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Comment by sershe | Hacker News Reader

As someone who makes a boatload of money in large part because tech companies are not regulated, I have to say - it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities. You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house. All you can do is sue (if that). It should be the same with oligopolistic cloud and social media platforms, since "breaking them up" doesn't really seem workable.

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> time to regulate large platforms like utilities

Sure.

> You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house

Uh... are you sure you understand what it means for something to be a utility?

Governments and police can absolutely cut power to your house if you hole up inside and broadcast death threats. They've done so for far less [1] [2].

[1] https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20160928/electricity-...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-shut-off-water-powe...

That's the government doing it though, and not just the utilities deciding to cut off your power.

I think the line is 'due process under color of law'- The legal framework would/should make any action automatic and any debate is done under the court system.

So next we would just have to fix the justice system (giant corporations have a bit of an advantage in the current one).

Giant corporations have an even bigger advantage when they can skip the court system and just do what they want.

[1] was done as a practical matter by law enforcement, and [2] should not be a thing either.

> it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities.

Not if we aren’t first regulating lower levels of the internet infrastructure that way. Starting with ISPs, DNS providerd, etc. And even if we were doing the lower levels, it still wouldn't be, but we might relieve the perceived need.

What amount to algorithmically assembled personalized magazines, like all the newsfeed-focussed social media outlets, are pretty much the least utility-like and most-media-outlet like (hence, the name) parts of the internet, and regulating them like state-directed utilities makes as much sense as treating the New York Times as a state-directed utility.

Currently I have at least 5 different that I can choose from and probably quite a few more that I am not aware of.

I do not have anywhere near this level of choice in Social Media.

In my opinion the question of whether or not these companies should be regulated has nothing at all to do with whether they more resemble media companies or they more resemble utilities.

> I do not have anywhere near this level of choice in Social Media.

You don't have to use social media to be online. But if all 5 ISPs decide to cut you off, you can't even access your social media accounts.

Seriously, secure the lower parts of the stack first. This administration went and did the exact opposite of that by repealing net neutrality. I have no sympathy for them if their ISP cancels their accounts. It's called reaping what you sow.

129 million people have access to only 1 broadband provider. That's 40% of the country [1]. With wireless carriers maybe that increases to a little bit more, but they're prohibitively expensive usually to run as your main home internet connection.

For social media you have: Facebook (Instagram, Whatsapp), Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, WeChat, TikTok. And these are just the ones with > 100 million users. You can find way more with users in the tens of millions or less.

1. https://ilsr.org/repealing-net-neutrality-puts-177-million-a...

>makes as much sense as treating the New York Times as a state-directed utility.

This just reminded me there are laws, such as changing one's name, which require things to be announced in one or more prominent local papers (which laws depends on your state and local governments).

I'm not totally sure if that's evidence against making a "utility" social media or for making a "utility" newspaper.

Lower levels should definitely be regulated or split up if practical. I think busting monopolies is better in general, but sometimes (like for existing utilities) it makes more sense to regulate a "natural" monopoly.

Facebook is not really an "magazine". In this analogy, it's more like a print shop or a point of sale, except that 3 giant corporations own all the printing equipment/all the newspaper stands, and they decided to stop printing/selling NYT because some opinion piece in there used bad language.

There are degrees of regulation; people on HN tend to like "net neutrality", and I don't think many people are against anti-discrimination laws for businesses, so why not "hosting neutrality" where cloud platforms, oligopolic in particular, don't get to kick people off their hosting just because they supposedly disagree with them?

Why are large social media platforms more like utilities than newspapers?

In my head I would liken your ISP to the USPS or a utility, while platforms I would liken to the press.

Both newspapers and social networks are multicast, but a newspaper is one-to-many and a social network is many-to-many. There's a material cost to publishing a newspaper that doesn't exist with electronic social networks. I don't know if a utility is a good analogy for a social network platform, but I am confident a newspaper is not either.

>> You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house

You probably wouldn't need to cut their power in order to stop the broadcast. Just call the local police.

What if the police are militia members too

Yep; so someone should have called whatever the Fed equivalent of police is to investigate specific people calling for terrorism. Not unilaterally ban the entire site.

Come think of it, in my original analogy, it would be more like cutting power to an entire condo building because one resident is broadcasting death threats.

First step is to make ISPs utilities. Zero-th step is to recognize that ISPs are just as oligopolistic with even fewer comparative alternatives.

Who said anything about ISPs?

How are you planning on accessing Facebook and Twitter if Comcast boots you off their network because they're allowed to? We don't even have net neutrality anymore.

off topic.

