Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc.

But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their nest thermostats? What if they used smart locks on their office: could they just disable the "unlock" function on the doors?

Would anybody be supporting this?

No. Google is different. They hold a monopoly on search that I think should be broken up. I have big problems with the power Google wields in finding things online.

But, going back to my previous comment, it would in a way be a good thing if Google started capriciously "disappearing" sites like this, in a high-profile manner. It would accelerate the move to other search providers and bring a more diversified Internet to us all. (I'm not advocating for it, but the end result would probably be better than what we have now: SEO madness all to please The One Algorithm.)

Twitter has competition. Reddit, Facebook, Apple News, and traditional media outlets all disseminate information. They all offer notifications on your phone. Where we're typing this out is HN, which is another news dissemination and discussion service.

The more Twitter does things to make it clear it's not a neutral platform, the more other services can find users. I do not want Twitter to be a monopoly platform. Tagging them with some common-carrier-like status, while allowing them to remain private, just entrenches that monopoly.

The GP's Google example concerns thermostats, not search. Google doesn't have a thermostat monopoly. Is it therefore okay for Google to remotely deactivate the thermostats of people they've decided to dislike?

It isn't a very good comparison given that those thermostats/locks aren't free and it's unlikely Google wouldn't like someone because of how they are using their thermostat. In this case, twitter provides the account and the objections are to how the account is being used.

Just because Twitter doesn't debit your bank account doesn't mean their service is free. They're selling you to any buyer who's willing to pay, and it's a lot of buyers.

Just because these companies engage in fancy accounting doesn't mean we aren't consumers in a traditional sense and doesn't mean we waive rights consumers typically are given.

If they were just a thermostat company, then yeah. They could say “we don’t provide climate control services to the GOP”, or whatever. (Contact law covers how to handle refunds for devices already purchased, etc. I’m talking about the core issue of companies being able to choose their customers)

But, because they have a monopoly in search, they can abuse it to dictate terms in other sectors. That’s what I have a problem with.

It’s also a story we’ve seen recently, where some poor user gets their Google Cloud acct locked, and loses their YouTube videos as a result. Those stories are what convinced me that Google needs to be chopped up.

I wouldn't be surprised if they already block access to nest.com or related APIs for users either residing in, or with an IP locating them in a US-sanctioned country.

I'd not hold it against them if the government were forcing their hand.

> Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc.

It's all of these, except private. It's a privately run notification/messaging/authentication/identity/verification service. Just one that is widely used. That doesn't make it "public".

You're talking past each other. OP was framing Twitter as a "natural monopoly":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.

In this situation, the market is more efficient when the large incumbents are granted a highly-regulated monopoly status.

That's how power companies work. You don't have new power grids cropping up, but the main providers are held to much stricter standards that a normal private company in terms of their quality of service and how much they can charge.

If we allow mass-scale social media to continue existing, we need these sorts of strict regulatory standards. These companies have become mad with power, and there's no way to unseat them through ordinary competition.

No, that's not how power companies are other utilities work and that's not what a natural monopoly is.

A natural monopoly is one that arises due to the high costs of entering the market and other barriers to entry that make it difficult for competitors to establish a footing.

Utilities are natural monopolies because it is very expensive to place pipes, transmission lines, etc., over large geographic areas. Consequently, a company must either have large starting capital or the ability to grab a large enough portion of the market to pay for the costs of the initial infrastructure outlay.

The barrier to entry for the short form messaging market? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Any programmer can recreate the functional parts of Twitter in under a day, scaling aside. And there are already several Twitter competitors. They're simply not very popular because they're difficult to use.

Isn't that what I said? That the cost of entering the market of mass-scale social media companies is extremely high?

I wholeheartedly disagree that the cost is "nothing, nada, zilch". The network effects of having everybody using a couple of sites is what makes the cost of switching high, not the technical triviality of creating a new website.

No, that's not at all what you said.

The cost of entering the mass-scale social media market is basically zero, since you can do that in a day with minimal cost other than a domain name and a server (or VPS or AWS/Azure account or similar), and you can scale your costs as you grow, but your costs don't grow as fast as your customer base.

A natural monopoly's costs start high, and just scales from there. It costs tens of millions for a utility just to enter a small market, and with utilities, growing may actually increase their costs (see, for example, power and water utilities).

That isn't "mass-scale", because you don't have any users. Sorry, but I'm going to quote my original comment:

>The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.

