Facebook and Google Are Not Public Utilities | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Google Are Not Public Utilities

wired.com

45 pointsgunwd54 comments

It's weird that there's so much talk about Google and Facebook being public utilities and no talk about ISPs, which obviously are public utilities and treat their customers like crap.

I think Big Tech needs to shake up their lobbying division.

I guess you are from the US?

Local loop unbundling [1] is a regulatory method to "utility-ize" ISPs by forcing the infrastructure owner (usually big telco companies) to allow competitors to use the infrastructure.

Here in UK LLU seems to be working reasonably well, as least in terms of value for money. My Internet bill is 25 pounds (~35 dollars) per month and from chatting with my colleagues in the US, I'm under the impression that this is quite cheap by US standards. It happens to be the same as my limitless 4G data subscription. You can get cheaper rates if you have a long-term subscription; I used to pay 15 pounds per month but now pay more after switching to a monthly subscription.

In the US LLU regulations also exist but according to some discussions I found [2] its implementation was sabotaged by the big carriers and the FCC did not manage to enforce it and gave up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-no-Local-loop-unbundling-...

That was the reality of the situation in the US in the year 2000, then the ISP lobby and the new incoming GOP administration for George W Bush removed that rule and kicked the customers to the curb again.

> My Internet bill is 25 pounds (~35 dollars) per month and from chatting with my colleagues in the US, I'm under the impression that this is quite cheap by US standards.

It's basically impossible to compare that plan with a US plan without saying what you get for that price.

I just checked. In my area (inside California), pure internet plans range from $20/month for 50Mbps to $85/month for 1200Mbps.

That being said, it is popular to bundle with cable/voice along with internet.

The only services I've seen competitors provide via LLU are ADSL, back when ADSL was still a viable competitor to cable.

But I've never seen any competitors offer service over a cable, VDSL, or other fiber network, and those are the only kinds of wired Internet service that are really viable anymore.

IIUC, cables are not subject to LLU in the UK (Virgin Media being the only cable ISP) but fibres are. Competition from fibre probably keeps cable Internet price reasonable enough.

In the US, fiber, at least last mile fiber is pretty rare. It is limited to a few small pockets in primarily large urban areas.

There is nothing that says public utilities can't treat their customers like crap...

At least with public utilities you can actually communicate with (many of) them by phone or email. Public utilities have to answer to someone and they don't like when dissatisfied customers file complaints (which creates work and potential blow back).

True, but it make it easier to regulate things like price hikes.

In fact I'm pretty sure it's in the job description.

My ISP may treat me like crap but my ISP doesn't stop me from using the internet how I wish (aside from criminal activity, of course).

Most ISP won’t even care about your criminal activity either, without getting a court order.

The media doesn't feel threatened by ISPs, so we don't get negative articles about ISPs. But big tech _is_ a huge threat to traditional media.

Seems like it's easier for local governments to set up their own public broadband services than their own competing big tech companies. And there's been plenty coverage of the fight for public broadband and the pushback from monopolistic ISPs.

The problem is local governments are not competent enough to do so...and even if they figure out how to do so it's at a large multiplier of the cost of any major ISP.

https://municipalbroadbandpdx.org/home

There is a link to getting local broadband in Portland...it's a total mess and waste of money.

It depends. I’ve only heard good things from my parents about the municipal offerings in my hometown in rural-ish Iowa. Cheaper, faster, better customer service than the existing private ISP I had growing up.

I'm sure it depends on the size and efficiency of the municipality...but the ones around Portland are about as incompetent as they come.

Don't forget that many are subsidized...so yes what they are paying monthly may seem to be cheaper there is probably tax money being funneled to that municipality for offering broadband as well.

https://ocio.iowa.gov/broadband-grants

Lots of money being thrown at the startup costs...

Honestly they might be better off using that money to buy everyone StarLink dishes...the speeds are going to be better than what a lot of them are getting.

That looks like a brand new project, the feasibility study is from Sept 2020, so I don't know if it's quite time to gauge competency of anything?

Feasibility study concluded in Sept 2020 (it started in 2019)...but lots of money has been spent already and with little to show for it.

The MBPDX organization was started in late 2017...and they still don't even have a "team" listed on their website.

> traditional media

Moss media. Spread the meme.

