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Comment by morpheuskafka | Hacker News Reader

So a forum like HN cannot even have rules that a discussion has to be on topic/within the scope of the site? Wikipedia cannot have notability and credibility policies (I guess that is an edge case since it is other editors actually doing the removing, but according to community consensus guidelines)? A forum for a marginalized group needs to allow hate speech against them, so long as its not illegal? All the while they are not only putting up with the unwanted content, but paying out of their own pocket to host it?

What you are saying about platforms should apply to utilities (ISPs, possible PaaS like AWS), which is where net neutrality comes in. ISPs shouldn't block stuff they or the government doesn't like, slow it down, or otherwise interfere with traffic.

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Is it time for Twitter to be considered a utility?

ISPs evolved from “online service providers” which themselves evolved from “bulletin board systems”, and if you consider an ISP to be a utility today, then there was a point where that kind of service became a utility.

Why? I'm not a fan of that idea as I'd rather find ways to spur new competition. Also, anyone can live without Twitter or any social network, whereas its harder to live without electricity, water, etc.

Historically, utilities/public services are things that have a natural monopoly, which absolutely applies to ISP/other wireline telcoms (city franchise licenses), mobile cell service (limited competition due to spectrum auctions and the need for enough nationwide spectrum to be accumulated to launch a viable service), water, sewer, power, gas, etc. It might apply to things like undersea cables, although there isn't really a natural monopoly (plenty of space under the ocean) and those primarily connect two privately owned datacenters. It applies to other services such as post office and city trash where either laws (private express statutes) prohibit competition for the sake of making the public service more profitable, or where taxes force the customer to "buy" the public trash pickup, making even the best-run private enterprise unable to compete.

It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc. There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city." Twitter is not the only physically possible way to publish short messages to the world (unless the ISPs ruin that now that net neutrality is gone).

You could technically set up a mesh network and bypass the ISP too. I don’t think that argument is aging well, since it depends on some essential distinction between “telephone wire” type infrastructure and “server farm” or “installed base” type infrastructure.

Why should we assume that a global content management and delivery network, broadcasting 500 million messages every day, is trivially replaceable? The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it.

The fact is nothing has even come close to replacing it.

Indeed, it seems that just as there are natural monopolies over physically exclusive infrastructure like roads and cables, there are natural monopolies over network effects and attention/mindshare.

I think the argument on monopoly is getting muddied, a monopoly isn't based on consumer's choosing a preferred service, but that they have no choice of provider.

Twitter is popular because people choose to use it, but they have the choice to use other services, or to attempt to create one, and compete with the current popular one, the difficulty of succeeding in the field doesn't change if it is a monopoly (unless of course the service provider can suppress any competitor from entering the market.)

Was MySpace a monopoly? it dominated social media at its peak, and not has been completely surpassed.

There were other operating systems for PCs besides MS Windows in the 1990s, but Windows was still a monopoly.

Yes Myspace was a monopoly until Facebook opened to tbe public because it was the only way a bunch of people were willing to communicate for a while.

I think you might want to do some double checking on your history. Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers.

And My Space wasn't a monopoly, there was a parade of social networking sites of various popularity and success starting with bolt in the late 90s and most directly before MySpace was Friendster.

Compare these applications, to say power companies, or ISPs in much of the US. The difference is really clear.

First - you seem to be misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the facts and results of the Microsoft case.

> Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge (which is why there isn't two Microsoft entities today. The whole thing hinged on "Microsoft installed its browser by default which gave it an unfair advantage." To allow the DOJ to save face, Microsoft agreed to make it easier to install other browsers.

Nothing was 'thrown out', rather the penalty was changed after the higher court issued a ruling that actually changed the liability implications for MS, which allowed MS to negotiate a lesser judgement. Findings of fact and the ruling were not overthrown, despite questions about judge Jackson's impartiality.

Beyond that, the US was not the only jurisdiction in which Microsoft was taken to court and found guilty of monopolistic practices. "DOJ" is meaningless in courts outside the US, so your statement doesn't even make logical sense as a component of your argument.

Second - you seem to be standing behind a single dictionary definition for what constitutes a monopoly. That's fine when discussing certain technicalities in abstraction, but completely ignores the fact that the dictionary definition is meaningless in terms of law. A monopoly can absolutely exist even in the presence of competitive options, and that is very clearly laid out in many ways in various laws and legal precedents. The Sherman Act* alone has very clear statements about this, and absolutely contradicts what you are saying. Monopolistic behavior is about controlling the market and/or using market/industry dominance to prevent or stifle competition. It is not about the sheer absence of competition.

* https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

> Firstly Microsoft monopoly got thrown out because of unethical behavior of the judge

No, it didn't.

