Monopolies for the most part are not a good thing. In fact, I would say that 90% they are a bad thing. Monopoly busting is one of the few government actions that make sense and actually have been proven healthy for the people.
Those old enough will remember the dismemberment of MaBell and the doom prophecies foretold for telecommunications in the US. We were supposed to pay for our sins by having to use the Pony Express and carrier pigeons again if we wanted to communicate beyond shouting distance. But almost immediately, prices went down, savings appeared and the service did not suffer. Most people had one phone for the whole house because they were either very expensive. or you also could get a phone if you rented one from MaBell. That stupidity was removed and we were suddenly flooded with phones that worked and you could buy for about about 70% less that the monthly fee you paid to your local Bell company. Calling relatives long distance only happened once or twice a year during Holidays or when there was a dire emergency or death of a close relative. Telegrams in some cases were cheaper if you were willing to accept the hours’ delay. Families shared the same line! because it was a cheaper way to be connected, but again, anybody could listen in to your call. Oh yes, you were tethered to a wall. At best you could buy a very long extension chord to see if you could talk in another room. Mobile phones? That stuff was for the Rockefellers or Gettys.
Fast Forward to today and we have homes with multiple phones which can be used to call long distance without any extra charge, in some cases even free overseas calls. Hell you can send instant “telegrams” that will reach anybody in the world in seconds from the palm of your hand . And the phones now still do what a bank of computers at the Pentagon could not do back then and all while we carry it in our pockets anywhere we want to go.
But what is going on with Facebook and Twitter is more insidious. It is no longer a question of simply commerce but a direct attack on the Freedom of Information by controlling its flow. It is covering the mouth of a woman being raped so nobody can hear her screams for help just because she happens to be in your apartment and it is private property so you can decide what can be said or transmitted. It is disabling the fire alarm system in your business so people do not pull the switch in case of a fire till you (or a trusted fact-checking partner) makes sure that indeed there is a fire.
This is a concerted effort to directly affect the ability of people to make a decision on a news item by the suppression of information monopolies deem prejudicial to their bottom line. It is a direct attack on the health of an ailing Republic by people who can and will leave the country and buy themselves a dacha and immunity in a foreign land after the mess they helped create explodes everywhere. They will find soon afterward that neither the people they helped, nor the ones they screwed up, will have any kind of sympathy for them other than have them standing in front of the ballistically pockmarked wall in the back of some property.
Thanks Miguel, you present a viewpoint that only people from our generation or before lived through. The generations after us can’t appreciate our situation with regards to Twitter and Facebook without the prospectives you write about so well. With regards to our phone service today I sometimes forget how restricted communication was under Ma Bell’s thumb.
Personal insight.
The issue here is not the monopolies. Technically, there are alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc… The usage of those platforms is no where near as universal though. If you are in any way a public facing individual or organization, you cannot remain relevant without a Facebook page. No political candidate has a chance without posting to Facebook, no business will realistically go without a facebook page. Too easy to set up/maintain, and generally free.
However, the issue here is really about controlling content, instead of providing a medium for the content. The phone systems you mention had no control over what was said over their circuits. Everyone willing to pay for a line was able to say whatever they wanted, to whomever would listen. Unless the police showed up with a warrant, no one was deliberately listening in, controlling, or recording what was said.
The issue here is social media platforms have taken on the role of content monitoring and control. Posts critical of the President are ignored, regardless of how truthful they are or the violent message presented. But, say something tongue in cheek about feeding a leftist into a wood chipper feet first, and you get 30 days in Facebook jail. (hat tip to Larry Corriea).
When Twitter ignores multiple users that are sharing stories about Trumps illegally obtained tax returns, but deletes accounts if they share a story about Cokey Biden’s illegally obtained e-mails, there is a clear bias. No reasonable person would think there is no bias, no attempt to sway public opinion.
That is where the Federal government needs to step in and say NOPE… Not acceptable. You are OK as a transmitter of third party content, NOT OK as a controller of it.
I’d add to that:
FB, Twitter, et al. are so large and all encompassing that they’re essentially the only names in the game. The old argument of “well just make your own” doesn’t bode well anymore because they have enough money to buy you out and absorb it and/or financially kill it off through censorship on their platforms, thus limiting exposure to something new.
I argue that all the big tech platforms have become so large that they’ve become public utilities and can thus be regulated as such.
It’s almost as if they WANT to be regulated.
The bizarre thing is I see the occasional far left winger calling facebook/twitter ‘Nazi’ because they block the occasional post of theirs and dare let Trump speak.
