Mozilla's latest step in fight to save net neutrality

Net Neutrality might be important in the grand scheme of things, but overall I find that it's less important to me than the current rumblings that may eventually give way to a push for an Internet Bill of Rights.

From the article:

> This case is about your rights to access content and services online without your ISP blocking, throttling, or discriminating against your favorite services. Unfortunately, the FCC made this a political issue and followed party-lines rather than protecting your right to an open internet in the US.

A lot of this language, and the website blackouts and other promotion of pro-Net Neutrality arguments we've seen over the past few years, are unfortunately drawing people's attention away from the real issue here. It's all well and good to make sure your ISP provides fairly prioritized access to the websites you want to load, but in the end this isn't really that much of a freedom or rights issue as they'd like you to think, and it's sapping energy that could be put to better use.

In my view, an Internet Bill of Rights is needed to really enshrine the right of freedom of speech and of association in the modern age. The key would be to enable websites to choose between two roles: either a publisher, or a platform.

If you're a publisher, you're acting as a curated source of content, akin to a newspaper or a broadcaster. Real names and identities should be associated with this, and these people should be liable for what they post. Publishers retain complete control over their content, and complete responsibility for any libellous or illegal content. Applying for status as a platform should be like registering as a corporation, and should carry with the advantage of a little bit of prestige, at least in the sense that you're verified to be real people operating under the law.

If you're a platform, you're acting as a common carrier, akin to a network provider. Anonymity should be an option, and you're only liable for the content on your network to the extent that a mechanism must exist to report illegal content and it must be taken down and reviewed on report. Other than that, there's no direct liability for the content posted. This should be the default state if you don't apply to be a publisher.

If you're a platform, you fall into one of two categories: natural monopolies (Facebook, Twitter, and anything else that reaches a certain size or certain percentage of their specific market), or a bit player. There's a long history of regulating monopolies differently than bit players, because monopolies can unfairly use their position for any number of nefarious things. Natural monopolies in an Internet context need particular attention because of their incredible and unprecedented reach and power. In particular, they need to be prevented from deplatforming people.

Deplatforming people from a natural monopoly is arguably similar to kicking someone out of the public square and telling them their freedom of speech can be exercised in a dark alleyway instead - it's antithetical to what was meant by freedom of speech, especially considering the fact that these natural monopolies could not exist were it not for the public investments in DARPA and various network efforts since.

In contrast, bit players aren't the public square, they're like public houses - places that can reasonably reserve the right to kick people off because their goal is not to cater to the general populace and their position in the market is not one of a monopoly over any niche.

In short, I think the real modern fight for neutrality that we need to have is content neutrality, in the form of regulating natural monopolies so as to remove their ability to deplatform, shadowban, and otherwise curate content (generally for political purposes).