> This is literally what Twitter has been doing. Trump's order puts an end to it.
Debatable, on both points. There have been studies[1] that show that accounts are banned, but it's not necessarily because they are conservative accounts or conservative content. In a civil or criminal case, causation must be established. In this case, the president is making it very much more expensive for certain companies to defend themselves.
This EO is more likely to hurt YouTube than Twitter because it has the ability to get the Federal Government to no longer approve grants to Google subsidiaries and for government agencies to stop advertising with them.
> to be stripped of their 203 protections.
You mean The Communications Decency Act, Section 230?
> Twitter's policies and their selective enforcement of such run directly contrary to the underlying tenets of free speech.
That's interesting. Government law enforcers and prosecutors have the ability to use prosecutorial discretion. Are you saying that the government should be able to select who they prosecute, but that private organizations should not be allowed discretion to enforce their own contracts?
If ISPs (where content in a pipe is pretty close to comparable to Common Carrier standards) can't be held up to the standards of Net Neutrality, how can social media companies (where content is much more subjective to interpret as violations of their contract)?
> this will be a net win for the internet
That remains to be seen. I can see it being another tool where the executive branch gets to unilaterally change the definition of which internet companies get protections, not leveling the playing field.
> This will encourage decentralisation in so far as there is now a soft power cap on these big tech companies.
More likely there will be some obvious "unintended consequences" similar to what happened after Trump signed the FOSTA bill in 2018[2] (hint: multiple dating sites, including Craigslist sections, closed up shop). It will very likely increase the cost of being a user-generated content host to the point that only a very select few companies would do it and they will all require arbitration clauses in the ToS to avoid extremely expensive litigation of the CDA230 rules. I expect a handful of forums and lots of news comments sections to close due to this "free speech" Executive Order.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/platform-bias.php
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/23/596460672...