I think there ought to be a data/interface divide. Social media companies that service more than 50 million Americans should be subject to this divide. Therefore, split Facebook in twain: one of its halves shall be Face, which is the web UI we currently interact with; the other half shall be Book, more akin to a data utility provider.

The monopoly that Facebook, Google, etc. have is a monopoly over how their data is presented. Google is the only entity with access to the data that Google collates, etc.; except that this isn't data they generate. It's data they capture, pieces of the commons that they sequester from the commons.

Doesn't this still make tyranny where the data provider censors? At which point, the UI representation of the censored data doesn't matter.

That's an excellent question, and it really is something for all of us to think about. In the 1890's people understood monopolies in terms of products. One suggestion might be that information can also be monopolized. Any company that acts as the sole gatekeeper of information should be regulated. Ironically, monopoly over information is infinitely more dangerous than over products. Monopoly over words and ideas is the definition of thought control. We need to find an answer to this problem with the tech monopolies quickly or we are all in serious trouble, not just in the West, but in every country around the globe!!

I think we should handle social media like we do smoking. They must print a giant warning warning it's addictive and dangerous and they must pay for advertising campaigns against their product.

I suspect the reference to 1890 may be to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, one of the most popular books its time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward