Maybe not broken up but the point is something need to be done to reduce the power of these company. They are simply too powerful.

Maybe some policy to make it easy for some new company/startup to disturb/compete ?

Are they more powerful than the big oil companies? the big 3 financial companies? the military industrial complex?

Maybe or maybe not but nonetheless something need to be done to fix this silencing issue.

So because we already have big corrurpt megacorps in other industries, it's okay to have the same in Big Tech?

Big Tech and Media is not where we make our stand because all the other evil mega-corps are doing it too?

My hot take? I think they are, yes. Information is literally everything.

Well yeah: There can be 4 monopolies, monopolizing 4 different things.

The parent said they were too powerful and needed to be brought to heel; not that they were monopolies which needed to be broken up. I think this point has a lot of merit.

Circa 2017, liberals were arguing adamantly that Russia tampered with the presidential election by exploiting the curation algorithms that these companies employ--if we can believe that these algorithms are powerful enough that they can swing an election, why should we entrust that power to a handful of companies with tightly aligned interests (irrespective of whether or not they can secure their algorithms from outside tampering)? Why should we be content with this kind of hyper corporate oligarchy? To own the cons?

Note that "breaking the companies up" isn't the only way to bring them to heel. With respect to social networks, one interesting approach would be to decouple one's social network from the specific platform through which one accesses their social network by requiring social media companies to use open protocols that upstarts can equally implement. This would increase competition, including allowing non-ad-based platforms (with all of the inherent ethical issues associated with that business model) to compete with these companies. It would also prevent these companies from shutting down alternative interfaces that circumvent their tracking. Most importantly, the competition would weaken them to the point that they're still profitable but not a threat to our democracy.

I haven't considered this possibility well enough to say with any confidence that it's a particularly good solution, but it seems interesting and appealing from this distance.

Technically its 3 companies. Facebook owns instagram.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon.

Would we want to add Microsoft to the list now that we've removed Netflix?

Do you remember the court testimony where Zuckerburge avoided the entire question about if they collude with other companies to make these decisions on the backend?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXuk-WSDDRw

Apple may have banned Parler and then Google just decided to go with it, followed by AWS. However, it may also be equally valid they colluded via private channels to make this happen. BOTH ARE EQUALLY POSSIBLE.

Discovery in this kind of lawsuit may lead to the answers. If they did collude, that is a strong argument for anti-trust. Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.

It honestly doesn't matter what you believe about Parler's user contributions. That's the entire point of Section 230. From what I've seen they do make a good faith attempt to delete all illegal posts with direct calls to violence. Section 230 doesn't prevent Google/Apple/Amazon from being forced to have them as customers.

You are protected if you're a minority and a business refuses to give you service based on that status. Opinions and viewpoints aren't protected, and maybe they should be.

If you in any way praise this legal yet blatant corporate censorship because it fits your views, you will be next. We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a god damn free fall. If you don't see it, they will come for you next and no one will be there to speak for you.

I've been on the internet since it started and every forum I've been on has removed users and or posts for a wide range of reasons. Including just being rude, as hackernews does. So I don't really see this as any kind of "free fall". It is just the usual way of things.

It's not the usual way of things. They're not removing a few individually flagged post. FB is erasing massive numbers of communities, many just because they lean right. Reddit deleting over 2,000+ subreddits in the past year is just business as usual?

No, that's fucking targeted attacks against opinions they do not like. This is absolutely not business as usual. Everything about this is massive and it's morally reprehensible. It may not be illegal, but it's fucking wrong and insane.

It also shows that Big Tech is afraid. They're afraid and they're cowards. Regulating speech and language and blanket censorship are tools of authoritarians, not of people who believe in democracy and liberty.

Show me a single nation where censorship lead to a more free and open State.

>Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.

Citation please.

It was a ride range to indicate how large it is and meant to illustrate a point. You're asking for a fact is really just a way to say "I don't like your opinion so I'm going to challenge something that's obviously intended as a hyperbole" to discredit your statement in some arbitrary way.

Alright, AWS may not own 80% of the market, but let's be fair; it's fucking massive. On top of that Cloudflair has taken down websites before. DigitalOcean and DreamHost have removed people's hosting with less than 24 hours notice[0]. NameCheap and GoDaddy have both revoked peoples domains with less than 24 hours notice[1].

Initial searches seem to show AWS owns 50% of the market by themselves. You add in DO, Azure and GCE and that number quickly climbs[2].

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

[1]: https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/896935462622957573

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/08/02/amazon-...

Edit: Also the lawsuit itself also claims AWS has 1/3 of the hosting market.