The Google and Apple duopoly may be something that requires regulatory action but I don't see how a store should be forced to sell or distribute any product from a company whose conduct they find objectionable.
Do you have evidence that Apple, Google, and Amazon actually coordinated (e.g. met and agreed on a common plan)? I think it's more likely that they made similar judgements based on the same information.
Let's use the classic example -- raising prices.
Suppose you have a market with two companies. If they get together in a room and conspire to fix prices, that's illegal.
So here's what they do instead. First, one of them raises prices. They know that isn't going to end well for them unless the other one does it, because otherwise they'll lose business to the other one which now has a lower price. If the other one doesn't promptly respond by raising prices too, they'll have to lower them again. So that action is really an invitation to coordinate in raising prices.
Because they both know that. It's obvious that the one can't profitably raise prices unless the other one does. So now the other company has a choice. Option one, leave prices where they are, causing their competitor to have to lower them again before their own company actually gains any significant market share as a result of the lower prices. Option two, raise prices to match, and now they both make more money.
Option two is better for both companies. They both make more money and the only risk is that the higher margins attract a third competitor who comes in to undercut them. If that isn't likely or can be made unlikely through some exclusionary mechanism then they both get to raise prices to the monopoly price.
It's exactly the same thing as the price fixing conspiracy except that they never said it out loud. It's a loophole.
And it's also the difference here:
> isn’t collusion anymore than when someone joins Parler/Gab because it’s the “hip new thing”.
The users are too diffuse for the coordination mechanism to operate, and without it they don't have market power. At the point when each site has a proportionate share of the users, no individual user has any reason to use a given site other than because they like it better, and their individual choice doesn't affect the collective outcome enough to justify making it strategically.
Basically, it only applies to concentrated markets.
> This is a loophole that deserves to be closed.
How is it a loophole? It's freedom of association, which is protected by the First Amendment.
People have been developing for Windows and excluding Linux for decades. Demanding that people develop for your very niche desired use case is just going to be unreasonable a huge amount of the time.
I don't think that my bank (SBanken) would agree that its app (which is very good by the way) is serving a niche use case but they nonetheless only provide it for unrooted Android and IPhone.
I think this restrictions is caused by their walled-garden approach. If we forced interoperability, the situation would immediately improve.
It doesn't have to be as black and white as that. The law could restrict their moderating powers to only removing malicious apps (defined by a reasonable heuristic); much as you may dislike the content, most badthink social networks are not also hacking your phone at the same time.
Ultimately, I don't care; I support their right to free speech as much as I support anyone else's. It's for the law enforcement that has jurisdiction over them to decide what they want to do with what is posted.
"Code is law" -Lawrence Lessig
But if you're looking for a government law, how about any of the ones that allow people who create alternate app stores via jailbreaks to be prosecuted.
Circumventing digital rights management to violate copyright protection is illegal, but that wouldn't be relevant to the Parler situation.
Companies have argued that it violates DMCA 1201 because you could plausibly use the other app store to install pirated apps or something like that.
They're trying to have it both ways, of course, so they tolerate a couple of small irrelevant stores in order to claim that there are competitors even though they still have >95% of the market. But now explain why Amazon or Microsoft doesn't make their own app store for iOS. Or just sell a mod officially supported by one of these large companies that allows any arbitrary store to be installed on one of their competitors' platforms.
> Circumventing digital rights management to violate copyright protection is illegal, but that wouldn't be relevant to the Parler situation.
It is if it's the reason they can't just distribute through a different app store.
Plenty of activities are legal, but censured by cultural norms. Prohibiting your users from participating in a discussion, because you don't like their political views should at least be recognized as a shitty thing to do. That doesn't mean there's a simple legal solution. But at the very least the users, from any part of the political spectrum, should be pissed off that the overlords in Mountain View have decided that certain ideas are too dangerous for their little brains.
Framing this as purely based on political views is disingenuous at best. No one is getting banned because they don't like the tax rate, or because of their view on universal healthcare.
Exactly right. Nothing would have happened to Parler if its userbase wasn't substantially affiliated with a mob that literally attacked the democratic process because they didn't like the result.
I'm sure someone's thinking that the correct response to that is have the government police forces battle with the mob until it changes its mind of its own accord, rather than have (non-government) society take action against the root causes of the mob, like Parler. However, that's undesirable for reasons that should be obvious.
Not to mention entirely ignorant of the very notion of our government being ostensibly "by the people, of the people, for the people" - i.e. the government itself being a representation of society. So if society itself is broadly rejecting some viewpoint on its own, then it's kind of pointless for the government to get involved.
People adopted app stores for security and stability- not political content moderation. The fact that they've decided to reinvent themselves as editorialists is as outrageous as if my mailman decided to tear out pages from my magazine subscriptions, if my cable company decided to black out specific television shows, or if the carmaker decided to censor radio stations it didn't like.
I think the way the world is today is that the smart phone as a product is like this magazine or tv channel and the mobile network is the underlying common neutral infra. And the apps are like the news items or articles or serial programs in this analogy.
Duopoly: We are private company! Lawless oppression second to none! All other company have inferior oppression! Stop discussion of Tienanmen! Cancel political opponents!
