You are free to define the "public" part of public town square as essentially popular, open and social, but that is not the flashpoint of disagreement. When peo

You are free to define the "public" part of public town square as essentially popular, open and social, but that is not the flashpoint of disagreement. When people disagree on the boundaries between private and public institutions, they are not disagreeing over whether something is popular, open, and social. A public elementary school is not public because it is popular, open, and social, and neither is a mall. And public funding is a critical component to public governance. Facebook is accountable to private money. There is a reason why people don't like the idea of politics being funded by private money. To change that, we might talk about using taxpayer money to fund Facebook, and rather than mere rules for companies, we might talk about public ownership and governance of Facebook and not merely breaking businesses apart. Breaking Facebook apart is about dealing with free market concerns. Nationalizing Facebook is about recognizing that Facebook ought be a public institution.