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> So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also s

> So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life. Holy crud, then break them up if they're that powerful. The right to private moderation is part of the 1st Amendment and should only be abridged in very specific circumstances; don't get rid of the 1st Amendment just because you're scared of Facebook's lobby arm. There are lots of platforms other than Twitter/Facebook. Anti-monopoly regulation against tech companies has reasonably wide bipartisan support in the US. We also have more evidence nowadays that social media doesn't necessarily have to result in natural monopolies. There are so many things we could do rather than significantly abridge people's rights to free association. - The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy. - The government could stop allowing purchases by these tech giants in general. - The government could split up Facebook/Instagram/Horizon. - The government could push for more open app policies on stores or regulate sideloading (seriously, the amount of pushback this idea gets as a violation of Apple's rights, compared to the amount of support for regulating social network moderation is wild to me. Both of those are an interference in private rights, but one of those things is also a significantly bigger restriction of 1st Amendment rights than the other). - The government could force open APIs between services (Europe is trying to do this, we'll see whether or not they get it right). - If that's too much interference into the market, the government could explicitly legalize adversarial interoperability and revise the CFAA to make it easier to scrape websites. - Then there's an entire conversation to be had about payment systems online and why we have some of the market forces that we do have around monetizing eyeballs and paying for content. ---- But to immediately jump to treating Facebook as a public utility -- not only is that a really drastic step with a lot of 1st Amendment implications, it's also kind of a depressing step because it assumes we couldn't make better social networks than Facebook/Twitter, and I absolutely believe we could. It's depressing to think that we can't ever move past them and the only thing we could do is just try to reduce one specific problem that they have. I don't want Facebook to be an essential service; even if they didn't censor anything I don't want to use Facebook. I don't really care what their moderation policy is. I hate almost everything about the website; I want alternatives, not a more regulated monopoly. I don't even like the ad-supported model in the first place, I think that monetizing attention is antithetical to creating a good social network.

philistine 5y ago
The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?
- danShumway 5y ago
  That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes. On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments. Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.
Chris2048 5y ago
I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.
- danShumway 5y ago
  I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves. Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect. On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower. And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides. My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws. The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).

philistine 5y ago

The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?

danShumway 5y ago
That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes. On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments. Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.

Chris2048 5y ago

I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.

danShumway 5y ago
I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves. Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect. On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower. And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides. My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws. The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).