It’s not unprecedented to have different rules apply to private company passed a given reach.

We could see it the same way we see banks. Banks are private entities but tightly regulated and their activity is overseen by their operating country.

Applying a given set of restrictions and requiremnts to services used by more than 50% of the population for instance could be a thing.

In the US I know people would call bloody murder, but other countries could do with sensible rules of that kind.

One thing that really bothered me was how Australian ISPs handled censorship of the Christchurch shooting videos. They have started proactively blocking not just websites that hosted it, but also those that linked to it - even forums, where it was posted by the users, and the moderators have a general hands-off policy.

It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.

It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.

Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...

And just because your house is already hooked up to your electric utility doesn't mean you can't build your own generator and and source your own fuel! Clearly the utility should have near complete immunity and let an automated algorithm cut off your power indefinitely for vague, unspecified reasons.

We could have antitrust enforcement that prevents companies like Alphabet and Facebook from becoming so dominant in our society, but if we are going to have such dominant corporations, we cannot allow unbridled censorship of speach on their platforms without undermining a pillar of societal strength, prosperity, and happiness: the marketplace of ideas.