My mother and her sister both worked for “The Telephone” company in a medium city in Wisconsin way back when. Through mom’s discussions of how they did long distance calling, I sort of figured out what they had for communications. They had a grand total of 3 T1 trunks. Each trunk could carry 24 phone calls at a time. So for a medium city there was a total of 72 long distance phone calls that could be running at the same time. But they had to reserve 3 of those “lines” for the operators to talk to each other.
So let’s look at this, at the time the population was about 8,500 people, 4 people per household on average giving 2100 families with one phone per family.
To handle that, the city had 4.32Mbits of bandwidth leaving the city.
The other day I was moving some data from one of my servers my desk top to do some work. It was only 73GB. I was grumpy because I was only getting 12Mbytes. That’s right, my personal bandwidth is 24 times greater than the city use to have. My “normal” bandwidth is 22MBytes/second, or just shy of twice as fast and around 45 times as much as that city had.
We are spoiled by the network connectivity we currently have. Our peerless leader is without internet and his complaint is that the phone keyboard is to small to blog from. Yet he burned through 2 to 4 GBytes of data in just a few days.
It isn’t uncommon in our household to have 3 different HD video streams running at the same time while I’m doing actual work moving large data sets.
More on topic:
When the first websites started to come on line which allowed comments, it quickly became apparent that the laws needed to change to protect the people that provided websites. When you started to look at deep pockets, you first found the datacenter that was providing the server, then the company that was managing the server, then the company that built the website, then the owner of the website, then the author of the article, and only then the author of a particular comment.
It was the case that websites were being shutdown because somebody would post a legally objectionable comment on an article and the data center would be at risk of being shutdown. This gave a great deal of power to those who commented.
There is an ongoing case from the Texas area. A bunch of 1st and 2nd amendment people showed up at a protest of the local police. And I do mean protest, not riot. A bunch of the people there started to live stream, with comments enabled. The police joined those live streams as individuals and posted addresses of members of the police department. The chief of police then was able to shutdown the protest and arrest many. Others they just “detained” and took their phones and cameras as “evidence.” all because the city had an ordnance against sharing addresses of officials/doxing officials.
The laws were changed to cover data centers, server management, site developers and all of that chain as “common carriers” and as such no more responsible for what was said in a comment than MaBell was responsible for what was said over the telephone.
And this allowed places like Facebook and Twitter to grow. They were protected from anything that was said on their platforms.
But this protection did not extend to publishers. I.e. if the NYT puts up an article that is slanderous or libelous they can be sued. They can’t be sued for something that is added as a comment to that article.
Facebook and twitter have, in my opinion, moved from common carrier to being a publisher. They did that when they started to examine and remove content from their platforms. As soon as that happened, they were putting their thumbs on the content and they became responsible for all content.
Today they are arguing that they are free to censor whatever they want on their platforms, and they do. But if they are arguing that, they are arguing that they are a publisher and should be treated as such.
The only way to “break up” Facebook and Twitter that I see is to some how set up competing Clients that connect to the same service sort of how IRC use to be. Then consumers could choose between their preferred Facebook like or Twitter like client but no matter what they choose they would all communicate.
Yea, but try substituting google. They are a complete monopoly. They need to be simply broken up. You can’t get away from them. That’s not a free market issue. You can’t tinker around the edges. Break them up or declare them a public utility.
For general use, I find duckduckgo is about as useful as Google.
The Big G has some specialty search advantages (e.g. scholar.google.com), admitted.
I think the better way is to repeal section 230 and let FB and Twitter find out what it’s like to be at the receiving end of thousands of lawsuits seeking to empty their very deep pockets.
This is why I don’t do any type of social media. If my friends want to talk to me, they can text, email, or call me. How hard is that? I’ve never had Facebook or MySpace, or Twitter, or anything like them, and I get along just fine.
Abandon social media!
The flip side of the publisher vs conduit argument is what happens when content, particularly comment threads, is unregulated. You tend to get enough trolls posting ad hominem garbage that the medium becomes borderline unusable. So, we’ve allowed the “platforms” to restrict that sort of content. Unfortunately, they’ve taken it as license to restrict whatever they please.
IMO, if the choice is between allowing totally obnoxious content and allowing publishers to masqerade as platforms, we’re far better off insisting that ANY regulation of content by the platform renders them a publisher. I’m sure various private-sector software solutions would crop up to filter content to the specifications of individual users, not unlike spam filtering today.
YMMV….