also the ability to just copy smaller competitors with impunity. After all, what legal action could a cash-tight startup take up against a behemoth with a war chest in the tens of billions of Dollars? Given their size, scope, and the lack of healthy competition, they need to be reigned in. We need to treat social media platforms like we treat telecom services - as common carriers. And we need to treat other large tech platforms as public utilities as well. Clarence Thomas on treating social media as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-public/ https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p... Eugene Volokh on treating social media as common carriers: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media-as-common-carriers/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...

pengaru 5y ago

Facebook isn't a monopoly, as evidenced by their recent outage resulting in 70M new Telegram users overnight. Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network. But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.

krapp 5y ago

>When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules". Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules. >Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines? That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.