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Re:Tech and Antitrust by tracker1 on Monday June 10, 2019 @02:54PM (#20149618)
I don't think that breaking them up is entirely necessary. Classifying them as public spaces in private ownership and extending similar freedoms from government to these large social media companies seems like a relatively reasonable approach. As to the counter argument that they are "private companies," corporations and companies exist because of the government. The positions allow for not only group ownership, but also for such limited liability that companies can collectively kill thousands and not be killed themselves. This can and should be offset by limited capability in scenarios where a corporation may have an unnatural leverage against competition.

I tend to be very libertarian leaning, but corporations are not individuals, nor are they held to the same standards, and as such shouldn't be allowed the same freedoms. Restricting business is natural, and civil rights laws have already made business owners do what they might otherwise not want to.

Extending freedom of speech rights enforcement to organizations with over 10m members or managing over 5b/year in revenue is not unreasonable. They already have platform protections.

Re:Tech and Antitrust by gfodor on Monday June 10, 2019 @04:54PM (#20150748)
I agree -- in fact, I'd argue that attacking the problems of social media through the lens of antitrust will result in a far worse outcome than directly addressing the problem head on that these companies have created a privately owned, global public square. The laws need to be updated to reflect the novel realities of the emergence of these platforms, which was likely an inevitability given the arc of the development of the Internet/web, and not something our forefathers could have forecasted when writing applicable laws and regulation around speech.