I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice. At least at this time I think you can ask for government interference or not. I would like to think that you could trust each side to know its boundaries, as we see in other regulated industries, but time has shown either side cannot. Which side would you want to give an inch to, because a mile will be taken (or according to some doomsayers it already has)?

I'm not sure this has to be an all or nothing thing. We have some reasonable protections built into the Constitution and case law that back that up.

I understand your hesitation about having the government involved as there are plenty of examples of government influence on the media around the world. I share the same fears.

With that said, do we really have any real world proof that the US government in recent years has over stepped its boundaries in regards to media restrictions?

But in general I don't think you can compare broadcast mediums to bidirectional ones (e.g. words on the telephone or text on the internet).

They’ll write the rules together, make the barriers to entry even higher, and pat each other on the back.

Then it’s on to the next moral panic, this one’s been fixed!

The US government hasn't censor broadcast media much given that most broadcast media owned by large corporations with ties to the state themselves.

And there's no reason that government wading into regulating Facebook could do anything remotely sane. A lot of Facebook's scandals have nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with filtering bias. When state agency is going to be qualified to regulate that?

You won't want a random foreign government censor your speech.

Why is okay when the US authorities shut down a site because of some bullshit DMCA violation that the rest of the world shouldn't be subject to?

I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Off the top of my head, a number of industries are regulated / heavily regulated and thrive: media; air travel; automotive; transportation of dangerous goods; medicine / dental / veterinary; legal practice.

The internet is now at the maturity level where it's ready to be locked down so Facebook, Google and maybe 1-2 other players can be cemented as the dominant players for decades to come through regulations ostensible there to stop them from becoming too powerful.

It's called "Regulatory Capture", and it's one of the most important concepts to understand to grasp how the modern world works.

Regulation is not as black and white as you are painting. Plenty of regulations do good things, because people can't be trusted to act with a social conscience when profit is their motive.

Indeed. I think the argument ventured is that it is burdensome to the point that only the big established players can bear

This is one of those sentences that sound logical, until you start thinking about it.

The fact that people sometimes do bad things in no way proves that regulations do good things. If anything, it's an indication that regulations might also be bad, since they are made by people.

Often the same people who are being regulated, believe it or not...

The powerful or the powerless?

Some regulation can form regulatory capture, but other regulation can enforce an open, accessible marketplace.

Facebook etc are more akin to broadcasters in terms of sharing ideas than they are akin to a telecom company offering communications infrastructure.

It’s not difficult to create a website to share the same ideas. In fact, it’s already done.

Openness is already there. Otherwise I agree.

I don't see evidence that there is no middle ground here. Facebook and Google filter a lot of content. But that is filtering and not absolute control and there are significant other sources for those who want them.

State regulation would, however, produce a situation where everything remotely like a filter would be exposed to whatever regulation was implemented and that would in fact be a tremendous advantage for these same large players.

http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-...

Especially with 'AI-based filtering', which blurs the lines on what is filtered and why, these companies have both significant discretion and plausible deniability when it comes to censoring content.

In South Africa Twitter is huge. In Germany, Facebook is. Instagram is big in the UK. Now take the possibly not unusual scenario in which a South African lives in London and has family in Germany.

Granpappy in Berlin would search for his grandson in London from Facebook but finds him on Instagram. He'd add the grandson as a friend and see the grandson's Instagram photos in his Facebook feed.

The South African guy in London searches Instagram for his nephew in South Africa, and finds him on Twitter. And sees that Twitter account's posts in Instagram.

If someone on Facebook finds me on Instagram, Instagram could notify me that Mr. X is searching for a profile that matches mine, and ask if I want to allow access to my stuff. If I decline he can't. Federation, with user control and consent.

I think it could work. And even if it was useful to a tiny monitory at least there's real choice. Inclusive of all.

I can see how it should be easy to send content from foo#twitter.com to bar#facebook.com as individual messages, format issues not withstanding, if foo and bar have agreed to correspond. But which end would manage the existence of that relationship and push/pull the data?

Maybe it needs third-party brokers to do it?

Interestingly I can see some parallels here with the current status of banking in the UK. After centuries of operation as "closed systems" there are now rules to force banks to provide APIs so that new entrants can offer inter-operation services. Maybe in a hundred years social-media companies will be forced to do the same? ;-)

Also, such federation, if not open to third parties (easy to justify with spam, malicious parties, etc) can actually strengthen the current big platforms against competition.

