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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is not like the power company, or the water district. It is not an essential utility that people will die without. If Facebook suddenly disappeared from the Internet tomorrow, life would go on. This particular person might find it somewhat more difficult to socialize without it, but people have been socializing for decades without Facebook, and people will continue to socialize when it's dead.

Just throwing up our hands and saying "we simply need Facebook" doesn't help anyone, and doesn't help to fight the pernicious effect of Facebook's dominance. I agree though, that some kind of regulation is part of the solution--but not because it's some kind of essential utility, but because of it's ill effects (like smoking).

Despite her initial fears about being so dependent on it, this might actually have been a blessing in disguise--just the encouragement she needed to let go and move on from this harmful platform.

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The tone-deaf responses of tech people to normal peoples' plights never ceases to amaze me.

The telephone is not an essential utility that people will die without, either. And yet the phone companies were regulated as utilities. Such regulation ensures that normal people with no monetary/social/political clout wouldn't be denied participation in society or burdened with undue hardships (communication, socializing, transportation, etc). This is a not-insignificant part of government's function in service to its citizens.

Just because you may be rich/powerful enough to not need such services does not mean that they are unneeded.

> The tone-deaf responses of tech people to normal peoples' plights never ceases to amaze me.

In this case though it is a response to another tech person. Maybe the general public would get some sympathy here, but this person had a vanity domain that they used for something important then let expire, and should know better.

> The telephone is not an essential utility that people will die without, either.

There are obvious circumstances where this is very much not true, so your call for empath back at you: just because you have never been in a position where phone comms are that important…

> There are obvious circumstances where this is very much not true, so your call for empath back at you: just because you have never been in a position where phone comms are that important…

True, and you just proved GP's point.

Yes, many farmers in poorly developed nations, now use SMS on ultra-cheap mobile phones to discover prices at the local markets. If they lose mobile phone service, it absolutely harms their income. And, many of these people are barely above substinence farming.

>it is a response to another tech person. Maybe the general public would get some sympathy here, but this person had a vanity domain that they used for something important then let expire, and should know better

Fyi... the person in question (Emily Cordes) doesn't appear to be a techie. Her "About" page says: Emily is an Exercise Physiologist

She's a non-techie that happened to get a domain name. She let it expire without realizing the interconnected consequences (email address recovery) which seems realistic for non-techies to overlook.

Even a tech company like Microsoft with dedicated IT department made the news when they accidentally let their domains expire: passport.com, hotmail.co.uk

Even more, she indicated that she added an updated email to her FB account. But, the old expired address remained, so was still a target for hackers.

Utilities have to conform to the same standard while FB is fully closed and does not interoperate with anybody. Think carefully before elevating it to the level of public good. If you want to force FB to open and interoperate that'd be a different thing though.

This is a great point. I was thinking this week: If my water was turned off, my home would be practically unlivable. Maybe you can survive for a couple of days, after that -- move out! Heh... can you imagine getting "Banned" by the water company? Just go live in the woods, off-grid!

> The telephone is not an essential utility that people will die without, either.

As someone who has been in situations where calling 911 and getting emergency services to a location ASAP I can 100% argue having telephone service available saves lives. More people would absolutely die if telephone service wasn't as widespread.

If you regulated Facebook in the way that the telephone was regulated, it would essentially become a requirement to use Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account and would very much object to regulating Facebook in a way that our local governments would suddenly be validated to use.

Telephones connected people in a specific way because there weren't really alternatives. Not sure that entirely applies to Facebook.

The regulation might mean that Facebook is forced to interoperate with your social network of choice (this reply [1] goes further into that idea), though. If you're an AT&T user, you can talk to Verizon users just fine even though you might not like Verizon as a company.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31579553

The phone company is a “natural monopoly” you can’t just choose another phone company. You can just go to another website.

It’s more tone death to think having government have more power over social media can possibly be good.

> If Facebook suddenly disappeared from the Internet tomorrow, life would go on.

Yes, if Facebook completely disappears there is a short moment of arranging alternatives and all goes on.

However if they ban single individuals from their platform this can have a notable impact as they are disconnected from social circles, which picked Facebook as their communication channel.

And yes, Facebooks relevance is still different from water, but it compares maybe somewhat to phone operators and other such utilities, which are under some regulation regarding required services and interoperability between networks and it's worthwhile to think how communication in a contemporary era can be ensured. Learning from mistakes made in phone operations, taking into perspective that development isn't "done" yet, ...

