> The whole point of free and open society is to avoid over reliance on a central authority and allow for emergent authority. To me, "free and open society" su

> The whole point of free and open society is to avoid over reliance on a central authority and allow for emergent authority. To me, "free and open society" suggests that the people of the society intentionally put limits on any authorities that can influence their society, whether centralized or emergent. Currently we've got two major emergent authorities: Alphabet and Meta. Neither of them has significant accountability to the people who use their services to obtain news and learn and communicate, and both of them have strong incentives to get people to spend more time using their services so that they can sell more ads. > One little talked about counter strategy is just giving those same people targeted ads with better information. Who gives the "better information", and who decides what information is "better" in the first place? As a potential alternative (... very much spitballing here), what if there was a government-provided website where citizens could vote on potential regulations to be applied to companies that, say, provide media services and get over a billion hits per month? It could also be set up to let people provide supporting and opposing arguments and vote them up and down, and proposed regulations would have a limited period of time for voting on the regulation overall. Something like that. And of course, companies would be able to say, "No, we really cannot change our software in [x] way because we would go out of business," but there could be room for discussion there, too. And I don't think these would be too unreasonable, because these companies generally succeed because tons of people use them and appreciate many of their services. The overwhelming majority of people are unlikely to vote for things to try to destroy these companies. I think something like that coupled with an enforcement mechanism would provide a way to steer away from the underlying issues that have been polarizing our society and guiding people down rabbit holes to steal their attention, which prevents our society from being free and open. Things like the youtube autoplay button, targeted advertising, and the damnable youtube autoplay button. And it would actually be able to keep up with rapid changes by tech companies, unlike legislation.