Or, just break up the alleged monopoly under existing anti-trust regulation, instead of welcoming a terrifying new power of the government mandating that private business serve customers they disagree with?
True libertarianism dictates that I can ban whomever I want from my shop. But in reality most of the bans were of the 'No Negroes' variety. I would love to think that the free market would take care of discriminatory businesses, but history shows it will not.
I agree that the true issue is ultimately monopoly: if a town has 10 newspapers and one goes democrat-leaning, no one would really care. But it's different if there is only 1 newspaper.
I worry that there can only ever be a single Friendster/Google+/Myspace around, because people will always gravitate towards the most popular one.
Now try to apply US anti trust laws to it.
Of course, those who make the "publisher or platform, pick one!" false dichotomy aren't really genuinely concerned about the size of the company. They just want to force someone to host their content, which is why they jump to "free speech means more nowadays than what it says in the constitution [so platforms must carry my speech]."
Sorry for the tangent, just want to make sure my position is clear.
It is not nice to lump us all together. Many of us here both
- despise certain content
- while we still find it totally unacceptable that tech giants are allowed to do whatever they want with their power "because hate speech"
This is just a variant of introducing bad laws "because of terrorism":
The laws are bad not because anyone wants terrorism but because we don't want anybody to be punished without a good reason.
And today as tech giants wields more power than many courts or - in many but obviously not all ways - even small countries it might be time to make sure they have to be careful with that power.
No one is forcing all businesses to do serve all customers everywhere always. We are saying you can't discriminate on the basis of marginalized groups.