That's where the cognitive dissonance here kicks in: the case for ISPs to be common-carriers looks much stronger (from any principled perspective) than does the case for social media networks.

And yet, because this is a party-political issue, you have the Republican Party swearing up and down that ISPs are not (presumably because common-carrier status implies net neutrality and this is unpopular with donors or something?) but that social networks are (because they exhibit "bias").

I think you'll find that if you talk with technically literate Republicans you'll find a lot of support for net neutrality.

Unfortunately, my party's base is made up of people who are not super into tech unlike the Democratic party whose base is increasingly rich tech workers.

On the other hand, my fellow Republicans do jobs you may think unimportant,like farming, plumbing, construction, etc.

Perhaps, when you think about it, democrat regulations of these professions are equally ridiculous when you look at it from the perspective of someone in these professions.

Half our political discord would be solved if we just thought of ourselves in the other person's shoes and listened instead of chocking it up to stupidity or malice.

Half of my conservative friends have no idea how the internet works. They don't understand the wires behind it. When you explain to them what's going on, they become more sympathetic to net neutrality. Perhaps try explaining instead of dismissing?

> jobs you may think unimportant,like farming, plumbing, construction,

> Perhaps try explaining instead of dismissing?

I've not dismissed his core concern about lack of net neutrality. In fact, i agree with him and encouraging him to not give up..

I'm not at all speaking about Republican voters; I'm talking about Republican politicians; sorry I didn't make that clear.

I agree that we should have both ISPs and major social networks as common carriers. Based on talking with Republican friends, I think the difference is that social networks are well-known censors. If Xfinity was known to censor as aggressively as Twitter and Facebook do, they would also be in favor of common carrier rules for them. But as it is, they're content to leave well enough alone.

Also services like Cloudflare, and email providers like GMail.

How is an email server a common carrier? People have been setting up email servers for decades and there are plenty of alternatives.

It is a common carrier by virtue of hosting many of the recipients you want to send email to.

That’s not what common Cartier means. If I set up my own mail server does it become a common carrier?

If you host the email of as many people as GMail, I'd say yes.

So let’s regulate all major email providers. Are you okay with giving the government that much power?

Yes, I'd be perfectly okay with that. Email is a general utility.

So if you set up a mail server should the government also be able to dictate what you do with it?

I agree, unless the alternative is to break apart the monopolies which I think is better.

It's unclear to me that email and CDNs are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated as common carriers

Look what happened to Kiwi Farms, and what happens to people who try to host their own outgoing SMTP server.

Something requiring decent scale is totally different than being a natural monopoly. There were plenty of DDoS protection options on the market. I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car, or DDoS protect my own website - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.

>Something requiring decent scale is totally different than being a natural monopoly. There were plenty of DDoS protection options on the market.

Is it? There were a few DDoS protection services on the market, but they seemingly all dropped KF, so what then? Is that not analogous to kicked out by every ISP?

>I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car [...] - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.

You probably can grow your own wheat or build your own car. But I like your definition of monopoly.

I would say that more generally, that a monopoly is any business that has insufficient competition to motivate them from abusing their stakeholders (including customers, workers, etc.).

Kiwi Farms is offline not because CloudFlare refuses to do business with them, but because everybody collectively refuses to do business with them. Otherwise they could just have gone to a competitor.

One can still find what happened to them chilling, but that doesn't make CloudFlare a "common carrier."

What happened to Kiwi Farms was that no-one wanted to do business with them from a risk-management and just general good-moral-fiber basis.

>What happened to Kiwi Farms was that no-one wanted to do business with them from a risk-management and just general good-moral-fiber basis.

While it's a somewhat different example and a bit reductive, I find this XKCD[0] to be relevant to the issues with Kiwi Farms.

I run several websites on my physical hardware and through the internet links for which I pay. I don't want (and won't allow) any speech on my private property that I don't wish to host or amplify.

If the government (as Florida's appears to wish to do) tries to tell me what content I must (or must not) publish (assuming it's protected speech under the First Amendment), not only won't I comply, I will scream bloody murder -- as it's a direct violation of the First Amendment -- because the government is involved.

What is it that strips other non-governmental entities of those same rights? Absolutely nothing.

Do I like much of the nastiness, trolling and disinformation that's out there? Nope. Which is another good reason (I abandoned the big "social media" companies nearly a decade ago because I objected to their business models) not to use the big "social media" players.

And whether you agree or disagree with those who do use such platforms, it's their choice to use them or not. Just as it's those (and every) platforms' right to host or not host any particular speech/expression.

I don't understand why technical folks don't understand this. If the government can force you to host speech you don't want to host on your own private property, then property rights are irrelevant.

As for the whole "common carrier" thing in relation to the big "social media" platforms, they don't have exclusive access to rights-of-way (e.g., last mile conduit for wired internet access, ownership of the cell towers, etc.). Setting up your own site is simple and cheap/free.

You have the right to free expression. You do not have a right to an audience.

If the big "social media" platforms (and/or platforms like Cloudflare, AWS, etc.) pull a 1357[0] on you, you do have recourse. Do it yourself. This isn't a complicated thing to understand, IMHO.

I'll say it again because I want to make it clear: I abandoned all the big "Social Media" platforms nearly a decade ago and find their practices and business models to be deeply offensive. What's more, I don't use Cloudflare or AWS or any other similar platforms.

So no, I'm not defending those corporations. At all. Rather, I'm defending the ideals of free expression.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1357/

The problem is that there are only a handful companies to do business with in the first place.

I think what you would expect in a sane market is that they are forced to negotiate a more expensive deal with the remaining service providers due to the supply/demand imbalance.

As there are so few service providers here, there's only a few levels of risk-tolerance/good-moral-fiber that you can negotiate on. Activists only need to push a site above the highest risk-tolerance level (which is unnaturally low due to this quantization)

I mean, yes and no. If you're loathsome enough, the asking price is going to be non-commercial for you, even in a perfect and infinitely deep market of providers.

I disagree, especially in the case of email, as someone who has done the onerous work of running a mail server. You are at a huge market disadvantage, both as a provider, and as a client, if you are not on gmail. Google preferences gmail hosted domains when it comes to spam filtering for email, and it makes a big difference as to whether or not an email can actually land in your inbox.

The way things are now, I can't ever in good conscious recommend any small or medium sized business own any part of the email infrastructure except the MX record, I've simply seen too many cases of the financial damage caused by not using gmail as a host.

Requiring all hosts to operate on a single, fair, well defined standard would be to the benefit of the people of the United States.

Also television channels and libraries. They are as much of a common carrier as a website is.

Which is to say, they are not at all.

Broadcast TV only exists because they license the public airwaves and the spectrum they use is of limited supply and is again a natural monopoly. Cable TV networks have no such restrictions.

Cloudflare is the last place I'd imagine it'd get political. Recent revelations were nothing short of shocking. Cloudflare is supposed to be strictly proxy and firewall, yet, they're bending over to a tiny group of activists.

SV corporations are spineless.