The remedy (not the finding of monopoly and abuse of that monopoly) got sent back by a higher court for new proceedings, and then due to a change in Administration to one friendlier to (and, coincidentally, heavily supported by) Microsoft, the government stopped seeking breakup as a remedy while the new proceedings were pending, and a far weaker remedy was mutually negotiated as a settlement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

"The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because the appellate court had adopted a "drastically altered scope of liability" under which the remedies could be taken, and also partly due to the embargoed interviews Judge Jackson had given to the news media while he was still hearing the case, in violation of the Code of Conduct for US Judges.[24] Judge Jackson did not attend the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing, in which the appeals court judges accused him of unethical conduct and determined he should have recused himself from the case"

> A monopoly isn't based on consumer's choosing a preferred service, but that they have no choice of provider.

Survey a hundred small publishers, and ask them whether their use of Twitter is a choice.

You can 100% exist today, and not use twitter at all, so its certainly a choice. Do you honestly believe that you can not effectively market your business or communicate with customers without twitter?

It is absolutely a choice.

I would actually argue that social media forms natural monopolies. The network effect creates an enormous advantage for incumbents.

> It is technically quite trivial to clone the basic functionality of Twitter and run a competing service. This has been done semi-sucessfully with Gab (not endorsing that community, but it is a good example), for example. People choose social media services based on their perceived value, social prestige, etc.

It is quite simple to create software that mimics Twitter, sure. It is very, very hard to create a platform like Twitter. That further reinforces it as a natural monopoly to me. You can even look at how the companies rise and fall; typically if the incumbent fails, they do so entirely, and the new competitor eats all of their lunch (i.e. MySpace and Facebook, Digg/Slashdot/Reddit, etc). There are very rarely situations where a new competitor comes and splits the market share; they either take it all, or they get none.

> There's no equivalent to "I have to use Twitter because they own the lines to the house/they have the only 5G coverage in my area/they are the only company licensed by my city."

There absolutely is. "I have to use Twitter because that's where everyone I want to talk to is, and they don't allow any interoperation with other social networks." It's fundamentally the same thing, and treating them like a utility would involve forcing them to treat their platform like utility poles. They can charge a fee to the other companies that interoperate to recoup their costs and get some profit, but they have to allow the interoperation.

You might enjoy Elizabeth Warren's proposal about designating "platform utilities": https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

But that aside (and I think she's using "utility" in a slightly different way), I think it would be a huge mistake to say that our approach is to regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and so forth) as is. That just cements their oligopoly: either your regulation calls out these companies by name (and therefore needs to ensure they retain power to work), or it imposes a regulatory burden which makes it even harder for competitors to replace them. This would be a serious unforced error for people who think that Big Tech is run by their political/ideological opponents. It would also be a practical disaster (imagine government-regulated Twitter spam detection), and IMO it would reflect an abandonment of the ideal of liberty. Rather than providing some structural reason why we need to regulate Twitter, we'd be regulating them baed on their effects - that they did something we don't like, and we don't know how to stop it other than telling them to not do it. It feels like it violates the spirit (though probably not the letter) of the constitutional ban on bills of attainder.

A sibling comment points out the "natural monopoly" argument for regulating ISPs as utilities. That's an argument on structure (there can only be so many ISPs and there's a huge up-front cost to becoming competitive), not effect, and in fact the argument for Net Neutrality was that companies could act in unwanted ways in the future, not that they did.

Our fundamental model for Twitter should be that it's just a company, and it could be replaced by some other company, and if we think that's infeasible, that's the bug in the market that we should fix. We should not resign ourselves to some government-guided-Twitter monstrosity - either you get regulatory capture or you get a private company whose product priorities swing with every election. My personal thesis here is that Twitter is simply too big, and that companies should be barred from growing beyond a certain size (of revenue, employees, or some similar measure). We can break them up like we broke up the trusts of old, and in fact like the trusts of old, they'll probably generate more GDP broken up - without the giant incumbent distorting the market, there's a more meaningful and direct profit motive on each resulting piece as well as more room for innovation by new companies, and therefore more general room for economic growth. That would be regulating the structure of the market in a generic way, and it would specifically regulate it in a way that promotes the ability of the non-government parts of society to have primary responsibility in shaping society.

There is an alternative political model where the government is closely involved in making sure that social media is run in a way that promotes the society the people want (in the government's opinion). WeChat and Weibo run under this model. That model seems to be unpopular in the US (I recall something recently about trying to ban WeChat), and I hope we don't decide that they had it right all along.

Why not put a protocol in the public domain and let service providers implement it, like email? Is there something about broadcast communication that makes impartiality or neutrality impossible? Even if the broadcast protocol is based on follow/subscribe interactions?

This is an interesting subject!

That's a great idea, and I think if private individuals (either businesses or open-source hackers or whoever) want to do that, they should!

