The issue is that, unless we have some sort of political movement toward a US-Government funded equivalent of YouTube, there will never be a public space online for the average person. More and more of daily social interaction is moving onto a platform on which everything is inherently private, where there is no public square anymore. I'm concerned about a future where technically you can scream on a physical public streetcorner but have it mean nothing at all in terms of impact on public discourse. "What good is speech if you are unable to make a phone call?" to twist the Matrix quote.
>If you want to publish your content with your own hardware on the Internet, you can. The tools aren't very good to do it, but you can. When the problem becomes network providers censoring your views, then come back to me.
The problem is that there's nothing fundamentally different about the arguments when it comes to the network providers. They're also private companies, why should they be forced at gunpoint to deliver content they disagree with? And yet we acknowledge that having the phone company shut you down for political speech on their phone lines would be an overstep even though the phone company is private.
At a certain point, the sheer dominance and size of some of these social media networks means we should be treating them differently. The fact that, as you say, "People treat Facebook, Google, etc. etc. etc. as if they themselves are The Internet" means that there is a distinction of kind that the citizenry are perceiving. I don't think the solution is just to say they're wrong, but rather to find a way to formalize this implicit categorization into something workable.
It seems like the options are to regulate, nationalize, or build government-funded public alternatives to mega-social-media systems. Other options are to add some better system of decentralization that nonetheless allows users to access the common public pool of an audience and not just ghetto-ize themselves into irrelevance and destitution.
I don't want a federally run YouTube, and I don't want to rob publishers of the right to choose what to publish.
There's nothing preventing a company from selling hardware and software to enable you to publish yourself. It won't be free, it shouldn't be free.
The only "platform" that should be a public space is TCP on the Internet.
There is one problem with two solutions.
Social media giants aren't public spaces.
You can either force them to be public spaces through strict and probably ridiculous regulation or you can create fundamentally different ways to publish on the existing public space of the Internet as a whole.
Except it's not fundamentally different. Much more towards the beginning of the Internet the way you shared information with people was by setting up a web server and an email server. They were yours so there was nobody to censor you.
That creating things yourself action hasn't really moved into the 21st century. It is still possible but ever more the realm of experts.
Actually, no, not at all. The Internet was for defense contractors to share information, and when made available to the public it was for corporations to sell services to the public. All that "free information" propaganda was just propaganda to get the public comfortable with allowing large scale surveillance technologies into their homes and to be carried on their persons. "Social media" is a genius re-writing of surveillance technologies.
It preceded the commercialization of the internet.
Ultimately service providers have to take a stand for free speech and allow both the publishing of controversial media, as well as let people easily filter out what they don't want to see. I would really like to see a youtube in the model of reddit or 4/7/8chan where you can manually segregate by "board" and just not engage with speech you don't like. This entire problem is because each new user content publishing site has to re-learn the lessons from UseNet, except the ones that are popular today want to take away the voice of people they don't like and put them in some underclass that doesn't have access to what everyone else has. Let people pick their spaces, move or delete content that doesn't fit the space it's posted in and warn&ban repeat offenders.
Where does it stop? Does the comment section on my personal blog have to be a public place? If I start a newspaper or open a book store do I have to publish or sell whatever anybody wants me to?
If I start a grocery store can I choose what to sell do the local farmers all get the right to sell in my store regardless of my wishes?
Where does it stop exactly?
> no single person can bear the costs of publishing videos online
I could. I am.
I have a server running Plex in the closet. It "publishes" videos over the Internet. Right now there are only two people who have access to see what I publish.
If I wanted to publish videos myself and let the public consume them, I could. It would take slightly different software, but the server is in the closet already. There might be some issues if something I published got to the front page of HN. There isn't much risk of that.
If the comment section on your blog started to comprise 80-90% of all the comments on the Internet? Yeah, maybe it should,
There's so much distance between your hypothetical and what YouTube, Facebook, et al are doing that it's not even a "slippery slope" argument. Maybe a "slippery Marianas Trench" argument.
Does Congress pass a bill declaring Facebook public? The rules can't be gut feeling, how do I tell the difference between a comment section that is a public place and one that isn't?
If there are two types of things: A which is a public place and B which isn't, how do I sort into those two bins?
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble"
What part of the first amendment guarantees me YouTube has to host and monetize my videos?
The government isn't allowed to tell me I can't say something or to punish me for doing so (with the exceptions decided by SCOTUS). The first amendment doesn't mean my neighbors have to be my friends if I use obscene language at dinner parties.
People seem to confuse the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.
The Civil Rights Act reached into much less public places and prevented certain behaviors. If YouTube was deleting videos because they were made by black people or Muslims or women, this would be a very different conversation. Religion, race, sex.... those are protected classes.
Freedom of expression doesn't mean your opinions are a protected class. The law doesn't and won't reach that far into the behaviors of private entities. The first amendment protects you from the government, nothing else.
Well, one starting point would be looking at past examples of antitrust action. The AT&T and Standard Oil cases might be instructive.
> What part of the first amendment guarantees me YouTube has to host and monetize my videos?
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the First Amendment. I think they should either be declared a common carrier (and thus required to serve all without discrimination) or (conversely) they should have their DMCA safe harbor privileges revoked.
"discrimination" legally is about protected classes, and like I said expressed opinions aren't protected classes.
Do you take 'required to serve all' as services without moderation? I don't really want to be surrounded by opinion anarchy.
People treat Facebook, Google, etc. etc. etc. as if they themselves are "The Internet" when they are publishers. "You" are not publishing content on YouTube, YouTube is publishing your content. Just because they do almost nothing to curate what they publish, doesn't mean the little they do is some civil rights violation. We're learning with the Russia+Facebook thing that there is a fundamental problem with third party corporations publishing and promoting anybody's content automatically.
Nobody claims the New York Times violates free speech when they won't put some radical wonk's opinion on the front page.
If you want to publish your content with your own hardware on the Internet, you can. The tools aren't very good to do it, but you can. When the problem becomes network providers censoring your views, then come back to me.
When your definition of "censorship" becomes advertisers refusing to pay you for your whacky extremist views, your view of freedom has become distorted from the liberty to expression to the freedom from criticism.
YouTube, Facebook, etc. do not owe you publication rights. They are not public spaces.
The threat to freedom isn't non-public spaces exercising their rights, it's the nearly complete lack of actual public space online for anyone that isn't wealthy or a hacker.