What makes the wire public infrastructure and facebook not? What would facebook have to do to become public infrastructure, or comcast have to do to become not?

Clearly not a definitive answer but some elements to think about:

Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.

Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.

Comcast can't do anything to no longer be public infrastructure. Rather, municipalities would have to rework their regulations to allow anyone that follows a defined process to install the same infrastructure that Comcast has.

Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.

That's an interesting perspective!

How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?

One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.

Is google fiber (which, afaik, was not contracted by the government) private infrastructure in your model then?

(Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)

I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself.

For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:

- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it

- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say

- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources

- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government

- who will be using the service

- is the service a government-allowed monopoly

- etc.

Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.

edit: formatting

You could compare it to the street vs a private hall - everyone has the right to walk on the street, but not to automatic admittance to private venues.

Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.

There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).