There are a lot of platforms out there today. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and Whatsapp are all huge. Plus there are smaller players like Tumblr, Viber, Telegram and plenty of regional players. The only anti-trust error was allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. But that was a result of poorly enforcing existing laws not a regulatory gap.

They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who gets access to what APIs and under what terms.

Everyone gets the same terms or no one does.

So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing.

Let's ignore facebook since it wasn't exactly first to market with myspace before it (although it was first to market in "this has your real name attached"), and talk about twitter.

Twitter had a fairly unique idea, you can post public messages that are very limited in scope. They were first to market on that- and that's why everyone uses it. What is stopping twitter clones from popping up? Absolutely nothing. Many people who read HN could easily make a suitable twitter clone. But would anyone use it? Pretty much no. Why? Because people like to centralize their technology as much as they can to make it actually useful.

What a pain in the ass it would be if you had 4 different twitter equivalents that you were trying to use.. or try to remember "oh friend A is on twitter1, Friend B is on twitter3" etc.

Now, yeah people still do this do a degree of course.. some friends might be on facebook, others twitter. So of course this segregation still exists but it's generally for products which are different in scope.

Anyway- my point is it's people and the marketplace have decided "1 facebook is OK" "1 twitter is OK". Arbitrarily trying to break them up is not what people even want. Paranoid people might think that's what people want because all they can see is the possibility of censorship and security stuff, but 95% of people just want to use something that works and they can connect with people without everything being a pain in the ass.

You are correct - monopolies are defined to control the supply of something to manipulate prices and hurt consumers.

The problem with these platforms is not that they are anti-consumer, the problem is that they are anti-competitive because they control the entire audience that a product can be sold to. This results in the commoditization of suppliers (eg news, books, etc.) and reduces competition in the distribution space of the economy that targets consumers.

It's a different way to think about it because it's a new concept in our modern world, but the mental model that I've seen is that there are three stages of creating something and selling it to a consumer:

1. Supplier / Manufacturer 2. Distributor 3. Consumer

In the old days, monopolies controlled supply and distribution, which resulted in consumers being hurt. Now, "aggregators" control distribution and the consumer, which leads to suppliers to drive down their costs or not even participate in the consumer space.

I HIGHLY recommend reading about aggregation theory on Stratechery to get a deeper understanding of this as Ben Thompson does a great job in explaining why the FANG companies do what they do: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

It can be solved with interoperability. If it is not a problem for mobile networks - phone calls and text messages, why would it be problem for social networks?

Mandating open communication between these services would help to break this monopoly and possibly just naturally evolve into the idealistic goal diaspora was aiming for, small networks of social groups that have news feeds floating between them and the ability to pick and chose from locally hosted and separately hosted feeds.

Networks effects.

More precisely, The fact that you can't read and reply to someone's tweets on a clone, due to Twitter's terms and conditions, and copyright law (enforced by states).

1. Popularity follows an extreme power law, so the number of people that would need to move is smaller than you'd intuitively think

2. Fads change relatively quickly, so it's not even necessarily about getting people to move, but about getting the next generation to invest somewhere else

3. The big players are extremely metrics driven, so if people feel like the tide is shifting, the transition from trickle to deluge could be shockingly fast

It's not all theoretical - Instagram created an entirely new network effect very quickly, and only FB's ability+willingness to gobble it up kept it from being another major player. But the next thing will come soon enough (less than 10 years for sure, probably less than 5), and then the dynamics of the space depend on the whims of a South American butterfly (or SF Biz Dev)

That's a very good counterexample.

and on and on. Basically forcing interoperability means a huge slowdown on innovation as you can't add anything without a committee and years of negociation

It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawlers. Or in your example, they provide everything they have as an API and it’s up to the competitors to adapt to whatever features they provide. In which case, other companies can focus on the lowest common denominator and making that interoperable.

It’s not perfect or seamless, but the baseline isn’t that hard, and that’s good enough for most people.

And it’s funny you bring up messaging, for many years it was interoperable across many services via XMPP and it worked pretty well, until everyone decided it was in their competitive best interest to silo it. We really haven’t gained much in terms of innovation in that space since then, in many ways it’s much worse.

Just exempt 'small' services from the rule. Maybe this will kick some of the get big at all cost behavior that's permeated tech companies recently in the teeth.

To bring it down to a populist formula: Why not make a law that requires the interoperability/federation of social networks? We have laws that set requirements for restaurants... why not for social networks?

One way to achieve that would be to require that platforms for user-generated content make that content available on open protocols, such as ActivityPub and RSS.

> I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms [...] don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally

Then they wouldn't be allowed to ban spam, which would be a regressive step.

