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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how anyone can see one of the tech monopolies as just another business from which one could simply move to another platform [0]. These places are de facto public commons at this point and are a significant factor in reaching a broad audience. Removal from the platforms does amount to censorship if the reason is a mere political disagreement.

[0] c.f. the fate of Parler which was assassinated overnight by a collaboration of the tech monopolies, but was celebrated by the public because of the bad reputation it accumulated.

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They are not de facto public commons, they are privately controlled advertisement channels. It is _very dangerous_ to consider them as anything other than an effective means by which to drive advertisement sales.

It is dangerous, but the people have adopted them as the commons. Especially as it's now illegal to gather in most places, this company shapes the perception of reality for most citizens online.

I do agree with you. That is the financial basis of their existence and will drive their decisions, however in practice the public does use them as a defacto public forum. These two ideas coexist and are also irreconcilable.

Personally, I think nationalizing FB, removing their profit motive, and clearly placing them under 1A protections is a good idea.

If you're worried about the government shutting down dissenters, well guess what this thread is about? The government and FB are only able to achieve this due to the private property protections FB has and rhetorical spin that provides.

... You'd give control of part of the most invasive and pervasive surveillance apparatus' in history into the hands of the American Government? Between Facebook and Google there's no effective means escaping intrusive surveillance.

I'd rather see Facebook and Google dismantled, not nationalized.

Until we can get the global surveillance apparatus dismantled, the size of the company doesn't matter. Small companies are easily bullied, large companies gain favors from cooperating and are also bullied via the threat of anti-trust.

I don't think breaking them up solves anything.

EDIT: A better but even more unlikely idea than nationalization would be internationalization, i.e. placing global companies under the control of international committees. I'm not holding my breath at this point though and the global dominance of the US means that unless Russia, Iran, and China are given prominent positions of control it's essentially meaningless.

Break them up and regulate the collection and sharing of personal information. Invalidate the freemium model by finding ways to make it more expensive to retain personal data.

Yet another idea is to force them to provide freely accessible API and possibility to extract all data in a free format.

This helps somewhat from a competition perspective, but the overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to and is a significant barrier.

While it can make switching costs somewhat lower (does uploading your posts from another platform always make sense in a new context with new people?), it doesn't do anything about the network effect.

> overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to

Users don't have to do it. See Nitter (for Twitter) and teddit.net (for Reddit).

The public is one entity- and will aggregate elsewhere, repeating the process. Humans aggregate, to expect a change in human nature is - a flawed approach.

The world has voted with there feet that this advertisement sales channel is the public plaza. Its not nice. Its horrible in my opinion, but one cannot argue with the network effect. It just is. A fact. A snapshot on reality. And parent is right. This company is censoring the public plaza. Which it owns. Which is very strange.

Supreme court has found that first amendment rights extend to privately owned shopping malls. Don't think in the current atmosphere any court will rule this way, but I understand why people are frustrated that these principles are not applied to digital companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

What monopoly, exactly, does Facebook actually have here? Are you suggesting they control an overwhelming share of... online marketplaces?

Facebook owns mobile advertising space. Their ad targeting data is part of duopoly with google, which owns search targeting data.

Facebook and google both needs to be broken up with anti-trust rules.

How is that relevant here, though? Facebook's marketplace is hardly WikiLeaks' only viable option to sell its merchandise, and in fact is probably not even the wisest choice.

Am I now unable to purchase WikiLeaks merchandise?

HN: “No one is using Facebook, and no one needs it for anything”

Also HN: “Facebook is essential and any limits they put on anything is a censorship”

It's almost as if HN were a community made from people with different perspectives and opinions.

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