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Comment by bragh | Hacker News Reader

If you do not like the rules set by them, you can always build your own social network.

This is like saying if you don't like the rules you can build your own multinational telephone network. There's a reason telecoms are subject to common carrier rules and I don't see why tech monopolies should be any different.

I think you are seriously and intentionally misunderstanding the point. So far it was completely fine for Facebook to ban whoever they wanted and it was justified by them being a private company. Anybody who complained about it was told that they can build their own social network/cloud provider/payment provider.

Somehow now this is bad... Ridiculous.

Different people on the Internet will say different things. You can't really assign one collective motive to everything on the Internet and then say it's hypocritical.

Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.

> Facebook is a utility

hardly.

> Facebook is a utility that should be nationalized - it has grown too big.

This can't happen to utility monopolies:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/06/telegram-says-...

If your claim were true, everyone would just be stuck suffering and beholden to Facebook's ability to fix their service for lack of options.

It's fine if you're a small or medium size business that commands at most single digit % of the market. Facebook dominates ad spending and reach to the point that you can't just build your own, because they have a de facto monopoly/oligopoly over digital ads.

Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.

My understanding of common carrier rules is that they want to avoid a situation where a railroad or telephone operator who controlled the only available line could charge exorbitant rates to customers who had no alternatives. I don't really see how the same concern is true for Facebook - we have lots of options to disseminate information online.

The crucial difference is lack of a right of way. The thing which creates an actual monopoly instead of the language degradation of monopoly to mean "But it is big and I don't like it!".

And your own social network will fail because of network effects. If Facebook can be as terrible as they have been and retain their users, it's really because of their users that they're being propped up with a successful business. I gotta say at that point even I start thinking they owe their users more than a free market exchange would imply.

Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"

> network effects

If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here:

https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/

These protocols exist today. This is a W3C recommendation as of 2018-01-23:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/

> And your own social network will fail because of network effects

Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine.

And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.

Burning down Facebook? What on Earth are you talking about? It makes it easier for users to remove their own accounts across multiple services. It's a common interface to features the social networks themselves provide. This is the opposite of a bad actor.

Fun argument, now try asking Apple why they're against Jailbreaks if they "technically provide the same services the phone could already do"?

I certainly think the same argument applies, FWIW - I don't think Apple is being reasonable if they ban people from services for fixing their own devices or other people's devices. Not sure if you were implying I would feel differently about that instance.

If you don't like the rules of English you can always invent your own language - sure you won't be able to talk to anyone but isn't that freedom enough?

If you don't like this privte outrage, just ignore it or start your own

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