> no talk about ISPs

What? The article literally mentions that:

> Because ISPs are mere conduits for data, it makes sense to prevent them from treating data differently depending on its source or content.

* Among those who understand internetworking, there has been debate about ISPs as utilities for a long time.

* ISPs present a cost and performance problem for most Americans, whereas social media giants present fundamental issues of society and speech. It's easier to see there is a problem, while also being harder to figure out.

Net neutrality doesn't exist so ISPs can decide to arbitrarily block access to social media giants, or any other site, altogether. That is the bigger problem. Anyone going after Google and Facebook but not ISPs has an agenda.

That's a non-issue in reality, as they haven't done that yet. When was the last time hate sites, or social media sites, or any sites, were blacklisted en masse by any public ISP in the US recently?

Don't get me wrong: I support net neutrality and greater regulation of ISPs. I believe the attacks on municipal service is wrong. And I believe the danger of ISP censorship is real - in theory.

I also wonder what, if anything, should be done to combat the virus that is misinformation on the social media giants.

> ISPs can decide to arbitrarily block access to social media giants, or any other site, altogether. That is the bigger problem.

How is that the _bigger_ problem? This is entirely theoretical. ISPs have not done anything like that yet because it doesn't make any sense for them to.

Big tech, on the other hand, have shown that they are more than willing and able to destroy any platform they don't like. Big Tech has as much or more power over the internet than ISPs, and are much more likely to abuse it.

One controls access to the internet. The other controls a subset of platforms on the internet.

I know which one has more power.

some ISPs could control access to the internet, which is the key point. I have no reason to expect my ISP to start filtering my internet. And if they did, I have a handful of other ISPs that will happily take my money instead. Not to mention a half-dozen 4G/5G providers.

To be clear, I think net neutrality is a good thing. I just think its unreasonable to be more concerned about a theoretical maybe-problem than an actual problem that we are facing.

Theoretically, Russia or China could launch a nuclear attack that permanently destroys the internet as we know it. That is a much larger issue, by your standards, than net neutrality. If someone proposed a new net neutrality bill, do you think it would be reasonable for the response to be "Yeah, but Russia has nuclear bombs. That's the real problem."?

ISP's don't ban you from using the internet for saying things they disagree with.

Google, Facebook and Twitter do.

Google, Facebook and Twitter can only block you from Google, Facebook and Twitter respectively. ISPs can, and do, refuse service to some people. In some areas that means effectively being banned from the entire internet.

Admittedly bans/refusals from IPSs are orders of magnitude more rare, but I find it disturbing that there there are no regulations or oversight to an ISP refusing or terminating service, when access to the internet is so fundamental to modern life, and to many people's livelihoods.

I can't do my job without high-speed internet access, but I either don't use, or can easily replace Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

But they can “ban” parts of the internet. Verizon for example aha blocked its consumers form accessing Mangadex.

I think there would be if ISP's were actively banning customers because of the content of the data they transferred over the network, as is the case with Google / FB.

[bittorrent enters the chat]

You can torrent things just fine if you're not torrenting illegal/pirated stuff.

Only for specific DCMA violations...no different than taking down videos for copyright violations. No one is arguing these types of "censorship" because it's theft...it's when opinions are taken down for being "wrong".

There are ISPs that prohibit legal bittorrent traffic

As an aside, I'm really beginning to dislike titles for articles that have that dismissive tone of "This is my fact and I'm going to tell it to you". I know the reason they have to do this is that having a reasonable title won't get any clicks, but perhaps that's a sign I should just be disregarding places that are only looking for clicks in the first place. I think I'm going to mostly focus on smaller creators, single people who have don't have the pressures that these large companies have.

Actually, looking at the article itself, I'm surprised how little there is here. It comes in just under 900 characters, it fits in 4 tweets.

> Actually, looking at the article itself, I'm surprised how little there is here. It comes in just under 900 characters, it fits in 4 tweets.

You're wrong about this, by an order of magnitude. It's 8,640 characters. I can only guess that maybe you have some malfunction of an adblocker that cut yours off after the first paragraph?

That's exactly it, thanks. Once I opened in an incognito window it showed up fully.