There’s several assumptions here (for example: more platforms will mean better ‘X’), but how would that link with the actual issues being faced by society vis-a-vis social media?

If you're operating a business you fundamentally need that control.

The platform you're talking about it the internet. It already exists. You can use it to say whatever you want within law. If you use someone else's servers to do so they can boot you, just like I can kick someone out of my house.

If there's interoperability between networks, then no one network can become dominant via momentum only, and has to actually provide value to users, and prevents lock-in.

I definitely want the US, with their strong ideas of free speech, to be the ones controlling those platforms. Because, as they are now, they are severely restricted.

Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.

The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing a newspaper the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. The newspaper can publish (or not publish) anything they want.

If you take my suggestion (in 19168078), you end up with: "The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing <a site called Facebook> the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. <Facebook> can publish (or not publish) anything they want." (For clarity, I agree with this 100%.)

The original post to which you replied (with expressed disagreement) said "The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor." I also agree with that post 100%. It's your interleaved post's (19167743) first sentence in response to that ("You have a poor understanding of free speech.") that I disagreed with, given that that poster appears to hold the same point of view that you do immediately above.

Extorting the platform owner with implications that if they don't do as the government wishes they may compel them isn't exactly "freely given" consent.

The government has the ability to regulate many things, but threatening prior restraint of speech is a pretty bold claim, and perhaps content providers should call that bluff.

One of the big reasons these big companies censor things is because they're afraid of public backlash for being associated with certain types of content. If the government doesn't allow them to censor that content then the public wouldn't take it up with the platform.

I think maybe it would be good to draw from the physical world. I'm not a lawyer but IIRC some states (eg California) let you leaflet on private property like malls if they're open to the public... I wish I could recall details but applying a similar logic online could be interesting.

But any modifications of safe harbor would worry me greatly.

Whether liability and damages are assigned would depend on the details, but the principle is quite clear here.

Otherwise yes, it is quite possible to be liable for whatever happens on your private property. If drug deals are taking place between third parties in your house won’t you be liable? If you allowed those parties there you most definitely will be.

The governments most successful crackdowns regulate the intermediaries

So in graph theory, you look at the node you want to control and then take the complement and restrict the nodes in the complement, while prohibiting the target node from interaction with non-restricted nodes

there is no sanction on non-restricted nodes and no sanction on the behavior of the target node, with voluntary compliance entered into by the restricted nodes

Examples of this approach: Accredited investor regulation (non-accredited citizens not prohibited from investing, businesses risk consequences)

Online gambling prohibition (citizens and online casinos not prohibited, voluntarily licensed financial institutions are prohibited from processing transactions)

Twitter and FBs issue is reliance and optimizing for engagement which leads to clicking and surfacing the most outrageous stuff at the expense of the ordinary.

Google search doesn’t have “an gagement problem”. They have black hat SEO problem, which is different, but they go beyond that and tweak some search results for political reasons. Not talking about terrorism or supremacy groups at all, but somewhat controversial social issues, (reproductive) sometimes tame issues (searching for candidates)[1]. The EU has fined them for “re-ranking” SERs and SSE effects.

>These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.<

Given that, 2-3MM vote swing (vs, what the outside estimate was under 50k votes for Russian bot sway), I’d say Google is the real problem in affecting democratic elections.

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big...

So, while his conclusions might be disingenuous, his assertions (manipulation) can be independently confirmed.

>Is there evidence of actual favoritism in Google’s search engine? Well, the European Union certainly thinks so, having fined Google $2.7 billion last year for having biased search results.

The fine was for an anti-trust ruling, where it was determined Google was promoting their own shopping results (showing them at the top of the page) over organic shopping sites, stifling competition. Favoritism for their own service, maybe, but nothing to do with pushing or manipulating results.

So that's why I suspected he had an agenda to push and was willing to spin the truth to argue for it.

You can argue that study [4] showed Google tended to have more Clinton-favorable results, but I don't personally think that shows manual manipulation. It's worth a critical read--in Issue 7, he seriously alleges that Google somehow realized this study was being conducted halfway through, and started serving unbiased results to subjects with Gmail accounts. If you accept that conclusion, okay, but I'd tend to believe that the results aren't as statistically significant as claimed.

Here's a read of some of the things they do out of legal obligation and other they do for selfish reasons and others for other reasons they believe are worthwhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Search_su...

compare an autocomplete search for sarah joeng, robert muller, or roger stone on google, ddg and bing and look at SSE results. Bing DDG show relevant political issues, Google is coy about those.