News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The ACLU Asks in 1934: Shall We Defend Free Speech for Na... by simonh on Friday August 18, 2017 @07:32AM (#15045241)
I'm in favour of net neutrality, and believe that ISPs should be common carriers just like phone companies. Physical infrastructure should be covered by common carrier rules as not discriminate (in the broad sense) between content. Maybe content types, for efficiency purposes, but not the content itself.

Publishing platforms explicitly manage content. They provide tools to create, edit, transform and manage content. They provide facilities to control content distribution and subscription. That's clearly a different class of service. You can't reasonably argue that a service that actually facilitates the creation and routing of content can't influence what content is created or routed. They already do so explicitly in their choice and design of tooling.

Re:The ACLU Asks in 1934: Shall We Defend Free Speech for Na... by leereeves on Friday August 18, 2017 @08:12AM (#15045416)
ISPs also "facilitate the creation and routing of content". We just don't think of them that way because they exist at a lower layer and we don't directly interact with them. Instead, services like Facebook use the services ISPs provide.
Re:The ACLU Asks in 1934: Shall We Defend Free Speech for Na... by simonh on Saturday August 19, 2017 @03:29AM (#15052172)
Thats some pretty contorted reasoning. ISPs only carry content after it has been created and they do not route traffic based on it's data payload, only it's addressing metadata set by the sender. The protocols they implement were specifically designed not to care about the data payload and just do what the sender told them to do regarding addressing and delivery. Internet users rely on them to do what they are supposed to do, as clearly laid down in the protocol specifications.

Various social networks use 'relevance' metrics, keywords in the text, timeliness and all sorts of criteria to choose how to distribute or sort and highlight content and they change these algorithms over time. They are part of the value the service provides and clearly their responsibility.