> Personally I agree with the ACLU position on this, but also believe that privately owned publishing platforms should be free to establish their own policies on what they will or will not carry. That's their right as private entities.
Are you opposed to net neutrality, then? If not, why the different standard for ISPs vs other tech oligopolies?
Not OP, but I think publishing platforms should be able to decide policies who to carry, infrastructure companies on the other hand should at most differentiate by usage patterns, never by ideology.
I count ISPs clearly in the infrastructure category, same with cloudflare, domain providers and AWS.
Personally, I think there is a difference between publishing companies that develop their own content and social media companies that only provide a mechanism for others to communicate.
I'd count the latter among the infrastructure companies.
I wouldn't. Even just the design of the tools they provide to facilitate communication influence what content can be created and how it is created. How can Facebook be a common carrier when it has age restrictions on accounts and makes choices about what languages and scripts it supports? If it were a common carrier, it would be unable to filter or limit the dustribution of pornography, for example. Should the be coerced by legislation to drop all such restrictions? If they should then what about private forums and bulletin boards? They provide essentially the same kinds of service? I just don't see how that approach is at all tennable.
Every platform limits the content based on the design of the tools. Being a common carrier wouldn't mean Facebook would be forced to support particular scripts any more than the phone company was required to develop video calls.
If there are some restrictions we want as a society, like age or porn, those could be made exceptions.
Regarding private forums, I'd distinguish between forums that seek to serve 99% of people and those that serve less than 1%. The first are public; the latter are private.
Facebook is just the last platform in a stack of platforms people use to communicate. Why would Facebook be allowed to restrict content while those who provide the services Facebook is built on wouldn't?
I already explained exactly why. They already have responsibility for the content on their platform simply due to the nature and design of the platform.
That's completely beside the point. They are required to do that by law, in exactly the same way that the phone company can be required by law to cut of service or trace calls by the law or the courts. Its got nothing to do with common carrier status, which is about the discretion of the company not the government.
I'm in favour of net neutrality, and believe that ISPs should be common carriers just like phone companies. Physical infrastructure should be covered by common carrier rules as not discriminate (in the broad sense) between content. Maybe content types, for efficiency purposes, but not the content itself.
Publishing platforms explicitly manage content. They provide tools to create, edit, transform and manage content. They provide facilities to control content distribution and subscription. That's clearly a different class of service. You can't reasonably argue that a service that actually facilitates the creation and routing of content can't influence what content is created or routed. They already do so explicitly in their choice and design of tooling.
ISPs also "facilitate the creation and routing of content". We just don't think of them that way because they exist at a lower layer and we don't directly interact with them. Instead, services like Facebook use the services ISPs provide.
Thats some pretty contorted reasoning. ISPs only carry content after it has been created and they do not route traffic based on it's data payload, only it's addressing metadata set by the sender. The protocols they implement were specifically designed not to care about the data payload and just do what the sender told them to do regarding addressing and delivery. Internet users rely on them to do what they are supposed to do, as clearly laid down in the protocol specifications.
Various social networks use 'relevance' metrics, keywords in the text, timeliness and all sorts of criteria to choose how to distribute or sort and highlight content and they change these algorithms over time. They are part of the value the service provides and clearly their responsibility.
Are you opposed to net neutrality, then? If not, why the different standard for ISPs vs other tech oligopolies?