I'm mixed, but I don't think companies should have 230 protection AND be able to make express publisher decisions on editorializing content.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
Common carriers had such regulation on them because their infrastructure was a natural monopoly. The lone train line through the town. The single telegraph and telephone operator. The only trucking company operating that route.
It's not clear to me we're at the point that Facebook is the only real way for us to talk online. It seems like there's a lot of easy to access competition in this space.
> It seems like there's a lot of easy to access competition in this space.
If I give you the money to buy and operate the required amount of servers and a couple developers, will you be able to launch a Facebook competitor in the next year? I doubt so.
Fundamentally the idea is that you ought to be able to participate in society without undue hardship solely by the whim of the (power,phone,water,communications) company. I don't think it is that unreasonable to regulate Facebook in that sense.
Also a lot of government agencies themselves basically only post up to date information on Facebook/Twitter. Do you think I should have to go through a hostile third party just to receive information from the government?
They're natural monopolies and yet I don't use any of them and somehow successfully talk to you here, right now. Strange huh, I thought they were a monopoly on internet communication. Can't possibly make a platform for people to talk without Facebook or iMessage and yet here we are. I guess Discord is also really Facebook? Signal? Telegram? I guess this is really just Facebook or iMessage behind the scenes for all of these things?
> If I give you the money to buy and operate the required amount of servers, will you be able to launch a Facebook competitor in the next year? I doubt so.
If you give me less than a week and some budget that scales with users I'll have something thrown together that can scale to at least several hundred thousand users. How long did it take for Moltbook to be made? How much do you think they spent building it? You think they spent years and millions on that? Do you really think it actually cost them that many millions to make Truth Social?
> You can run a telephone cable to your neighbor, but good luck reaching anyone else.
The lines are already run, it's called the internet. We're already all connected to each other. We can reach practically anywhere on the planet with the wire or signal coming into your home. That is a natural monopoly. There is probably only one fiber or coax provider, there's only so much useful RF bandwidth, etc.
If you give me an hour I'll give you a page on the Internet saying anything you want it to say, and everyone in the world (outside of Iran or North Korea) will be able to see it and interact with it.
Competition is a click away. Compared to the industries where there's often only one telephone provider, only one train company, only one major airline, etc.
> Also a lot of government agencies themselves basically only post up to date information on Facebook/Twitter.
Those agencies have websites and other means to disseminate information. They are in no way limited to only Facebook. Many have the ability to make every single phone and radio and TV station say whatever message they need to get across. They have lots of means to get information to you.
There's no train monopoly, I can just walk to the office! A monopoly does not have to exert total control to be a problem.
I shouldn't have to walk to the office because the train company has a problem with my viewpoints. I shouldn't have to spend a ton of extra effort to communicate with people and businesses because Facebook doesn't like my viewpoints, either. No private company should have that kind of power.
> that can scale to at least several hundred thousand users
It can scale for sure. Will it have all these users though? I can also go buy several containers worth of fiber optics cables. But that doesn't make me a competitor to the local ISP because there is such an incredible amount of human friction I must go through to compete with their network that it effectively locks out competitors.
There are legal limitations to installing fiber in a city or laying track. There isn't in hosting a website, at least in most jurisdictions. Open port 80 and 443, register a domain name, and you're hosting whatever you want to say to whoever wants to listen anywhere on the planet.
> I shouldn't have to spend a ton of extra effort to communicate with people and businesses because Facebook doesn't like my viewpoints, either. No private company should have that kind of power.
You don't have to. It took you the same effort (probably a lot less!) to come here and talk. There's thousands of other places on the internet you can go talk as well with about the same effort as Facebook. Go talk on X. Go to Truth Social. Or Bluesky. Or Mastodon. Or Reddit. Or Nextdoor. Or this or that and on and on and on...
Alex Jones and Infowars and such content has been banned from platforms like YouTube and Facebook and the like. I guess they just can't post their content on the internet anymore. What's this? https://banned.video/ Sure seems like they're still making all kinds of nonsense videos despite Facebook having a monopoly on the internet! They were even sued into oblivion for the things they said on the internet, and yet somehow they're still getting their message out.
Once again, you're telling me it's impossible for you to talk to me on the internet, that without Facebook it's just so onerous to do so that it's just unworkable, and yet here we are communicating and they are not involved in the slightest. How does that work?
Yeah you can say X but no one will see it.
I can see potentially requiring platforms to moderate in a "viewpoint neutral" way, though, which only applies if you have ~5% of potential customer base as users.
It would at least create a diseconomy of scale and discourage centralization.
Yes it’s important for news organization and such to have unrestricted speech, but that seems solvable by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps that engage in other lines of business. I don’t want say Google to be have full censorship and editorial privileges just because one of their many products surfaces news.
> news organization and such to have unrestricted speech [...] by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps
This is an misunderstanding of "freedom of the press". The "press" is a reference to the printing press as a device itself. News organizations (which are usually for profit) have the exact same rights to free speech as anyone else. The natural analogy is printers and the right to publish information online.
(last comment regarding MS Now is meant for humor)
Section 230 is a terrible law because it exempts one class of business from any responsibility for their actions.
A global company which faces no penalties for allowing malicious and fraudulent content has no incentive to police itself, and its clients live outside the reach of the law. Ergo, they make money on crime and have no responsibility for it.
If we want to fix the Internet, step one is deleting 230 in its entirety, and step two is ensuring a tech platform cannot profit from illegal activity. That means if they sell a malicious ad, they at bare minimum, have to give up that revenue, and ideally, face a penalty for it if they aren't taking adequate measures to prevent abuse.
A true financial risk to tech platforms is the only way to incentivize good behavior.