People using twitter or google or facebook are not clients because they aren't paying. The clients are the people who pay those companies for valuable information and advertising space.

That's not quite right. You pay your cable provider for television service. The cable provider pays networks for their content (the networks are the "suppliers" in this case). Some of those networks also collect payment from advertisers, but that advertising revenue probably wouldn't go to the cable company.

That explains all of the ads I see on GNU Emacs.

/s

I'm not sure of all the repercussions, but perhaps we can start with N at a large value, and slowly (over several decades) decrease it, and see what happens.

"Google? No, I technically work for Search Ad Services by Google."

Also, if you don't like what company X is doing, you just need to find N qualified people, and you can start your own X.

These companies could then be hired by the hospital itself.

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/e/eyler/426/coase1.pdf

What? No. The comment said nothing whatsoever about 'N'. GP's comment was exactly this, and nothing more:

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

Not explicitly, no. I drew an inference about what the GP commenter meant (or at least an obvious implication of what I think he meant). He's welcome to correct me if my inference was wrong.

Sure, but the question is whether any proposed change will be likely to make things better, or worse.

> I don't think there is a need to prove anything for every possible case.

Maybe not, but it doesn't look to me like you've even considered what fraction of cases would lead to a net benefit under your rule vs. the current rules.