With print media, TV, phone and post, all developed countries have special regulations that ensure these (often privately run) services align with values of democracy (with varying effectiveness).
I think the ideal solution would be to compel Facebook to make its architecture more open. For it to have real APIs, which, among other things, would allow other companies to transition users from Facebook effectively and seamlessly.
This is analogous to the reasoning that says that banks cannot make it unreasonably difficult to switch to another bank by creating admin around direct debits and the like (rules currently being implemented in the UK).
Facebook can engage in whatever kind of censorship it likes as long as the barriers to leaving it are sufficiently low that we can realistically imagine users doing so.
(Unfortunately FB is not a formal monopoly because it's free to users.. so we absolutely do need new legislation).
"The concept of access [to your data] was just alien to them. In the US consent is just a privacy policy and a tick-box approach." "They break democratically decided laws in the EU and get away with it. Instead of putting money into compliance, they expect NGOs and authorities to do that work for them."
The bundle download that Facebook offers (which I have used) doesn't meet those criteria, we can see this because no one has built a business off it.
At the moment Tinder is the only company I'm aware of that really does this, and it's not exactly a corner stone of democracy.
I've no idea why you've written the word compel in speech marks? If it is because you think it is unacceptable to ever compel a private corporation to anything, I'd point out that Facebook and all other corporations are already bound by all kinds of laws, many of which are very widely accepted. Especially relevant here are the laws (and social norms) TV and print organisations adhere to.
Because we can see it's essential for democracy for public discourse to be structured in a certain way, specifically that it not disproportionately represent one person or organisations views.
I can see that in principle people can choose not to use Facebook, but in practice we see that it is very dominant, and so, if a society perceives that a very dominant platform curtails freedom of speech, it's absolutely right to do something about it.
In principle, we might imagine, a newspaper that prints lies will go out of business. But, maybe it won't? In practice, all developed countries have laws against printing untruths.
It's clearly a balance, but if we look at other mediums and the way we've chosen to regulate them, Facebook is a clear outlier. If that's the case we should find the least intrusive way to ensure a single company doesn't have so much control over public discussion.
The idea that everyone freely selects Facebook for their communications because they love its moderation policy doesn't pass the common sense test.
The amount of bandwith for tv stations is limited, the internet is effectivly limitless.
>print media
We don't really. Print media is extremely off limits because it's protected by the First Amendment. Try passing regulation requiring a newspaper to print an image just because you deem it worthy.
>Why do we have libel or defamation law, even?
We don't really, the bar is very high. Also, these laws to apply to things written online, just ask Gawker.
As a consequence, I'm arguing, it would be a good idea to apply a similar approach to Facebook. I'm saying the lightest touch would be to make moving your social network off Facebook easier. Maybe there are other better ideas.
On the topic of print media being off limits... not so. I'm from the UK, I'm not sure exactly about media laws in the US, but the First Amendment does not mean that any publishing company can run just how it likes. Having just Googled I see that there are indeed cross-ownership laws for newspapers in the US. I expect there are many other regulations on print media.
Just as I'm arguing for Facebook, these are not laws about what might ultimately be said - either online or in print - they are laws about how much power a single company can have over the discourse.
It literally does. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that government can not make any impositions on print media, save for extreme cases of national security and libel, which also has a very high bar.
Cross ownership is only a thing because they can apply it to the TV half, which again, regulations on TV are made on the justification of their scarcity.
There simply is no equivalent in the US to placing such draconian rules on websites.
I can see your point that Facebook, and the web more generally, does not represent a 'natural' monopoly in the sense that it's not a physical feature of the technology that it is inevitably going to be dominated by a few companies. We could argue that Metcalfe's law actually does make it a natural monopoly.
Either way, it's an empirical fact that Facebook is tremendously dominant, and it seems to me that is the basis for intervention, though of course the intervention should be minimal respect and liberty as much as possible.
I also understand that views on this topic will reflect your wider views on liberty and legislation more generally, but those views ought to be consistent. I think the position that an effective national discourse can be expected to occur exclusively from market forces is extremely dubious, maybe you think differently.
Again, I do think you are mistaken about print media in the US. It seems to me cross-ownership laws do apply to print media, however justified. Much more clearly, copyright laws are applied everywhere.
I think some of these laws are wrong, but there are many precedents for regulating print and the web.
I disagree. Do you know how many general users have the vaguest ideas what those things are? People en masse use Facebook because other people do - they have very limited of awareness of anything how Facebook skews their view of reality and what limits their communication on the said platform has - until they hit those limits. They just know all of their friends are on the platform, so they must be there too.
Facebook has no more obligation to allow you to write whatever you want on their site than the New York Times has to publish your op-ed piece.