The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?

That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes.

On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments.

Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.

>The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.

As one example, France has generous tax deductions that effectively triple the value of your contribution for places like Framasoft, although it's not necessarily targeted just at free software.

I completely agree with you in the abstract, but I worry primarily about this chain of causality:

Network effects -> market forces -> political will

I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.

It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.

_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.

Longer conversation than I'm willing to go into here, and I assume that you already know this anyway, but this is a point that Cory Doctorow pushes a lot. His take is that sites like Facebook in particular got where they are because they were able to scrape and remotely manage other sites, and that after they rose to dominance (among other things like buying competitors) they also pushed to shut down a lot of those systems and make it harder to do what they did.

I'm interested in seeing how EU legislation works out here. I tend to sometimes be relatively skeptical about EU legislation because I think the final results tend to miss the mark or get compromised or have side-effects, but I have seen a lot of people that I respect a lot say that this legislation is good, so I'm really curious to see what happens with it.

I don't personally think that network effects are the only thing that's factoring into current tech dominance -- my evidence for that is that Facebook has had to buy competitors before, and I don't think they would have felt that threat if they were confident in network effects alone to save them. I've also gone through enough internal emails from the various leaks from Facebook to where I can see some the anti-competitive strategies they tried that (in my mind) were in a very different category than just locking down an API. But network effects are certainly an important part of the puzzle, and even ignoring the market, having more user agency to remotely control accounts and build/use their own clients for services is (in my opinion) a really important part of individual freedom, so I'm all for improvements in that area.

And highly agreed, the problem with Facebook is not that people want to talk to friends and family. I don't think that people's instincts to be connected to each other should be treated as something that's unreasonable or bad.

I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.

I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves.

Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect.

On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower.

And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides.

My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws.

The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).