So...that is what I said, that the barrier to entering the market is enormous.

No, the entire history of social media has been low-cost entrants capturing market share from existing giants.

I'm definitely dating myself here, but Livejournal, Blogger, Myspace, Frienster, DailyBooth, Friendfeed, Yikyak, Snap, Vine, were all once the dominant social media website before losing to new entrants.

Facebook was started in a college dorm room. Twitter launched as an employee's side project. Instagram began with two roommates sharing an apartment. WhatsApp began as one guy.

These success stories don’t prove that it’s feasible to create a widely used social network, just that it’s possible. And that’s a pretty obvious statement, seeing that widely used social networks exist at all. What’s important is how many failures are there?

There’s no physical issue preventing competition like with power companies, but to a social media startup, getting enough users is a similarly hard challenge as constructing a new power grid.

And you’re not actually a social network until you reach some critical mass of users. The cost of entering the market is low as you point out, but that doesn’t imply that you can realistically compete. So I think it’s fair to call social networks a natural monopoly. Even if they don’t strictly fit the definition they’re still monopolies in practice.

We cannot compare Twitter to the situation with power companies, because Twitter does not own the only copper wires that are routed to your address.

Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.

Not the case. 96% of americans have a cell phone: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

I'm talking about social media in its entirety, not a single provider of it. Twitter/Facebook/Whatsapp have billions of users and would be treated as a single class of service.

> Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

Yep, and they can also terminate your service for any reason they choose.

I don't think this is true, and even if it were it would be something everyone except literal fascists would oppose.

This isn't true in text, but national service providers very well could terminate someone for 'violating' their acceptable use policies and, unless they make a huge stink about it that gains state-wide or nation-wide attention, nobody's going to look too deep into why you were terminated. Maybe fining a small claims case could do something about it but I wouldn't count on it.

How about a world where corporations have regulations that serve the public?

> And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.

Okay. That doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.

The ISPs that allow you to even access Twitter at all are quite deliberately not regulated to this extent, so there's a lot of work to do before we can say that Twitter, of all things, is somehow a public utility without First Amendment rights.

How the "public" uses the service is irrelevant; the legal regulations are all based on what the service is.

Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.

Public usage is how regulations and legislation are determined. Making social media a public utility is the point of the discussion here.

No, use of public space (spectrum, running wires to homes) drives the regulation. If the wireless spectrum was unlimited, and power, tv, internet and phone lines didnt need to be run on public land to get to private homes, they wouldn't face anything like the regulation (nor be granted monopolies) like they are now.

> Your ISP and phone provider are private/non-state-owned entities too.

Even if we agree that they are the right comparators, there's a problem for using that pair as a reference for how online service providers should be treated, since phone providers have a strong neutrality mandate and ISPs have none, so it basically provides no guidance whatsoever.

Really because many government organizations have taken to twitter/social media to be the official (and in some cases only) method of public alerting and notifications around emergencies, school closing, traffic alerts, and a wide range other topics.

So if I am not allowed to access twitter, or banned from the platform then I am being banned from participating in my local government

So if it not a public service, then public organizations (like police, fire, schools, etc) should be barred from using the service

As someone who gets these notifications, and who never uses Twitter, I'm pretty sure this is not the case.

No, Twitter is equivalent to a store or restaurant that you can opt to enter, or opt to avoid. They're also within their general rights to disallow service to you.

They _run_ on public infrastructure, just like a store or restaurant. That should be available to all.

Twitter isn't critical infrastructure.....

The difference is that Twitter ostensibly believes the NY Post was posting misinformation to Twitter. They're not disabling an unrelated service just because they don't like the Post's politics. You can disagree with Twitter's take of course, but I don't think the analogy holds.

Hopefully the Post would have signed a contract with their smart lock supplier that would detail the circumstances where the supplier could disable that function.

If it's critical infrastructure, then it should be regulated. Right?

Well, then it has to be so also from a legal standpoint. Nationalize Twitter and Google, or declare them public utilities. Until then, they're totally free to do what they want. In my opinion they should have already shut down President Trump's account, regardless of the backlash they would receive. They could single-handedly eradicate a broadcast opportunity for the single person closer to a literal dictator the U.S. has ever had.

There are network and anti-trust concerns that make this problematic.

In the old days, if you thought newspapers were biased you could publish your own and it would sit on the newstand next to the other ones. That's how we got NY Post and the Daily News in NYC, etc.

