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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of things that can be normalized at a small scale that don't work at a large scale. If you're a 3 person startup with your 2 best friends you can work in your living room, keep whatever weird hours you want, call each other rude nicknames, and joke around. When you're a 1000 person company with an HR department you need to have some clear procedures because there's lots of different people that can't all know and trust each other the way three people do.

Likewise, a small niche forum with an insular community can police itself pretty much however it likes. A global communication network that has become telecom infrastructure for all intents and purpose has do a little more justification before it cuts someone off from what is becoming a vital service.

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> A global communication network that has become telecom infrastructure for all intents and purpose has do a little more justification before it cuts someone off from what is becoming a vital service.

Until the Facebooks and Twitters of the world become legally classified as such, you're making the same mistake of expecting as much from what is legally absolutely no different from the SomethingAwfuls of the world.

I’m saying those laws should be made. I get that that is not the case presently. Pretending that a network with 2 billion people and the ability to influence national elections is the exact same thing as the phpBB for your Dungeons and Dragons group and it’s fine if there’s no difference in the way they’re regulated is either naive or disingenuous. Laws are not immutable facts of nature that we have no control over. We can create or change them as needed when something new arises that is harming society.

With wacked US politics lately business regulations are just turned on and off as the parties trade control. Laws will probably make it harder to kick off foreign influencers and bots with plausible deniability if it's protecting regular a-holes

He's not making a mistake, he's making an argument.

> before it cuts someone off from what is becoming a vital service

Facebook is not a vital service. Popularity doesn't determine what is and is-not vital, nor does it remove the rights of a private business.

We regulate private businesses all the time when their actions are harmful to the public. Labor laws, environmental laws, workplace safety, discrimination, and on and on. "Private business" is not a magic phrase that means you get to do whatever you want with no regard for the rest of society.

If the State wants a fully regulated communication system, it can put facebook under the same umbrella as the telcos.

Interestingly, it will surely be what you dislike so what is your point?

If facebook becomes public utility I want to be able to regulate speech on it with my tax money. If it's private, I dont care if it tries to regulate harmful speech the way it wants as long as it doesnt impact where my tax money is going (so I dont want to pay for girls empowerement to have facebook massively undermining it by letting sheikhs explain the youth how to beat their unruly wives)

> If facebook becomes public utility I want to be able to regulate speech on it with my tax money.

What makes you think you should be able to do that? Do you get to cut off someone's water utility if they say something you don't like?

> Do you get to cut off someone's water utility if they say something you don't like?

Coming soon to a Hell on Earth near you.

A lot of small business/self employed folks don't have any kind of web presence other than FB/Instagram.

It's not as cut and dry as you're making it out to be.

> A lot of small business/self employed folks don't have any kind of web presence other than FB/Instagram.

This is pretty cut and dry. Dom't build your business on top of another business, for which you have no contract.

There are plenty of alternatives, from Shopify to Etsy. None of which require a FB presence.

Where do you advertise your Etsy/Shopify business?

I don't use facebook myself, but it's pretty hard to deny that they hold a vital position in the market. You can avoid them out of principle, but you're not setting yourself up for an easy start.

> Facebook is not a vital service.

WhatsApp is. Everyone in my country uses it. Not even a judge can get away with blocking WhatsApp as punishment for encrypting messages because the consequences are too great.

>>Popularity doesn't determine what is and is-not vital

Then, pray tell, what does? It is the assumption that these services are used that turns them into important infrastructure.

Everyone just assumes you have a bank account or a telephone, and that makes both bank accounts and telephones desirable, we wouldn't invest ungodly amounts of money in infrastructure on roads, traffic lights etc if automobiles weren't popular and they surely wouldn't be if we didn't have the infrastructure.

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