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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Problems like this were litigated in the railroad era. See Memphis News Pub vs. Southern Railway (1903).[1] Could the railroad transport one newspaper, but not another? The Supreme Court of Tennessee ruled, "no". That was even before the US had Federal antitrust law.

Railroad law and regulation from a century ago is worth studying when trying to figure out how to deal with monopolies with strong network effects. Railroads had even stronger networking effects.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=sU0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA202&lpg=...

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Difference being that the railway was the only practical mean of delivery back then and is an actual utility. Also one couldn't sideload newspapers to circumvent restrictions.

Tagging everything as a "utility" and demanding they be regulated as such is as far removed from the conservative ethos as the altright apparently.

I think Google, Facebook and Amazon have far bigger network effects than railways. Also, the network effects are different making Google and such exponentially more powerful.

"Network effects" are people's relationships with their products, which they justly earned.

They ran atop the same network that everyone else had access to and achieved, the accurate analog to the railway example is the ISPs and not these companies.

So, Where do we draw the line between a company rightfully refusing to host inappropriate content and a company "abusing" its network effects?.

Where do we draw the line between a company "abusing" its network effects and a company avoiding being abused by other companies? (e.g. Imagine a app store that distributes only free software backed by a big corp, then a small proprietary app maker complains that they don't want to accept their app because its proprietary).

Is the size of the company the criteria that decides if they are in the right or in the wrong?

Is the size of the company the criteria that decides if they are in the right or in the wrong?

Yes. That's the whole point of antitrust law.

> So, Where do we draw the line between a company rightfully refusing to host inappropriate content and a company "abusing" its network effects?.

I don't think the app description of Gab is an appropriate content. Google seems to assume that the content of the Gab app will be innapropriate. Given this is about freedom of speech I'm not sure they should be the one deciding this. Are they also removing Gab from their Google Search results?

Interesting to consider vertical integration questions in light of this.

Were Google just one of many available app stores for Android, would this be a weaker case? (Or: would railways have been regulated as common carriers were there several parallel railways next to each other, or if the track owner was not the only person operating trains on the line?)

What if OS + Store integration was done at the cell phone manufacturer level? What if they all ended up settling on the same default store (say, Google's?)? Would it depend on why they had selected that one? Would it depend on how many others existed? (And same question if OS + Store integration was done at cell network operator/phone reseller level.)

What if there was a plethora of app stores that various phones came with, but they all or almost all independently decided an app was not representative of them, or distasteful, or inappropriate?

What if OS + Store integration was done at the cell phone manufacturer level? What if they all ended up settling on the same default store?

Yes. See US vs. Microsoft.

What's the parallel here? There was no app store back then, I'm guessing you're referring to IE, but again, that was Microsoft integrating two Microsoft products together. Similar with Windows on top of DOS.

What if Microsoft had never made a browser, but 90% of manufacturers chose to make Netscape default over Opera, and Opera sued them for it?

Also, why only comment on one of the scenarios?

Not all Android devices come with Google's app store, and some manufacturers have their own. On the other hand, it's also not a simple per-device decision of the manufacturer between Google and the alternatives (afaik manufacturers either ship Play with all of their devices or with none).

Actually this is a bit different as google is not blocking their app from being installed on Android just not allowing them to use Google play. In other words google is not stopping them from using the (railroad) train tracks just not willing to transport them in their locomotive.

This is the best analogy to explain net neutrality I've ever heard.

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