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Comment by justinzollars | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see Twitter, Google, CloudFlare and Facebook classified as public utilities. While Alex Jones is a nut case (And shouldn't be defended), other less publicized incidents of censorship by Social Media companies has occurred (related to picking winners between Israel and Palestine) [1]. While I am a Democrat who has been elected in the past, I agree with the conservative argument that: Corporate censorship dampens the spirit of free speech.

[1] Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...

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What makes these companies "public utilities" as opposed to others? I don't need Twitter in my life. Nor Google. Definitely not Facebook. And maybe lots of web sites use CloudFlare, but consumers don't interact directly with them.

Maybe applying common carrier status is something that's more palatable, but classifying them as "public utilities" doesn't have to be the mechanism by which CC is applied.

What counts as a need? Does one need land lines? Electricity? People live off the grid by generating these themselves and people live elsewhere without them at all.

Of course, one could bring a distinction between things that naturally grant a physical monopoly and things that don't, but I think one could make an argument that certain sites have effectively become the new public square and in doing so have a natural monopoly of our attention (or more pedantically a natural cartel).

There is also a natural monopoly of technology. If you have a patent for something, others can't use it unless you let them. Imagine if every major tech corporation aggressively pursued every possible patent claim against any companies trying to offer an alternate space for those banned from the mainstream, would the little company have any greater chance that a new electric company fighting against the entrenched players?

>what counts as need

When access to it is required to be on an even playing field.

Hence internet, yes. Electricity, yes. Phone? Yup.

Facebook? Ehhhh

If you want to reach an audience, the vast majority of companies would reach for Facebook and/or Google in a heartbeat. Either they're all wrong, or you're not on an even playing field if you do not use them as an advertiser.

Ok, but you a seven year old still needs the internet to have a level education playing field, and her mom needs it to sort out her taxes and ID applications and look up nutritional information and SNAP information and parks nearby and how to register a car and available jobs at the DMV and...

You need access to electricity, but there are alternatives such as solar panels or diesel generators. As for phone, more and more people are switching pure to cell phone, of which there are many different options.

By the same measure, depending upon what you are trying to do, it will not be an even playing field if you are removed from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.

Cell phone calls are regulated just like land lines... But yes I think data should also be a utility.

Being banned from Facebook/Google/Amazon doesn't prevent you from using the free irs file option, or applying for your ID online, or helping your child with math homework you have no idea how to work on cause you grew up without access to schooling, or etc.

I'm more talking level playing field for your average American, not your average hackernews poster.

What about LinkedIn. You could argue they are needed for career purposes.

You could, but I think I would win the argument that the internet is a couple of magnitudes more important to finding a job than LinkedIn... Plus all the other reasons the internet is necessary for a level playing field in modern life.

These days if you are a local or small to medium business and you aren't on these sites, you practically don't exist. Then again, this censorship isn't averted even if they are regulated by the government. I imagine Alex Jones would also have a hard time getting a 30 second ad on public access televison, despite however much money he was offering.

Personally, I'd apply a completely different property/rule on them. If they're open to the public, and they're used for debate/dissemination of data to willing individuals, then they are not allowed to restrict any speech that doesn't violate any existing laws.

That still leaves plenty of room for the removal/censorship of violent videos, copyright-violating videos, and content with outright calls to violence. Honestly, I've seen a ridiculous amount of the above three examples on all platforms to come to the conclusion that it's both impossible to police such content properly, and that the attempts at classifying content with political speech under the same umbrella is just silencing/censorship rather than it just being a matter of consistency.

> Nor Google. Definitely not Facebook.

While I agree with you on Twitter, these two are less clear.

Google wields vast influence by being search provider, advertising provider, email provider and phone provider simultaneously. Google IS the panopticon for the average user.

Facebook is someone I can't avoid in quite a lot of situations. When government starts using Facebook to coordinate and contact (and it has), Facebook has become more than a mere company.

As a fellow Democrat, I'm deeply disappointed to hear this. First, it's not a conservative argument in favor of free speech, because their criticisms of limits to free speech are limited to speech that they support.

Second, the first amendment is clearly and unambiguously intended to protect the right to free speech from governmental interference. There are myriad outlets for speech, and as long as that continues to be the case, you can't just handwave something like "corporate censorship dampens the spirit of free speech". Argue from facts, not ideology: show that it's actually happening.

Further, there is no argument for making Twitter, Google, Facebook, CloudFlare, or any other company into a public utility that wouldn't also apply to Fox News, Clear Channel, or the Drudge Report, and compel them to publish liberal views.

Alex Jones is facing backlash from these companies not because of his reprehensible politics, but because he has been inciting violence against other people and these companies, finally, are taking some responsibility for their role in that. Maybe when he finally stops trying to convince people to go after the families of Sandy Hook victims or "investigate" pizza shops, he'll be let back onto the playground to play with the other kids.

>right to free speech from governmental interference

I don't like where this argument goes. Do you think it should be legal for Google to remove every search result of a cannabis business? Should it have been legal for Google to censer anyone advocating for LGBT rights before they were a protected class? If you answer no to those questions its hard to justify saying that 1A only applies to the government.

Answer to both was yes, even before I got to your last sentence.

That's not a statement that I think either of those things is right. I would and should expect a lot of user and community backlash from actions like those.

But as far as the law is concerned, those things should be legal. Again, because to do otherwise would mean forcing businesses to adopt the government's position on any number of subjects.

