It's worth noting that the Fairness Doctrine was applied to things like radio where you had to have a license, and which were more limited. It was not (at least after a couple court decisions) applied to other media like newspapers, which could operate without a license.
Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to operate. Anyone can establish their own website to counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-applicable to the various web platforms.
A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but would probably run into issues with compelled speech. Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
I agree that's worth noting, and I'm not suggesting a literal revival of the fairness doctrine, just noting that there are past precedents for regulating speech in the public interest. You're no doubt right that it would run into legal difficulty, and actually the corporatist supreme court would be expected, amusingly enough, to side with the illiberal left on this issue.
This is a canard though:
> Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
Anyone can make a website that no one reads, but not anyone can make a public square. As I said above, the alternatives are choked out by network effects, so the internet is not "pretty wide open" in any way that counts for public debate. It used to be, but that was before it consolidated into an oligopoly. That is why the public interest and free speech questions necessarily shift to these platforms. In the world we now live in, it's distracting to offer the prospect of "anyone can make a website" as if it were a realistic alternative.
It's not a canard, it's well-founded by examining precedent. The courts already decided that compelled speech (the Fairness Doctrine) didn't make sense without scarcity of a medium or difficulty to publish through the medium. The precedent is that newspapers (which is a harder field to enter into than starting a website) couldn't be compelled under the Fairness Doctrine because it wasn't licensed and was wide open. That's absolutely not a canard here (do you know what that word means?).
Starting up a website is even easier than publishing a newspaper so it would be very bizarre for that precedent to somehow not be applied in this instance.
Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to operate. Anyone can establish their own website to counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-applicable to the various web platforms.
A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but would probably run into issues with compelled speech. Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.