This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.
What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?
All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.
I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)
I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy.
In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them.
If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.
[0] You might claim that Twitter is superior to other forms of public debate, but then I'd ask if you're really happy with the way politics are going.
What's next? A well designed debate platform that allows only emojis? A well designed debate platform that allows only meme pictures?
I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:
https://twitter.com/Jimmytidey/status/757494127537905664
Where else would that happen?
If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).
I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.
I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.
Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/twitters-new-simpler-rules...
"SIMPLE".
New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)
It can happen, co-operatives are a viable business model. My bank is a co-operative and they work for their member-owners.
I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.
It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.
This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.
The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.
The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.
I'm told that in Afghanistan it played (plays?) a key role in for aid agencies.
Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.
GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.
That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.
Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.