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Because they've been allowed to privatize what is effectively the commons. In the US we had the Fairness Doctrine until Reagan. That was to try to make publish

Because they've been allowed to privatize what is effectively the commons. In the US we had the Fairness Doctrine until Reagan. That was to try to make publishers show balanced views. Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today.

shagie 5y ago
Individuals are still quite capable of publishing material in the ole Web 1.0 way. Get a server, get some storage, and serve the data. The commons of "being able to publish your own content" is still as available as it ever was. YouTube (and others) monetized a single spot to host and discover content - but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it. YouTube itself isn't a publisher - they are a distributor. Publishers publish to YouTube for it to be distributed and monetized. The Fairness Doctrine applies to YouTube no more than it does to AT&T to insist that the phone calls that it carriers are balanced. Fox and MSNBC are publishers. Charter, Comcast, AT&T, and Dish are distributors.
- lettergram 5y ago
  > but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it. How do you go to the public square and take a speaker phone and start talking in the internet? Google: blocks content Twitter: blocks content Facebook blocks content DuckDuckGo: Deranks (possibly blocks) content Reddit: Blocks content ... do you see the problem? Company towns still had to allow free speech, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are the defacto town squares and if I can't pick up a microphone and speak my mind; then it is not as it once was. Claiming I can "start my own town" doesn't work in this context. Worse, if I do how do people find my town? Can I advertise on these locations (nope, probably not). What if I use AWS? Well probably like parlor infrastructure would be pulled, if it becomes popular.
  - shagie 5y ago
    These are all private companies that have some space that they pay for from common carriers and open up to people with constraints. They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces. It is not reasonable for random people to declare that some private company's comment section is a public square and thus can't or shouldn't be moderated. If you want to grab a microphone and speak your mind, stand up your own server and do it. However, no private company owes you a thing. Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so. If you want to have the government compel private companies to do things, then say it. If you want the government to takeover private companies to provide the services you desire, then again, say it. As it is, the companies that you are listing are working as private companies in a context of "they're not breaking any laws" and "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying." I also believe that going down that path of "you must host all content that isn't illegal" to a private company is as equally authoritarian as "you must not publish any content about X". As it is, the companies are making decisions about their ethics and bottom lines (from however their content is monetized) and working from there to decide what is and is not appropriate to host on their systems.
    - lettergram 5y ago
      > They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces. That is literally a public space and you can protest there depending on the district (New York for instance). The better analogy would be banning a store from a state. Sure people can move to a new state, but you’re still banning discourse in the region everyone lives in. Then banning any advertisements, and you’ll actively take the wealth and infrastructure from the other state, if you can. > Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so. It’s devoid from any of our opinions. The question is where can I conduct commerce on the internet? The answer is one of these companies is almost certainly required to make a profit. That makes it the public square. It’s where commerce and information is shared. I can’t go to an alternative, I can’t build an alternative.
    - ttybird2 5y ago
      "However, no private company owes you a thing." Technically true, but I have yet to see someone who actually believes it. Everyone has a limit somewhere, for some people that limit is wedding cakes for gay marriages, for others is discrimination on some certain characteristics of a person. The point is that this kind of policy at the end of the day makes our society slightly worse. "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying." They are doing that but indirectly as to not break any law. See the senate hearings about facebook for example. They can force that via blackmailing (if you do not restrict X we will make a law that increases your tax or responsibility for what users post or whatever, deny funding or provide funding to competitors, prosecute crimes that we ignored before, etc)
Lazare 5y ago
The Fairness Doctrine applied to holders of broadcast licenses only, not to publishers in general. Per Red Lion Broadcasting Co v FCC[1], the FCC's power to enforce this rule only applied to mediums where there were limited channels. That is, the court found that since not everyone could have their own broadcast television channel, the FCC could (if it chose) enforce something like the fairness doctrine. Note, however, that such rules are unconstitutional when applied to newspapers[2], or any other medium where bandwidth is not limited. > Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today. Fox and MSNBC are cable channels. The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable channels, and a modern reincarnation that tried would be obviously unconstitutional. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._FCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._F... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v._Tornillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
- hnov 5y ago
  You're the best kind of right (technically), that law doesn't even come close to applying here and yet the argument still stands. Broadcasting has been usurped, mass media is not delivered over ATSC, but over a variety of PHYs, with IP/UDP/TCP/TLS/HTTP on top and your channel directory is privatized.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    I agree (and have posted elsewhere in this discussion) that there's a problem that needs solving. Nonetheless, the Fairness Doctrine didn't do what the OP claimed, and couldn't be made to do what the OP wanted, and yes, I think that does fatally undermine the argument being made. (Not to mention which, the current supreme court is much more protective of free speech than in previous decades, and particularly of free speech exercised via corporate forms. Realistically, the odds of an expanded Fairness Doctrine passing muster in this court are nil.) All of which means that whatever the solution ends up being, it's really not going to look much like the old Fairness Doctrine. Which, again, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist!

