This doesn't really work in practice though. For most people they keep their head down and hope that nobody finds fault with them, because everything is filled with so many rules and gotchas that you're almost guaranteed to be breaking some of them. You're supposed to follow rules that you don't even know. And this is considered fine by society, because as long as you keep your head down you're not going to be bothered.
The internet is the way it is because people in the real world are the way they are. When a real world business bans you on a technicality you don't really have recourse either.
It depends. In the EU, a bank account is deemed a right, as an essential utility.
If a bank bans a customer on a technicality, it could be construed as breaking this obligation.
Whether or not something like that could apply to something like an email address, however, is another question.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
But there are vanishingly few real world businesses that have the kind of editorial power Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have over what information people consume. The only other industry with that sort of power is the news industry. And they (at least used to) have very strict legal codes and professional ethical codes which hold them accountable to society. It’s not ok for journalists to slander people or give bogus medical advice. But somehow we think it’s fine if a witch hunt is trending on Twitter, or YouTube patiently convinces people that the earth is flat, or vaccines don’t work.
You can talk all you want about the sovereignty of businesses and I get it. The problem is, when those businesses are so big and form such an essential part of how people connect in society, we (society) collectively depend on those businesses to be responsible actors.
Not all governance is bad governance. Where did you get the idea that governments can only ever be part of the problem? There are plenty of people doing good work in the US government at every level. And plenty of world governments that work well. And plenty of historical examples of fantastic US public policy measures - like the space program.
And if government isn’t working properly, you think digital feudalism would work better? A world some rogue AI at Google is able to shut off your online life because they don’t like the contents of your email or Google docs. So they brick your gadgets and shut you off from the world. With no recourse or human appeal process. No thanks!
Recently I've been thinking along the lines that the bigger a company (or the larger their ability to influence, discriminate, and in doing so screw individuals over), the greater their social responsibility (roughly: provide the service they've set out to provide without discriminating and unjustly taking action against individuals any more than is necessary to prevent immediate harm & abuse).
That small mom & pop store? Sure, kick me out and ban me if you don't like the shade of my mask or my manner of speech; I will look for another place to shop. The two big chains that own virtually every grocery store and supermarket in town? Well it's going to be very inconvenient for individuals to be rejected by these behemoths.
Private or not shouldn't matter, there are many companies who have huge potential to mess with your ability to live a normal life and participate in society and do all the things that other people can do.
And I really think this social responsibility should extend to all services, not just ones that the customer pays money for. So deep pockets and the ability to offer lucrative free services that largely displace competition shouldn't relieve a company of their responsibility. If anything, these seem to give them immense power and huge potential to screw people over.
The internet and online platforms are important but still just a part of the issue.. which is that corporations take over our cities and lives but have essentially no obligation to serve you.
That conversation is where things get muddled up.
Now we are in a much weirder situation where services to use the utility are provided by companies you don't have a direct utility provider relationship with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a new thing that doesn't follow the traditional "rules" and analogy models of traditional utilities. If you have electrical problems you call your energy company. If you have telephone problems you call your phone company. If you have internet problems you can't just call your ISP to fix them.
I think a lot of these growing pains with "is the internet a utility?" and "is email a utility?" and "is Facebook a utility?" are happening precisely because we've passed a boundary of what "utility" means both governmentally and culturally. When your ISP was your email provider, the government had power to regulate it is a utility service: if your ISP didn't support things that kept you safe the government in theory could mandate it as a part of the limited regional monopoly rights granted to an ISP. When Google is your email provider the government has no such rights, and yet Google has far and away de facto become much of a "regional monopoly" for email than was ever expected to possible pre-internet. A lot of the specifics of Facebook weren't exactly on the radar as 1990s internet services, but suddenly for many people are required services with monopolistic lockdown.
There aren't easy answers here. We've passed beyond the 20th Century definitions of "utility". We probably need a new vocabulary for all of this. We probably need to collectively "sit down" and establish what all our new boundaries are, what powers we expect corporations to have over our lives, and which we expect to return to governments (as regulatory powers), and which we expect to collectively need to disrupt (through existing monopoly laws and trust busting exercises). Unfortunately no easy answers, just a lot of work to do that we'll probably collectively continue to procrastinate.
And remember, the maximum engagement one can possibly get is the open warfare. Facebook has been a tool of war propaganda, too, Zuckerberg is all for it if he can display some ads to the participants, last I've heard.
After the frontier era came the company towns and the large independent communities... Then, eventually, government incorporation and legal control.
I’m using COVID as an excuse to move away and start drawing down my involvement with all of it. I spent years trying to work my way into one of the few tech companies I considered at least nominally not trying to ruin the world for money but that’s not even enough.
We have built a dystopia, and short of finding a way to dismantle it that still lets me pay the rent and eat and not resign myself to a cat food retirement, I just want to get as far away from it as possible.
If you're set on getting out of the SV bubble, look around for needs in regenerative agriculture, or even carbon offset projects that need real estate to operate. If I had a different family situation, that's what I would be doing.
You’re free to label that histrionics, but I’m the one who has to face myself in the mirror.
For me it wasn’t just tech though; its all of corporate America. I just can’t take the lack of humanity, empathy, kindness. Nor can I take the useless work, endless, pointless posturing, forced “fun” activities, and the general dishonesty.
I weep for what we’ve done and the awful future that awaits. All this is probably histrionic too. But like you, I’d rather be able to look myself in the mirror, and get a good nights sleep.
In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments, councils and countries we form part of in a participatory process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or get involved in the local political process. As a society we spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do.
On the Internet, we absconded from our collective responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around creating “free” services. You don’t want to pay for infrastructure? No problem. We’ll cover the bill, so long as you don’t mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you directly. Don’t like the spaces we created? We’ll aim some of the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don’t live in the US? We don’t care. We’re in charge and we’re enforcing American “decency” standards on everyone. Don’t like the feudal empire we built? You’re welcome to delete your account and banish yourself from our society. If we don’t do that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other feudalist corporate empires down the road.
We’re all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around us. We’re paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has created in a desperate attempt to maximise “engagement”. All so we can show more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society crumbles in the process.
We’re kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising shareholder value is held in higher regard than our responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children. Help us all, but we need to do better than this.