But imagine if one newspaper had 100x the readership of the second one. And if it'd be impossible to start a new one because of network effects. The editor of that newspaper would have outsized power to affect elections and it would be considered threat to democracy. That's the case with Twitter.

Either Twitter stays 100% neutral, or we'll need to anti-trust the heck out of it to make sure there are a few Twitters to compete with each other (and represent different views).

We live in a world where Twitter is the place to get information about official government policy (US) or emergency alerts regarding life-or-death situations (NS). If Twitter were not a common infrastructure, it should have been downright illegal to use it like one, at least for government agencies and officials. That ship has sailed long ago. We might as well try to make sure everyone has unfettered access to Twitter. Because sometimes, the alternative is literally death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#Lack_...

No it isn't. Personally, I'm very up to date on what is going on in the world and I've never had a Twitter account and maybe go to the site once a month. Pretty much the only time I even see Twitter is when it's linked in news articles.

It's completely possible to get almost the exact same information you get from Twitter elsewhere. Even in the link you provided, it says that they used Twitter as well as Facebook to broadcast their message.

Twitter is not a utility. It's one of many news aggregators and it's completely possible to live without it.

What?

I have never used Twitter in any serious capacity.

There are plenty of ways to get all this information and thinking that Twitter is the de-facto place to get emergency life or death situation notifications is downright laughable.

As far as I can tell, I haven't gotten swept up by a tornado yet because I don't have Twitter to see severe storm alerts.

If your only source of news or alerts is a single service run by a corporation that isn't beholden to anyone but themselves, that's your problem.

Your NS example shows why Twitter isn't common infrastructure and wasn't an effective method for getting information out in life-or-death situations:

> .. many questions were raised about why Nova Scotia failed to use Alert Ready, Canada's mandatory emergency population warning system, to warn the public about the attacks but instead chose to use social media platforms Twitter and Facebook to provide updates, RCMP officials said they had been dealing with an unfolding situation and details were being updated frequently. However, the areas affected had poor cellular Internet service and were mostly populated by seniors who might not have used social media. Relatives of the victims pointed out that the use of Alert Ready could have saved lives.

I stopped using FB 8 years ago because the attention-seeking design was making me depressed, always wanting to check was was going on.

If we say that Twitter and FB are the places to get information about official government policy then 1) we need to let minors under the age of 13 have Twitter account (not allowed under the current ToS), 2) we need to have some way to ensure that personal information is not sent outside the country (currently allowed in the current ToS) or sold in any form - basically, the same protections as if you were to go to a government-hosted site - and 3) we need some way so people can see only essential government information, without advertising or viewing other sources designed around "engagement".

I don't think Twitter wants to take on this role.

Ok, what if the only grocery store in your town did it? Or the only gas station or the only doctor's office?

> Twitter is not a utility

It's effectively a utility.

I'd say one could fashion a reasonable criterion based on extent of use by anybody + extent of use by organizations + extent of use by news media. Beyond some level, a platform is a utility (albeit not necessarily defined by law to be one).

I'd disagree on the fact alone that the President of the United States essentially needs to use Twitter in order to communicate with the general public without his words being twisted by an EXTREMELY biased media. (Fox news isn't even 100% on his side)

Except platforms are the internet in any meaningful sense of the word. In the 80s people literally thought that when you and I wanted to exchange data over the net, I would connect to your computer or vice versa. Even setting aside centralization pressures resulting from economy of scale, NAT killed this by essentially making everyone's PC act as a client and never a server, at least without extra non-user friendly work

Projects like IPFS and urbit are trying to change this but the FAANG economy of scale combined with the sheer user friendliness of centralized platforms makes me very bearish

> "The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no longer some sort of vital communication platform"

The usage and network effects by the public is what determines the ubiquity and utility of the platform.

Just because it's served by private entities doesn't change the fact that social media is very much on the verge of becoming public utility. Twitter's own CEO claims that social media is a human right.

> Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure.

Great, then they should not be subject to section 230 protection, which protects them from liability from user-generated content. If they are a private publishing site, they should be entitled to all the privileges and responsibilities of such sites, as well established in the common law.

That makes zero sense; 230 wasn't written to be exclusive to utilities or common infrastructure. It has always applied to private publishing of third party content, so long as the content isn't editorialized by thr publisher.

Not everything that isn't a common carrier is a traditional publisher. Bars, for example.