But I think if private individuals (again, including business) don't want to do that, they shouldn't be compelled to! No law makes an email provider use SMTP; they do it because the industry / the market has settled on it.

(Imagine if nobody could use STARTTLS until it got approved by the government!)

Twitter is running a product, which includes broadcast communication as a component, yes, but also includes lots of other components: the idea that the product is structured as short messages with "retweets" and "likes" (distinct from Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, email, etc.), limitations on message size, the idea of "Verified" and the choice of whom to verify, the discovery page and curation, showing "Who to follow" and curation of that, the data model of threading, the whole concept of hashtags, a "Home" view where the timeline goes sideways, images and video and audio and alt text and link previews, encrypting traffic to their site, not encrypting DMs, etc. And part of their product is determining what their rules are about what's on-topic and what's off-topic (whether you count it as spam or as harassment or as whatever else).

Absent a compelling reason otherwise, I don't think the government should be in charge of any of those decisions. I don't agree with all of those, and I certainly don't think it's impossible for them to make better-in-my-opinion decisions. But that's not for me to decide, nor is it for the FCC to decide.

Come to think of it, that's probably the underlying principle behind the US (and many other countries') political philosophy: the default is that choices are in the hands of individuals, including groups of individuals who make a company, and the government overriding that is an exceptional case that requires a strong justification. It's not the only model - monarchies and authoritarian states follow the approach that everything is in the hands of the ruler / the party, and liberty is granted as an exception when there's an argument for it.

You make good points. But the fact remains that Twitter is a viable product only because it is granted special immunity from legal consequences for publishing, immunity that you or I would not enjoy if we were to publish the very same content on a personal website, or hand out pamphlets on the street.

In this context it is not at all that “government should be in charge of these decisions”, it is entirely that Twitter’s privileged status should be questioned, given the amount of control they are exercising over the amount of content they distribute.

Put another way: AT&T should not be liable for what I publish on my personal website, but if they were dropping packets from my server because of a “content policy” then I would think differently!

> But the fact remains that Twitter is a viable product only because it is granted special immunity from legal consequences for publishing, immunity that you or I would not enjoy if we were to publish the very same content on a personal website, or hand out pamphlets on the street.

That’s not quite true — Section 230 protects all platforms from liability for content produced by third parties. You enjoy that exact same immunity for comments others post on your personal website. And conversely, Twitter does not enjoy immunity for content that they themselves produce, such as descriptions of trending topics.

> Twitter does not enjoy immunity for content that they themselves produce

Exactly. If the law is not changed, any challenge would hinge on the court defining their curation process as an act of production. It may not be as far-fetched as you think: DJ Shadow can copyright a song made entirely from snippets of other recorded music.

For the record, I think the law should be changed. Twitter is categorically different from a small/personal website. You could argue that it is a natural monopoly.

> Exactly. If the law is not changed, any challenge would hinge on the court defining their curation process as an act of production.

Any challenge to what? I don’t understand what you’re proposing here. Even if Section 230 were repealed, Twitter would be perfectly free to e.g. censor all conservative content. The issue is that by doing so, they might be liable for unrelated content they allow that ends up being defamatory.

> Twitter is categorically different from a small/personal website. You could argue that it is a natural monopoly.

This would be a hard argument to make. There are hundreds of competing social networking communities, some of which are even bigger!

I don't think it's problematic to place more specific constraints on larger companies, including a requirement to use open protocols, and to allow federation.

In general, corporations are artificial entities that are established by society via laws that it enacts. They don't even have a natural right to exist, much less a right to operate without any constraints. This is very different from real persons.

It's not a utility though, utilities are primarily designated as such due to their extremely high infrastructure costs, twitter is just a popular website and nothing about the qualities of it make it similar to a utility.

HN, forums etc could still have all the rules they like, but they'd be publishers, not platforms, if I understand the GP correctly. Sounds reasonable enough, they aren't platforms that anyone can build on, they decide what goes on their site and what doesn't, even if they outsource part of that process to trusted users.

It has to be treated as criminal negligence when a platform applies its 'Terms of Use' or rule of conduct, selectively.

I think that will solve the problem.

Today, HN or Twitter can, selectively, diminish visibility of pro-conservative content and posts, while not applying the same scrutiny to the other side.

They can sit there and claim neutrality, ask for 'evidence' and so on.

But really, they are the ones that should be convincing courts that they were not partial, biased or selective in applying their Terms of Use.

True. From what I hear the conservatives are constantly given a pass because the platforms are too scared of exactly this scenario.

I’m surprised they found a reason to act like this when the conservatives are in power.

Sure they can. And "pro-conservative" users as well as anyone who likes to read their content can start their own forum for discussion online, or use one that their find more welcoming.

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