Hypothetical: current social media dominants become restricted by governments from expelling people based on their views, no matter how radical. Consequently their platforms become full of hateful propaganda by the kinds of groups that love freedom of speech for all the wrong reasons. As a response, I start up a new social media site that promises to keep people like that out, which I can do because I'm small enough to avoid the regulation. Within a year my social media site attains billions of users sick of dealing with Big Corp's platforms and their hate mobs. Unfortunately, now I'm big enough to be subject to the same regulation.

Is this actually what we want?

A federated network of social media services all with under 50 million users to avoid regulation? Sounds good to me.

Something tells me the government isn't going to be fooled when Facebook suddenly breaks up into 50 separate instances.

As long as there's operational independence and no bias for particular nodes, what's the issue with Facebook breaking itself up and federating the Baby Books with something like Mastodon?

Because the purpose of this law is to suppress the right of online platforms to moderate certain forms of speech, and to compel them to publish that speech against their will.

If Facebook or any other platform breaks up in order to avoid that, the government will just rewrite the law in such a way that it still includes them.

It's harder to regulate a bunch of protocols and distributed entities. Regardless of purpose, regulation which only kicks in at 50m users seems a solid incentive to force networks to remain under that size, and that seems socially beneficial to me after the past decade. Scale benefits distributors but destroys diversity.

If Facebook splits into 50 Baby Books, Zuckerberg's overall wealth likely increases, yet power is distributed. Ma Book could try to control the protocol, or a reference implementation, but they would need to do so in the open, and offer up transferable user data, which would mostly solve the issue with asymmetric access to "their" user data. Each Baby Book would need to compete on design, features, moderation/labeling/verification/filtering, branding, ad tools, etc. and that would be just fine.

In the past, traditional media companies had huge effects on discourse, yet where never considered to be a common carrier. Facebook has really done very little to police its network, and we see that viral news is polarizing people and risking the stability of the nation.

> Because they have such an influence on discourse.

So do newspapers, but you can't generally demand that a newspaper publishes your letter to the editor about how the illuminati are pushing people over the edge of the world, which is flat.

> ISPs aren't currently common carriers as far as I know

Strictly speaking, in the US, no, not at the moment. They were from 2015 to 2017.