EDIT: I think we have enough to discuss here without bringing up hypothetical situations that would make us all very sad.

I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.

If you can be booted from Amazon because it's a private company then you can also be refused service by your ISP. And there's an argument to be made that, at some point down the chain (AWS, DNS, ISP) you should have a right to internet access. Should Amazon be forced to offer unconditional access to Parler? Probably not. But right now there's nothing stopping ISPs from cutting people's internet connection just because they don't like what the customers are doing with it, and that's a much thornier issue.

Regulating ISPs like utilities would delineate a clear line in the sand for problems like this.

Forcing the equation by talking about this from the perspective of ISPs is a lot easier in my head.

Other technologies that build upon the basic connectivity are much more subjective in their entitlements. I.e. you could run your own DNS name servers, so perhaps something like DNS or DDoS protection is viewed more as an open-market opportunity on top of the utility.

The barest of essentials for a self-operated cloud service would be IP connectivity, public TLS CA and domain registrar. Maybe we should look at these technology features in the same way we do frequency control, voltage and standardization in the electrical grid. DNS, compute, storage, DDoS protection, et. al., would be analogous to all of the various appliances you have connected to your electrical system at home or work.

>I'm going to agree with the parent comment: The question of ISPs being a public utility or not is crucial for this discussion because it goes to the core of the issue of what should be a privilege and what should be a right.

I'd go further than that. Requiring ISPs to be dumb pipes (that means no port blocking or throttling, among other things) can reduce the power and influence of the large social media players by making it easier to host your own data[0][1][2] and share what you want with whom you want.

No middlemen, no abusive data mining/tracking, etc.

But doing so requires that ISPs are not gatekeepers, just suppliers of bandwidth/routing.

[0] https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Installation_guides

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/

[2] https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/activitypub

> You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house.

This is a bad, needlessly hyperbolic analogy. The reasons there are regulations prohibiting the shutoff of utilities is that these are basic needs without which people can be directly harmed (often very seriously, if you cut off heating in the winter, etc...).

There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account.

I'm not saying I disagree that some level of regulation is appropriate. But this issue is (for somewhat obvious reasons) being wildly overstated. Parler was shut down for explicitly violent rhetoric which inspired real political violence, period.

Surely everyone agrees that this particular speech should have been banned, right? We just disagree about the specifics of how it should be done. If so, why are we screaming so loud about "Silicon Valley" showing "Monopolistic Force"?

Is hyperbole really the answer here? Or is it an attempt to deflect discussion from things that seem a little more important at the moment?

> There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account

Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.

I think it's very clear you can harm a person by cutting them off from the world / loved ones, news, etc. Especially in communities that have no outside access other than internet based.

Maybe not Parler specifically, but certainly internet access. And if the vast majority of the world and people around you are getting news and info and social life from <website>, it could be argued that denying access to <website> will harm a person.

Getting banned from a social media site doesn't remove one's access to the internet.

What about banning the actual social media site from the internet?

That also doesn't remove your access to the Internet.

They also weren't banned. Their hosting provider refused to continue hosting them. There are thousands of competing companies out there they can take their business to.

Human rights are not the same thing as corporate rights.

This is like all the grocery stores choosing not to carry brand of product in their grocery stores. You didn't lose access to the grocery store. That brand can start their own grocery store and host their own product if they want to.

Tons of companies host their own infrastructure.

And similarly: likening the banning of one site that was a hotbed of rhetoric akin to (or directly related to) a serious incident of political violence to the "vast majority of people around you" losing all internet access is senselessly hyperbolic and unhelpful.

If we grant that the reason we're currently in this crisis of democracy is that people are addicted to an outrage machine (stop the steal, #resistance, whatever), then maybe it's our job to get us off the train.

Why can't banning Parler just be about banning Parler and not an assault on democracy or whatever? I mean, we all agree that the kind of speech banned should be banned somehow, right?

>> There is no similar human rights mandate for a Parler account

>Canada considers internet access a basic human right, and it's pretty clear the rest of the world will move in that direction shortly.

Having a Parler account and having access to the internet are two different things.

Funny that you mention Canada. Parler would likely have trouble existing as a Canadian entity due to Canada’s hate speech laws and the courts’ propensity to leave carriers exposed to liability for hosting content that violates those laws.

Also, the Canadian government has a broad power to restrict speech in times of crisis through the War Measures Act. They could easily have switched a site like Parler off if a similar event occurred.

No, I don't agree that "this speech" ought to be banned, and also not in this particular manner. First of all, were %%ge of Parler posts contained incitement? I honestly have no idea, but I suspect it's by far not the majority. More importantly, Brandenburg case is a pretty good standard for banning speech as far as I'm concerned, and it's a pretty high bar. What %%ge of Parler posts met THAT standard?

Comparing social media access to electricity is the height of disingenuous absurdity.

I don't think the comparison is between social media access and electricity access. The comparison is between access to internet and access to electricity. You just picked a specific case of "internet access" to make it look more silly and easier to defeat.

Using that same technique, I can say "Comparing internet access to being able to use your toaster is the height of disingenuous absurdity". You can see why this technique isn't really legitimate and should be avoided in public arguments.

Well, sure, how about access to electricity for the purpose of broadcasting? In some other fork I posted an example where Russian govt has extra-legally shut down a live opposition broadcast by cutting power to the studio.

This is not a switch, but a spectrum. Monopolies/oligopolies should be either broken down or regulated. Electrical companies should be more regulated, cloud providers less regulated, social networks perhaps much less regulated.

I frankly don't think social networks are that important at all, but I am trying to account for my biases. For many people and organizations, they are not really like a newspaper, a comparison many make here - they are more like a printing press, or a radio transmitter or something. If one company owns the entire radio spectrum or all the printing presses, it ought to be regulated.

More people have access to social media than to clean water,

you might be on to something...

I agree 100%. The mega-tech corporations enjoy legal protection as a platform vs a publisher. They are clearly taking an opinionated stance re content moderation and should lose their legal protections as a platform and become liable for content like a traditional publisher.

"If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" I regret to inform you that you are wrong."

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Oh, I know. I was saying they should lose their status as platforms if they are going to be un-equatable in moderation - which they clearly are.

No. You apparently don't.

There is no distinction between "platform" and "publisher" in Section 230.

And you can't "lose" your section 230 protections. Section 230 protects every person and every device in the US. There are no limitations to that.

Because Section 230 isn't what you think it is. The important part says (paraphrase):

"You can't be sued for something another person says." Full stop.

That other person can be sued.

If you personally engage in illegal or tortious activity, you can be prosecuted or sued.

But you can't be prosecuted or sued for what someone else says.

That's Section 230. That's it. Full stop.

I'm pretty sure what GP is saying is that they think it should work differently (to note, I disagree, although my position is that moderation for platforms like Facebook/Twitter, where visibility is off-by-default, should ideally be limited to targeted removal of explicitly illegal content, and there should be some regulation to that effect for platforms above a certain market share by some definition).

>I'm pretty sure what GP is saying is that they think it should work differently (to note, I disagree, although my position is that moderation for platforms like Facebook/Twitter, where visibility is off-by-default, should ideally be limited to targeted removal of explicitly illegal content, and there should be some regulation to that effect for platforms above a certain market share by some definition).

That's as may be. However, none of that is the law.

I strongly agree that Facebook, Twitter, et al have disproportionate influence due to the strong network effects of their user bases.

And I believe that we should take steps to limit that power and influence. However, modifying/repealing Section 230 is not the way to do so.

In fact, reducing or eliminating the protections of Section 230 would have the opposite effect, because only those with deep, deep pockets could continue to operate in a world without Section 230.

I made other suggestions[0] which I think could help by providing other places for people to go.

Any success would depend on folks voting with their feet. Let's make that easy to do and give people a better, more positive experience, with more privacy and choice and less ads and tracking, and people will run away from these monsters.

I'll say it again. Repealing/weakening Section 230 would hurt everyone else much more than it would hurt Facebook and Twitter. In fact, it would significantly harm free speech on the Internet -- which is what Section 230 was designed to (and has done for 25 years) protect.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25688032

This is one of the best links I have ever been gifted in a comment section, thank you!

I posted that link before I saw yours.

Thanks for beating me to it.

While it's a shame when the HN crowd takes down a site due to us mobbing it, given the number of folks who are seriously confused about Section 230 I wouldn't mind if techdirt took that hit.

It would save me (and you) from having to post that link every 25 minutes or so.

I think the solution is the opposite. This would be removing the section 230 protection from any platform that moderates lawful content, other than technical things such as spam or attempts of intrusion.

Any enthusiast message board would be unable to remove political offtopic material without losing section 230 protection. I don't really want to wade through a bunch of political ranting when I want to learn about the best graphics card for the newest AAA game. But on that same site I may want to read about some potential defamatory claims about manipulation of benchmarks.

I'm not sure I like that solution.

If the removal is done by the moderators not affiliated with the platform, this rule would not apply. As long as the platform (host) itself does not engage in political moderation. So you would create a community within a platform and moderate it as much as you want, as long as you are not an employee of that platform, just a regular user.

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