Other than that, this is spot on. Conservatives have been happy to tell everyone to let the free market decide, only to cry foul when the market makes a decision they don’t like. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.
Also, it seems that these moves by tech companies are acting in unison (Apple, Google, Amazon) to the satisfaction of one political party (that just happens to have won 2 branches of the federal government).
It’s also possible that this truly just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Regardless, my general inclination with regard to these companies is that we should have a free market but break up any one that gets large enough such that getting kicked off presents a moral issue. VPS is highly commoditized, so I don’t really care that they got kicked off AWS, but Facebook and Twitter are a bit thornier.
If it isn’t then morally they should side with the party who is against violence.
If it isn’t then financially it is prudent to side with the side that will keep the advertiser dollars flowing. (Biden won 70% of the economy and the majority of the people, especially the wealthy and well educated)
I'm pretty sure our tax dollars fund DARPA. [+] A substantial portion of the technology we're talking about here was funded by Public money.
[++] So when making all these fine points about discretion of private companies regarding the use of their platforms, it must be remembered that none of FANGs would even exists without technology and both military contracted private and academic research that were funded by American taxpayers' money.
Taxpayer funding has no bearing on the commercialization of products down the road. It is not a special case of intellectual property...
Issue is not IP. Did I mention IP? There are extant congressional records of discussions in Congress regarding gifting this technology to "business" in service of the American public (one presumes). There is an implicit social contract at work here.
>Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
>The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.
There was no inaction. The inactivity was intentional. Things were going great. Bank balances were going up, everything was centralizing, everyone else putting off the difficulty of learning to actually make something and keep it free.
The last 4 years has injected more jade into my worldview than the rest of the years of my life combined.
Us on the left have been fucking telling everyone for years that these companies are dangerous but everyone else embraced them.
These companies yanked the plug on many leftist communities and dozens of social media networks for sex workers. To this day VISA and Mastercard don't allow payments to come in if the website is mainly sex related.
Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.