> the problem there lies in the market power of the monopolies, not their speech.

So if there were 50 companies, and all of them censored you for saying something really unpopular, would things be any better?

Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.

Critical infrastructure has never been regarded as a public platform.

No one has been prevented from buying their own internet connection or DNS names and running their own site over the "common carrier" status internet backbone infrastructure.

It's just a lot less useful when your goal is radicalization and you need to hit the widest possible audience to get conversions.

Is that guaranteed? Parler has found that the machines their code ran on could be taken away for having bad opinions. I'm not a defender of fascists, if anything I lean towards being happy when their megaphone is taken away, even when they receive the occasional punch, but the precedent this has set with the power of these companies is frightening for anyone.

What if Amazon will refuse to do with business with people who support unions next? It no longer seems impossible to ke.

Amazon contracts haven't changed, they always have had the right to drop you for any reason.

Amazon is not a common carrier: the cloud, other people's data centers, have no legal requirement to be neutral about what runs on them (and it's not even clear how this would work given the difference between compute and communications).

First of all, there is a difference between current law (which means that what AWS did with Parler is indeed perfectly legal) and a theoretical "perfectly fair" law, which is essentially what people mean when they say such and such should/should not be legal.

Secondly, there are limits even in current law on what grounds a business can refuse to do business. For example, Amazon could not refuse to do business with someone because of their skin color, or because of their religion. Extending this in more of a free speech direction (where companies could be prevented from refusing to do business with organizations whose message they do not condone) is not unthinkable (though there are pros and cons).

>Critical infrastructure must be legally protected from censorship and (private, mandate-less) eavesdropping. Whether it is run by a monopoly or many small companies is immaterial.

Well said.

What we have today is an oligopoly on speech by a small handful of ideologically identical technotyrants who have managed to circumvent the first amendment without ever having had to so much as introduce a bill to Congress.

If this keeps going it isn't going to end well.

I agree but this is mostly a different problem: our definition of "critical infrastructure" is outdated, especially in law.

AT&T is regulated as a common carrier and there are federal laws that prevent them from discriminating against their customers. I don't think classifying Twitter and Facebook as common carriers would work out very well for those companies, and I'd imagine they don't want that either.

Maybe there is a different set of regulations that could be applied to those platforms beyond something like Section 230. But the side effects of that could cause serious damage to those companies, depending on how the regulation was crafted.