A little empathy would go a long way. Surely "life would go on" if your kids' school closed down, or if your best friends relocated, or if your employer laid you off. But it would be a significant inconvenience, wouldn't it?

She articulates well why losing her account is an inconvenience. We can at least acknowledge that her feelings are valid.

Comparing facebook to your employer is silly.

I agree, you can always find new employment, can't get your entire social circle into a different Facebook.

It's funny that you compare Facebook to a power company this way. Recently I wanted to contact a power company about a bad experience I had with them. Basically there were three support options. Phone, Facebook or Twitter. Phoning them was possible during office hours, while both Facebook and Twitter were available between 08:00h - 20:00h.

Another example is my local pay sports provider, which doesn't even have a phone or e-mail support option anymore. It's Facebook or Twitter only. So I ask my spouse to contact support, since I don't want to engage in social media that way.

I think Facebook and Twitter are more essential than we may think and should be regulated like a public utility.

Instead of regulating whatever social media platform happens to be trendy at the time, your anecdote suggests we should regulate companies so that they offer direct support through conventional means, rather than exclusively through third parties.

Yes, but that would be rather hard to do. You would end up in a semantic discussion of the term "conventional means"? Is that support through telegraph, mail, phone, e-mail or social media? And what determines a third party? The telephone company or mail provider can also be a third party.

In my opinion when we have a oligopoly of social media providers (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), they should be regulated by local laws and government. Same for providers such as Microsoft, Google and Apple. It must be unacceptable that you have to provide your private details for usage and can get banned from a service without any prior communication. And without the ability to appeal or arbitration.

> You would end up in a semantic discussion of the term "conventional means"?

A definition could be a means which is itself regulated to be available to any customer.

So a phone support line is one because phone service is regulated, available and interoperable. Email counts because it is open, standard and decentralized (an email provider like gmail can block you but you can simply go elsewhere or self-host). A support office staffed by humans is also good because everyone can walk/bike/drive there. (But as a counterexample, a support office inside a military base wouldn't count since most people can't get to it, unless 100% of the customers are in that base.)

A support line controlled by a private entity which arbitrarily blocks people from access, such as FB, clearly doesn't count.

> Facebook is not like the power company, or the water district. It is not an essential utility that people will die without

Imagine walmart is the only large store near your house, and they ban you from that store. Walmart is not an essential utility, since you have a convenience store and a gas station in the same town too, and you can also drive 2 hours to another large store if needed.

If all of your social circle is on facebook, it's very inconvenient to ask them to move somewhere else just for you.

Does your browser not allow you to type in another web address?

So now we want to give the government more power to make things “more convenient” instead of just asking your friends to use another application?

SO if your local mommy group uses facebook... are you going to ask all 50 of them to switch to signal/telegram/vk/whatever? Are they going to do this just for you?

Is this the new version of “think of the children”?

No, the government doesn’t need to step in because you can’t be part of the cool kids and they won’t relocate the party to your house.

> Does your browser not allow you to type in another web address?

That's not a good-faith response. Of course they can go to a different website, say, ycombinator instead of FB.

But if their child's school is only reachable via FB, that won't do much good.

Then the answer is not to regulate private industry. The answer is for the local government to pass laws saying that all communications must be on public websites.

While you have a point, people also have been living without electricity for several thousand years. Yet, we still regulate the utility company.

> If Facebook suddenly disappeared from the Internet tomorrow, life would go on.

Yes, if FB disappeared overnight, we'd all wake up to happier world and life would go on.

But that's not the scenario. The scenario is that suddenly your FB account disappears overnight while the rest of the world, all the groups you need to interact with, continue to exist only in FB. That's a terrible dystopia for the victim.

Personally I'm lucky no group I need to deal with uses FB much or at all. But I do know there are groups for whom continued FB access is vital. It shouldn't be so and/or FB should be regulated to force them to allow access to anyone who needs it. Allowing a private company to shut someone out of society is morally incorrect.

> It is not an essential utility that people will die without.

Numerous local governments announced COVID vaccine availability exclusively via Facebook. Citizens relying on their government to inform them of vaccine availability did not receive the information because they were not on Facebook. So far about 15 million people have died from COVID. Are you suggesting that none of these people contracted COVID and died while they were trying to get the vaccine but were unable to because they did not receive the government-provided vaccine information from Facebook?

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