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Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

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Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#191

Post by Const-me »

triceratops wrote: post #64
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social networks have nothing to do with infrastructure where as utilities and communications do Social network and communications have nothing to do with each-other? are you reading what you are writing? How is Facebook messenger call different from a phonecall of the 21st century?

I only have one or 2 choices of phone carriers with a high cost to switch. I have a multitude of alternatives to FB Messenger (which I don't even use) with very low cost to switch.

You can use any phone carrier you want, one of these two real ones, or one of the hundreds of VoIP providers. Regardless on your choice, you can still call the people you want, regardless on their carrier. The only difference is cost per minute, which is typically low cost to switch.

It's impossible to use an alternative messenger to communicate with people who use FB messenger. Unlike e-mail providers or phone operators, these newer web services don't have any interoperability, they're closed systems.

To switch from Facebook, a person gonna need to convince all people they communicate with to switch as well - to the same alternative messenger. That's very high cost to switch, borderline impossible to do for many people.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#192

Post by gamacodre »

anon291 wrote: post #153
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.5% of Americans could never log into Facebook, Twitter or anything ever again with no substantial impact on their daily lives. The remaining 0.5% have careers centered around social media and should probably find a real job. Honest to goodness, the hyperventilation about how "important" social media is just amazes me.

This is not true. You need a Facebook account to interact with a lot of businesses. Many businesses don't have normal websites for better or worse. Many government agencies announce things through Twitter and Facebook for better or worse (worse in my opinion).

And yet, with no functioning Facebook or Twitter account, I seem to have no problem finding businesses that sell the things I'm interested in. Most local issues of actual importance are still mentioned in the newspaper.

Facebook could get their databases and backups wiped tomorrow and I'm pretty sure nothing would substantively change in my life or my work (and I work in tech). Same goes for Twitter. I might be exposed to less second-hand stupidity on an average day.

I see lots of hand-wringing about them being somehow equivalent to power plants or water districts, but to me it seems like a tortuous justification for "make them act how I want them to act".

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#193

Post by starik36 »

user3939382 wrote: post #181
paxys wrote: post #113

When a state is against net neutrality, pro super PACs, pro hobby lobby/religious tests in employment, pro book banning in libraries, but wants to regulate social networks because "political freedom", their motivations are a bit suspect.

> pro book banning in libraries I've seen tons of recent support for censorship from ideas and speech the (left? I wouldn't consider it actually left) doesn't like. Then you have conservatives moving against these books that promote woke religion and suddenly these same people are very pro free speech.

The "shoe on the other foot" syndrome.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#194

Post by cowtools »

elil17 wrote: post #80
layer8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

>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.).

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#195

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

jrm4 wrote: post #143
paxys wrote: post #113

When a state is against net neutrality, pro super PACs, pro hobby lobby/religious tests in employment, pro book banning in libraries, but wants to regulate social networks because "political freedom", their motivations are a bit suspect.

No, but seriously, they're doing this stuff in such a sloppy way that I'd definitely be looking for opportunity, e.g. the wording of one of their anti-CRT things essentially said "no one can make someone else uncomfortable about race" and I'm like "word? I can work with that."

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#196

Post by starik36 »

bell-cot wrote: post #85

IANAL, and have not read Florida's law, but it sounds ripe for abuse by trolls: 1 - Become a political candidate (even if a write-in for some bottom-end office in a tiny municipality) 2 - Register with social networks as a Florida-protected candidate 3 - Spend all your time spewing hate at people you don't like. Maybe automate that, to get both far more spewing and far more free time.

As long as the speech is protected under the 1st amendment, it is irrelevant what they are "spewing".

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#197

Post by cowtools »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #60
layer8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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)

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#198

Post by Buttons840 »

They're doing it at the wrong layer. Make the internet a common carrier and maybe regulate AWS (etc) to ensure everyone can host their own websites somewhere.

How can social media be a common carrier when it cannot be accessed through a common carrier?

It feels like we're fighting to have our one sentence displayed among the ads, while giving up the ability to create our own webpages and platforms.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#199

Post by pclmulqdq »

sircastor wrote: post #162
anon291 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They punished Disney by not granting them self governing status. In my world, corporations being subject to the government is the Hallmark of progressivism. But no one's actually paying attention to the actual actions, just their own view of the motivation

The Disney properties were already self-governing. The Florida legislature revoked that in political retaliation, and passed the cost on to nearby counties.

As well as the potential revenue, which is immense. The city around Disney could introduce a small sales tax or raise property taxes and their anticipated shortfall would likely be fixed.

Re: Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

#200

Post by honkler »

nrb wrote: post #119
pessimizer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're biased against something, because they delete legal content.

Who cares that it’s legal though? You’re on their property, committed to abiding by their terms of service even. If you’re hosting a garden party and one of the guests has become disruptive to everyone else, are you not allowed to demand they cease their behavior or leave your property just because their angry ranting is not illegal speech? You’re totally within your right to say “I’m out, this party sucks anyway, yo…

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