shagie 5y ago

Individuals are still quite capable of publishing material in the ole Web 1.0 way. Get a server, get some storage, and serve the data. The commons of "being able to publish your own content" is still as available as it ever was. YouTube (and others) monetized a single spot to host and discover content - but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it. YouTube itself isn't a publisher - they are a distributor. Publishers publish to YouTube for it to be distributed and monetized. The Fairness Doctrine applies to YouTube no more than it does to AT&T to insist that the phone calls that it carriers are balanced. Fox and MSNBC are publishers. Charter, Comcast, AT&T, and Dish are distributors.

lettergram 5y ago
> but the commons still exists for anyone who wants to serve it. How do you go to the public square and take a speaker phone and start talking in the internet? Google: blocks content Twitter: blocks content Facebook blocks content DuckDuckGo: Deranks (possibly blocks) content Reddit: Blocks content ... do you see the problem? Company towns still had to allow free speech, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are the defacto town squares and if I can't pick up a microphone and speak my mind; then it is not as it once was. Claiming I can "start my own town" doesn't work in this context. Worse, if I do how do people find my town? Can I advertise on these locations (nope, probably not). What if I use AWS? Well probably like parlor infrastructure would be pulled, if it becomes popular.
- shagie 5y ago
  These are all private companies that have some space that they pay for from common carriers and open up to people with constraints. They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces. It is not reasonable for random people to declare that some private company's comment section is a public square and thus can't or shouldn't be moderated. If you want to grab a microphone and speak your mind, stand up your own server and do it. However, no private company owes you a thing. Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so. If you want to have the government compel private companies to do things, then say it. If you want the government to takeover private companies to provide the services you desire, then again, say it. As it is, the companies that you are listing are working as private companies in a context of "they're not breaking any laws" and "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying." I also believe that going down that path of "you must host all content that isn't illegal" to a private company is as equally authoritarian as "you must not publish any content about X". As it is, the companies are making decisions about their ethics and bottom lines (from however their content is monetized) and working from there to decide what is and is not appropriate to host on their systems.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    > They are more akin to shopping centers were the teenagers use to hang out in than public spaces. That is literally a public space and you can protest there depending on the district (New York for instance). The better analogy would be banning a store from a state. Sure people can move to a new state, but you’re still banning discourse in the region everyone lives in. Then banning any advertisements, and you’ll actively take the wealth and infrastructure from the other state, if you can. > Just because you want Twitter or YouTube or Reddit to be a public square doesn't make it so. It’s devoid from any of our opinions. The question is where can I conduct commerce on the internet? The answer is one of these companies is almost certainly required to make a profit. That makes it the public square. It’s where commerce and information is shared. I can’t go to an alternative, I can’t build an alternative.
  - ttybird2 5y ago
    "However, no private company owes you a thing." Technically true, but I have yet to see someone who actually believes it. Everyone has a limit somewhere, for some people that limit is wedding cakes for gay marriages, for others is discrimination on some certain characteristics of a person. The point is that this kind of policy at the end of the day makes our society slightly worse. "it is not the government's place to be regulating what private citizens or private companies are saying or not saying." They are doing that but indirectly as to not break any law. See the senate hearings about facebook for example. They can force that via blackmailing (if you do not restrict X we will make a law that increases your tax or responsibility for what users post or whatever, deny funding or provide funding to competitors, prosecute crimes that we ignored before, etc)

Lazare 5y ago

The Fairness Doctrine applied to holders of broadcast licenses only, not to publishers in general. Per Red Lion Broadcasting Co v FCC[1], the FCC's power to enforce this rule only applied to mediums where there were limited channels. That is, the court found that since not everyone could have their own broadcast television channel, the FCC could (if it chose) enforce something like the fairness doctrine. Note, however, that such rules are unconstitutional when applied to newspapers[2], or any other medium where bandwidth is not limited. > Removing it led to Fox and MSNBC today. Fox and MSNBC are cable channels. The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable channels, and a modern reincarnation that tried would be obviously unconstitutional. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._FCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._F... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v._Tornillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....

hnov 5y ago
You're the best kind of right (technically), that law doesn't even come close to applying here and yet the argument still stands. Broadcasting has been usurped, mass media is not delivered over ATSC, but over a variety of PHYs, with IP/UDP/TCP/TLS/HTTP on top and your channel directory is privatized.
- Lazare 5y ago
  I agree (and have posted elsewhere in this discussion) that there's a problem that needs solving. Nonetheless, the Fairness Doctrine didn't do what the OP claimed, and couldn't be made to do what the OP wanted, and yes, I think that does fatally undermine the argument being made. (Not to mention which, the current supreme court is much more protective of free speech than in previous decades, and particularly of free speech exercised via corporate forms. Realistically, the odds of an expanded Fairness Doctrine passing muster in this court are nil.) All of which means that whatever the solution ends up being, it's really not going to look much like the old Fairness Doctrine. Which, again, doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist!