Except they're wrong. There's no meaningful competitors to choose from. The big tech platforms - and arguably most SaaS software - are not commoditized. There's no competitor you can just switch to. This is mostly achieved through purposeful incompatibility, and all kinds of network effects.
> Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.
Exactly. But in winner-take-all markets, the two strongly correlate.
Because the government is supposed to enforce antitrust laws to make sure there is always a handful of private companies competing with each other, and taking different stances at various topics, so that the consumers could find the one that suits them.
Currently, if you want others online to hear your opinion, you need to rely on a very limited set of free-to-use services that have an increasing appetite in deciding what opinions should be heard. You cannot easily outcompete them, unless you can find billions of venture capital to subsidize your service until it grows large enough for the big advertisers (that are part of the same club) to consider it interesting.
I would say, if a private company doesn't directly charge its users for the services it renders, it should be treated as a government service.
Not really given most ISPs ToS, you’ll have to use a provider. Then what if this provider cuts you off, spin your own DC? What if you can’t get peering? How will you connect your DC?
If you effectively create a town square you shouldn’t be able to ban someone because you don’t like the ideas. How will others know these ideas even exist? (which is the point of censorship)
Is there no room for nuance here? Can't we support freedom of association without encouraging expanding levels of censorship?
The reason why big tech platforms have been moving towards more censorship isn't just out of natural inclinations, but directly due to people blaming those tech for allowing types of speech.
There are strong arguments, some of which the article puts forward, for the value of free flowing information. This doesn't mean we have to abrogate freedom of association, but it does mean that we should push back against censorship.
We could also limit freedom of association without abolishing it. (There are already laws restricting freedom of association to prevent discrimination against protected classes.)
> Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away.
It often is far more than "one click". If your email provider terminates your account, you'll have huge problems everywhere you signed up with that email. If your twitter account is revoked, you lose all your followers and history. If you have digital "purchases" on an account, you permanently lose access to them if the account is revoked.
There are all kinds of ways that a corporation, exerting their freedom of association, can have huge negative impacts on their users. The power imbalance here is sufficient to warrant concerns about abuse.
I don't think we should revoke freedom of association from tech companies, but I do think we need to create limitations on how they can exercise that right and provide checks and balances in that process. I am not certain what those limitations should be but I think that is the direction the discussion should move.
The explanation for this is the same explanation for why eminent domain exists. If you own a piece of land that will be in the middle of a busy road, in the US you likely can't construct that part of the road yourself and charge people or arbitrarily restrict people from using it - you likely will have to sell it to the US government.
I'm not trying to argue about if this is the ideal way to do things, but the more society views tech companies owning platforms like landowners owning parts of roads, the more government control.
Services and products on the internet however are not landowners. The reason eminent domain exists is because land is not fungible. Mailchimp however does not sit on mail-land. There is nothing that prevents dozens of mailchimp competitors to exist, offering whatever content policies people prefer. Google does not sit on search-land and somehow excludes anyone from building a search engine. Tech companies, in almost all cases, derive their value from the intellectual property that they built, not some sort of analog to land they stumbled upon. If that was the case we would be on MySpace.
I agree. But fungibility isn't a binary thing, it's a spectrum. And how society chooses to regulate goods and services also varies between extremes.
> Google does not sit on search-land and somehow excludes anyone from building a search engine.
Owning a piece of land that will be in the middle of the road doesn't mean the government can't build a different road right? Both google and the landowner just make it harder.
> Tech companies, in almost all cases, derive their value from the intellectual property that they built, not some sort of analog to land they stumbled upon. If that was the case we would be on MySpace.
Couldn't your arguments could be applied just as well against standard eminent domain? I feel like you are saying something analogous to: Most businesses derive their value from the goods and services they developed, not some sort of logo or piece of land they own. That's why the government shouldn't be able to take anyone's land.
Some people say allowing certain content is a statement of endorsement. "Silence is violence" and similar argumenents, but I disagree with that line of reasoning.
"Throwing shit at people and hoping it sticks" is something I do associate with accusations of racism to be honest.
Correct. They can do what they want. However, the title of the article is still correct.
Second is that platforms themselves now have massive political power. Twitter or FB can easily suppress any fact or opinion it does not like(see Twitter and Biden's crackhead of a son), it can also easily trade ability to suppress for political favours.
In a society as divided as US is right now it is inevitable that they take the 51% side to suppress the 49% side. Result will be a bloody a mess.
There is no solution to it either, shit is in full flight towards the proverbial fan.
Just to set some parameters here, you would be fine with, say, a landlord refusing to rent an apartment to a black person?
Not a lawyer, but I wonder if the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause give regulatory power to the government under the guise of promoting the general welfare. After all, this has been applied to commodities in the past, even when said commodities weren’t even used in trade/commerce.
In plain English, there’s precedent in the constitution and law for the government to regulate business if it promotes the general welfare.
There are a lot of things that "private entities" aren't allowed to do when doing business with the public in the United States.
They can't discriminate based on race, or religion, or national origin, or handicaps, or (in civilized areas) sexual orientation.
It wasn't always that way. At one time all of those things were perfectly legal. But we, as a society, after a great deal of argument (sometimes contentious) decided that they were wrong and changed the laws to prohibit those things.
We're having essentially the same arguments about online speech right now.
The problem is rather __who__ will regulate a __global company__, when infact companies like google arguably hold more political power than many smaller countries do.
It's very important to distinguish between the actual right you have, which is that nobody should be able to compel you to speak, or how to speak, which is a right that in this case Mailchimp has, and the complete reversal of this, namely forcing private entities to host the speech of others, and have the government coerce platforms on behalf of third parties.
The author wants nothing less than a complete reversal on how we treat association and speech on the grounds that in his perception, 'purple haired millenials' run a business in a way that he doesn't approve of.
It is far more obvious to me that there is an inherent right to choose whom you do business with and whom you don't than that there is an inherent right to have a single corporate entity employing unbounded numbers of employees and making unbounded amounts of money. The individual person can buy and sell on their own, without the government; the corporate entity only really works because it is recognized by the government.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that regulations are illegitimate. We do regulate, say, the individual farmer to make sure they're selling actual milk and not melamine. We do regulate the individual storekeeper to obligate them not to discriminate on race. But those regulations are all very measured and designed to solve specific problems (ultimately - protecting those who are even weaker than the individual businessperson).
Mailchimp is not some tech titan. They do not have more political power than any functional government. They are in no sense a monopoly in their industry, and they have exactly one industry, unlike the usual juggernauts that come up here. Calling them "Big Tech" is a clear example of the terrible slippery slope of adding regulations about obligating companies to do business vs. regulating their accrual of power, if that's the real problem.
Any regulation that would apply to Mailchimp would - if it's going to be effective - also have to apply to a startup that wants to be in the same industry. (It may not apply immediately, but it will certainly apply to the startup's medium-term goals, and thus affect its profitability.) If you just want to regulate Google and Facebook, I could almost believe that, but if "Big Tech" includes Mailchimp, who doesn't it include?
What we'll end up with is a system where anyone who wants to do business must have their business plan approved by Big Government, and where a professional specialization in complying with those regulations arises, and where there's a nice revolving door between implementing and enforcing them, and where Google continues to hold more political power than several countries and can engage in regulatory capture. It's hard to imagine that this aligns with the political desires of anyone except the current leadership at Big Tech. (Even the aspirational leadership of the next generation of Big Tech will find themselves shut out by this regulatory regime.)
Government is toothless and unmotivated to reign them in for the same revolving door issues you wrote about already happening today. The only thing that changes any of this will be whistle blowers and exposition from the inside of these companies. Then you have the issue of what media company will run that story? Think about how much the media rely on Twitter for “content” now.
I am skeptical of any positive changes for quite some time.
The actual key issue is somewhere in the middle of that article:
>"When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn’t misinformation, or taking action based on events that occur outside of their own platforms what they are doing, at its core, is adjudicating international law"
No, it isn't. It's a private company determining how and who it conducts business with. Being a 'patrician' of your own property is completely fine and in fact a basic right, and if you don't like Mailchimp's content policies, go to a competitor.
Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with, I don't want to read any essay length pieces any more about the Gulag archipelago, Orwell or how his friend being cancelled by Mailchimp is like being stuck in Soviet Russia.
And to preempt the inevitable "but they're so large!". This is not an indicator of anything. Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away. Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.