Purism: Hey, you there, customers, maybe that lot is headed down a road you don't want to travel and you should come over here.
Q: What law is at work in the identified problem?
A: What law is at work in the proposed solution?
I probably disagree with just about everything ever said on Parler but it's difficult not to point out this absolutely reeks.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-15/twitter-w...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/capitol-riot-a-rocket-ship-f...
EDIT - I can't tell if the downvotes are people mistakenly believing I'm defending Parler or because they believe that $Big_Tech is free of blame.
Slippery slope arguments, while sometimes valid, usually require more leg work to persuade than a vague sentiment.
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
~ Karl Popper
Straw man. It's true because it's true, not because of who said it.
> "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
"This statement is false." "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Karl Popper was wrong, and here's why.
Speech and actions are different. Society can tolerate any kind of speech, because they're words. They don't cause direct harm. And the indirect harm, i.e. violence or firing people or refusing to serve them as a result of their race or religion, can be prohibited, while still allowing the speech.
This is false; there is no metaphysical difference between "speech" and "action"; I'd check out the work of Fred Schauer or more recently Susan Brison on this point. There are many examples (see citation) of speech having the ability to directly harm without any other action, from psychological harms to contextual harms. Indeed, in many segregationist policies, it wasn't the segregation that made it ugly, it was the effects of the contents of the law which provided denigration through authority.
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me" is empirically untenable[0], and like actions, speech can cause negative involuntary reactions. It also seems unfair to place the burden of "hardening" one's ability to feel this pain on the people whom the words are targeted at.
[0] http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...
Popper lived in a time when many far left or far right parties had well organized, sometimes massive militant wings ready to bash skulls of their opponents (think SA). He believed in restricting speech when the intolerant were on a clear path to triumph by violence, not by engaging in an argument.
But AS A LAST RESORT and in limited scope only. This is a part of Popper's philosophy of liberalism. Violence is used as a last resort only.
When you look at the case of Parler, if it was really used to coordinate the attack on the Capitol, and the digital giants decided to take it offline for that afternoon and in the proximity of the rally only (say, 100 km radius), or in a similar restricted way, it could definitely be argued that they used force as a last resort against the possibility of democracy losing control in a certain place and time.
But eternal worldwide permaban of an entire platform clearly exceeds the "last resort" test. It does not even try to be narrowly tailored to the threat, even though the giants have all the ability to do so. It is a blanket, global act meant to constrain speech of millions for actions of hundreds.
Now we can debate whether the giants should have the right to do so or not, but I think that regardless of this question, by swinging the hammer so heavily and so wide they proved that they aren't really fans of Popper-like liberalism at all. Whatever they did isn't covered by Popper's argument against intolerance as a whole.
https://fee.org/articles/why-the-paradox-of-tolerance-is-no-...
This position is rejected by many today on the basis of mental health concerns. For example, LBGT activists claim that anti-LGBT speech is inherently harmful because it leads to higher suicide rates and higher incidence of depression among their community.
Parler wasn't intolerant. Parler wasn't advocating for Twitter to be taken offline.
Based on his heart tweet, Jack sure was happy when Parler was removed from the App Store. Jack is the intolerant one.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken
The question is what sort of nazis these people are or wish to be. Are they passive but ignorant supporters, or do they want to make an army to kill tens of millions based on their race? The term is too broad
On my dads side most of his family was killed by the nazis and while he was only 4 when the war started he remembers Minsk burning and the horrors that followed, especially towards the end as he was older. My paternal grandfather (also Jewish), fought in wwii starting from day 3 of the invasion of ussr all the way until nazis got pushed out of Poland (and a miracle of survival since most of red army in Belarus was wiped out quickly).
As you can imagine, I am no friend of the Nazis.
At the same time I’m now a US citizen, and one thing I internalized about my adopted homeland is that America is this weird place where everyone can have a voice. It doesn’t mean we need to amplify all voices, such as nazi voices, but I do think that it is very important to allow meaningful expression of all sides, even when it is despicable and uncomfortable.
Only when nothing is taboo can people truly speak their mind and change narrative. When things are not hidden in subcontext but rather spoken out openly.
I do not mourn loss of nazi voices, but I am worried about it being ok to silence anyone. Especially at infrastructure/carrier level. I believe that if one doesn’t like platform rules they should move/make their own, but if the very infra of internet prevents you, that’s really bad. You can’t say “don’t like our rules then make your own internet.” This goes beyond simply not amplifying the voices (such as the justified Twitter/fb bans), and into total suppression.
But choosing not to associate with Nazis isn't oppressing them.
The alternative is to not use iOS-based devices, which seems like a pretty good idea all around from a transparency avenue (and like I've said before on this site, like the broken record I am: transparency is a dependency of trust). That's exactly Librem's argument, and it's a compelling one: you have no control over the device or visibility into the software running on it, so how can you trust it to be operating for your benefit instead of that of some third party?
Even Android devices typically allow sideloading, and quite a few even support custom ROMs. That is: even devices with software maintained by a literal ad company are more transparent - and therefore more trustworthy, even if only marginally - than any iPhone or iPad.