I don't think Yost has any chance of successfully arguing that Google is a public utility, but it would be interesting if there was a public utility search engine. It seems obvious that search is something everyone needs, and perhaps if there was some legal right that the public utility had - for example, to index web pages without breaking copyright laws - then the public utility could actually reasonably compete with Google.

> I know the reason they have to do this is that having a reasonable title won't get any clicks

A title that says its conclusion is less interesting to me. First if I know the conclusion then what's the point of reading the story and secondly the story is more likely to be an influence campaign than an actual researched opinion.

For example: "What are public utilities and how it applies to Big Tech" sounds a lot more like an article worth my time reading.

More like 15 tweets in length

Any student of history can explain that America has had this debate many times for almost all new technologies that grow dominant. The railroads spurred heavy regulation because they didn't treat all customers the same. The trucking industry too. When companies become large enough, citizens get upset when they're not treated equally and they start complaining to lawmakers who often do something.

Well, more precisely: Lawmakers will do absolutely nothing until a combination of a sufficient number of organized voters and pissed off businesses being discriminated against decide that lawmakers need to do something or be replaced by those who will... then, quite suddenly, government becomes very efficient. Amazing how that works.

For those who may have skipped the article, it is worth reading at least the first half which succinctly explains the difference between common carrier and public utility.

Many public institutions treat Google as public utility. Children can not attend school, unless they agree to privacy policy on school issued Chromebook. Town hall meetings announcements are only on FB...

If those are not public utilities, there should be law to prevent public institutions from using them.

I always seen it as public threat that politicians are on private social media, what if private company declares war on our behalf?

This is a good point. Perhaps they're a utility and/or common-carrier only in certain contexts? The article points out "Public utility comes from a contractual relationship between the government and that entity that is supposed to be the public utility". Other's have pointed out that when government employees use Google search, there's no contract in place. The latter may be true, but I'd argue that there is a contract in place when schools are paying for the Google Apps service and Chromebook hardware.

If you have to use the Google products in a school, and the school has a contract with Google, that seems like a utility and/or common carrier. The analogy that I use with my friends is "You have Verizon for your mobile phone, yeah? I have ATT. We can call/text each other, right? Of course - that's how phones work. What would you think if you could ONLY call Verizon customers, and if you wanted to call/text me, you had to get an ATT phone? And what about all those land lines, customer service lines, etc... how annoying would it be if everyone had to have the same phone company, and the companies kept coming and going in and out of vogue? All the older people user Company X, Millennials are all on Y, and the kids are all about Z...."

Most people think that's an awful, terrible world to imagine. That said, it reminds me a little of Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" ~ one review says "Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous.... you'll recognize it immediately"

Most people could not live their daily life without a Google/Facebook/Apple account. In social media has become the de facto place to reach and be reached by government officials and the information there is more up to date and well organized and targeted. For all practical purposes they are public utilities.

Also the owner of Wired is Advance, which own Reddit. They have a vested interest in not seeing that kind of legislation pass.

To me there’s way more nuance than simply the question “is big tech a common carrier?”

I don't really care if Google discriminates in its search results to provide a better user experience. If I don’t like that UX I can use another search engine.

But what about Twitter? Twitter is not just discriminating in tweet search results, they deplatform Tweet authors and organizations (e.g. Unity 2020) on a whim and with no recourse. The analog would be if Google just deleted your website if your page rank fell too low.

IMO Google looks like an information broker and Twitter/Facebook look like common carriers of tweets/posts.

If your argument is that we can’t call them either then it seems like it’s on you to suggest a framework that does correctly classify content platforms.

Twitter and Facebook both have the same argument as google does about their proprietary feed algorithms being their primary value prop and the opposite of common carrier expectations. Google also bans advertisers from time to time. Banned users have the recourse of suing for discrimination, but given the vast majority of these people are racists and trolls, they are unlikely to win those lawsuits.

They're not public utilities. They're a cartel.

Exactly, a public utility is useful to the public.

Social media companies harm the public. Glad they finally admitted to this.

But the series of tubes that enable them /should/ be though

TL;DR: Aside from clarifying what the terms "public utility" and "common carrier" mean, the article's main argument is that Google's customers are the advertisers, not the visitors to its search engine, and that there's no reason to expect them to treat all advertisers equally.

They absolutely ARE fascist collaborators with the government. That's related to public utility monopolies but not strictly the same.

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