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.