And no, I'm not a free-market libertarian. There are lots of things I think businesses should be forced to do under strong regulatory terms. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.

The argument against net neutrality that I like the best is that net neutrality takes power away from the regulated telecom monopolies, which are more firmly under government control and scrutiny, and gives it to the tech multinationals who are much more loosely regulated. The tech multinationals are more and more acting a lot like governments with their coordinated content policies, so it's more about giving power back to the government regulatory agencies vs embracing the brave new world of banning unpopular speech on all the major platforms.

That's like saying cancer is good because it means fewer die of old age (fine print: because they are already dead).

Also, multinationals are the ones that can bend the telecom monopolies to their advantage and crush competition.

Thanks for posting this perspective. That is an interesting point.

> The argument against net neutrality that I like the best is that net neutrality takes power away from the regulated telecom monopolies,

This argument makes no sense. ISP monopolies are almost completely unregulated. It's not like Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) is regulated and subject to the kind of oversight that Con Edison is.

> I would like to see Twitter, Google, CloudFlare and Facebook classified as public utilities

This would be destructive to our venture ecosystem with dubious benefits to consumers. Few Americans love their public utilities–they're often mismanaged and at least somewhat corrupt.

Better to set up a system of rules and corresponding liabilities and--if necessary--regulators. (Given how profitable these companies are, though, litigation would probably cover all bases except those hurting the poor.)

This is going too far.

The Internet absolutely should be classified as a public utility, but the services on it should never be considered as such.

Telephones are a public utility, but a conference room service is not. This is by design, because the conference room service isn't integral to having a telephone system, but having a telephone system is integral to having a conference room service.

Likewise, the Internet is integral to accessing all of the sites that you visit, but all of the sites that you visit are not integral to the existence and continued functioning of the Internet.

You're suggesting that once a privately owned website grows large enough, that the private entity controlling should lose control of the service they created. I am curious where you would draw the line. If Facebook and Twitter are Public Utilities, what about Reddit? What about that web forum you're running in AWS that just hit 10,000 active users? What about a popular personal blog with server-side comments?

Classifying individual websites as public utilities was never the mission of net neutrality to begin with, and could actually be harmful. If such rules were to exist, all of the content-based censorship arguments against Facebook and Twitter for removing hate-speech from their platforms would be validated, because as public utilities these websites would have no right to moderate their own platforms anymore without government oversight.

Furthermore, it would give our government control over social networks, as they are now a highly-regulated public utility.

And how messy would it be for a website like Facebook to many any major change to their platform once such a rule took effect? By classifying it as a Public Utility, any feature Facebook added would be unable to be removed without a plausible argument that users were being robbed of utility. This would kill innovation, because why would any website implement a feature when doing so could result in immediate lawsuits, and the removal of such a feature once launched would be virtually impossible without legal consequences?

This is silly. We don't have to have Twitter, Google, CloudFlare or Facebook in our lives. We can live perfectly happy lives without them and they can be replaced by other companies as quickly as they were created by Twitter, Google, CloudFlare or Facebook. Electricity and phones are two physical services that we really need and can be ran by any company. Cable television is regulated because cable companies need right of way on telephone poles and under the streets, which is owned, more or less, by the city, county, state or federal government.

"they can be replaced by other companies as quickly as they were created by Twitter, Google, CloudFlare or Facebook."

You may not have Free Speech on the biggest platforms on the Internet today, but if you wait 15 years and are lucky, you may have it by then.

As arguments defending the status quo goes, that stinks.

(I'd sharpen my argument by saying "biggest and growing", but I'm not sure that's the case anymore. Facebook is definitely showing some signs that they've peaked, for instance. I'm not saying it has 100% happened, but it's a lot stronger of a claim now than it was even six months ago.)

It's vastly easier to replace your electricity or phone provider than your Facebook provider.

Electricity, water, cable, and phone are all "natural" monopolies because of the significant amount of infrastructure they require. Having private companies lay their own competing water mains would be an absolute clusterfuck.

Facebook is, at the end of the day, a website that happens to be popular right now. It's not even close to being a public utility. Anybody can enter the space and create a competing service. Given how fickle consumers are, I'll be surprised if it's still around in 10 years.

> I'll be surprised if it's still around in 10 years.

I agree that facebook the site, in its current form, is unlikely to exist in 10 years. I highly doubt that facebook the company is going anywhere in that time frame.

Then what even is the definition of "Facebook" if the entire business model can collapse and you still consider it to exist just because they have some money left somewhere and can continue being a business?

A company that doesn’t anticipate the end of a given revenue stream does a disservice to its shareholders.

Facebook is not its only web property and it will still have hooks in a majority of internet users for some time in aggregate by improving other properties and by acquiring new ones.

Does the Microsoft of 10 years ago look like the Microsoft of today?

It's easier for me to entertain the idea of treating ISPs like utilities, because it doesn't make sense for multiple companies to lay fiber to the same homes.

I'm not convinced for things like Twitter, Google, and Facebook. I think decentralization is the solution to this problem, not regulation.

It's weird to think about, but I almost wonder if something like Alex Jones starting a PeerTube instance might be the event that pushes enough people to start using ActivityPub to where the network is of a viable size.

You're confusing PIPE[1] with PRODUCT[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(business)

Private entities are under no obligation to be a platform for all speech. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

If someone comes on to Hacker News and posts racial slurs, shouldn't HN have the right to ban that user? Wouldn't that be censorship?

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