Justice Thomas grumbles over Trump's social media ban | Hacker News Reader

Justice Thomas grumbles over Trump's social media ban

politico.com

Thomas goes on to describe the sheer scope of Facebook and Google's market power, citing Facebook's roughly 3 billion users and Google's 90% market share in search. "It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail," Thomas writes. "But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is."

Thomas states that in order for an account like @realdonaldtrump to be truly classified as government controlled, "the power of a platform to unilaterally remove a government account" would have to be "reduced."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26700921

> The justice didn’t elaborate much on that argument, but he hinted that the platforms’ First Amendment rights could be limited much as business owners can be forced to accept customers regardless of race or religion.

I don't like this framing. Does net neutrality limit the first amendment rights of ISPs? Did Marsh v. Alabama limit the first amendment rights of company towns?

Thought 1:

Business owners in the should be forced to serve the entire public in a non-discriminatory manner because they depend on taxpayer-maintained public infrastructure which also serves the public in a non-discriminatory manner (roads, zoning ordinances) for business inputs and for money-spending customers to get to them.

Since the Internet is not a public utility and is privately paid for by ISP subscribers, they can control who uses their service.

We can get rid of the notion of public shop if we want, and make every commodity available only through member-only clubs that only allow members they want to serve. But then taxpayers which include anyone and everyone who pays income or sales tax probably shouldn't feel the need to provide free infrastructure to them.

Thought 2:

I'm using Twitter as an example because they're huge and banned prominent political figures for breaking rules.

Someone who accesses the Twitter site doesn't pay a dime, therefore they are not a customer.

> Business owners in the should be forced to serve the entire public in a non-discriminatory manner because they depend on taxpayer-maintained public infrastructure which also serves the public in a non-discriminatory manner (roads, zoning ordinances) for business inputs and for money-spending customers to get to them.

> Since the Internet is not a public utility and is privately paid for by ISP subscribers, they can control who uses their service.

If the internet was a public utility and roads were funded by congestion pricing, would that make any difference as to how twitter should or shouldn't be regulated?

This isn't even an unrealistic hypothetical, there are places where the government runs free wifi hotspots, such as Bavaria and Berlin, in Britain Corbyn even promised free broadband, and there are of course places that use road congestion pricing, such as Singapore, though I can't think of any place that has both.

> Someone who accesses the Twitter site doesn't pay a dime, therefore they are not a customer.

- Net neutrality outlaws making a limited version of the internet that includes only certain sites available for free.

- In Marsh v. Alabama, the supreme court decided that a company town couldn't prevent people from distributing religious materials on sidewalks they owned. These people were not the company's customers either.

The sooner one of the Justices who played a role in bringing the reign of Citizens United to the US fades into obscurity, the better.

Who'd have guessed that Thomas and Bernie Sanders would agree on anything?

I mean the platforms all laid out rules about what you were allowed to do, bent over backwards to allow politicians to ignore them, and then finally actually enforced them after innumerable warnings.

No one was forced to make baseless attacks on the election. No one was forced to support an attempted coup.

The platforms can make up whatever rules they want to - how does citing those rules justify anything?

It's true. They could ban you for no reason whatsoever, just because they wish to.

They don't wish to, because you're bringing them business. The rules are there to beg you to keep bringing them business without driving away their other customers and keeping the eyes of the law off of them. Both of those considerations are going to change as their understanding of what's good for them changes.

They cite the rules when they invoke them -- especially in notorious cases that they review individually because they know it's going to drive business away. In most cases they're trying to get away with automation and an army of poorly-paid moderators, which is a crummy substitute but the only way they've figured out how to scale.

It's so crummy that they're really forced to exactly what you say: you're banned because can ban you and you don't have any recourse. The rules are a fig leaf. They're just there to try to convey that the company doesn't want to ban anybody who brings in money, and letting you know roughly how they're going to figure out when you're more trouble than you're worth.

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