51–58 of 58 posts
It's weird that there's so much talk about Google and Facebook being public utilities and no talk about ISPs, which obviously are public utilities and treat their customers like crap. I think Big Tech needs to shake up their lobbying division.
Google, Facebook and Twitter do.
It's weird that there's so much talk about Google and Facebook being public utilities and no talk about ISPs, which obviously are public utilities and treat their customers like crap. I think Big Tech needs to shake up their lobbying division.
ISP's don't ban you from using the internet for saying things they disagree with. Google, Facebook and Twitter do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ISPs can decide to arbitrarily block access to social media giants, or any other site, altogether. That is the bigger problem. How is that the _bigger_ problem? This is entirely theoretical. ISPs have not done anything like that yet because it doesn't make any sense for them to. Big tech, on the other hand, have shown that they are more than willing and able to destroy any platform they don't like. Big Tech has as…
One controls access to the internet. The other controls a subset of platforms on the internet. I know which one has more power.
To be clear, I think net neutrality is a good thing. I just think its unreasonable to be more concerned about a theoretical maybe-problem than an actual problem that we are facing.
Theoretically, Russia or China could launch a nuclear attack that permanently destroys the internet as we know it. That is a much larger issue, by your standards, than net neutrality. If someone proposed a new net neutrality bill, do you think it would be reasonable for the response to be "Yeah, but Russia has nuclear bombs. That's the real problem."?
As an aside, I'm really beginning to dislike titles for articles that have that dismissive tone of "This is my fact and I'm going to tell it to you". I know the reason they have to do this is that having a reasonable title won't get any clicks, but perhaps that's a sign I should just be disregarding places that are only looking for clicks in the first place. I think I'm going to mostly focus on smaller creators, sing…
> Actually, looking at the article itself, I'm surprised how little there is here. It comes in just under 900 characters, it fits in 4 tweets. You're wrong about this, by an order of magnitude. It's 8,640 characters. I can only guess that maybe you have some malfunction of an adblocker that cut yours off after the first paragraph?
I don't think Yost has any chance of successfully arguing that Google is a public utility, but it would be interesting if there was a public utility search engine. It seems obvious that search is something everyone needs, and perhaps if there was some legal right that the public utility had - for example, to index web pages without breaking copyright laws - then the public utility could actually reasonably compete with Google.
It's weird that there's so much talk about Google and Facebook being public utilities and no talk about ISPs, which obviously are public utilities and treat their customers like crap. I think Big Tech needs to shake up their lobbying division.
I guess you are from the US? Local loop unbundling [1] is a regulatory method to "utility-ize" ISPs by forcing the infrastructure owner (usually big telco companies) to allow competitors to use the infrastructure. Here in UK LLU seems to be working reasonably well, as least in terms of value for money. My Internet bill is 25 pounds (~35 dollars) per month and from chatting with my colleagues in the US, I'm under the…
It's basically impossible to compare that plan with a US plan without saying what you get for that price.
I just checked. In my area (inside California), pure internet plans range from $20/month for 50Mbps to $85/month for 1200Mbps.
That being said, it is popular to bundle with cable/voice along with internet.
They're not public utilities. They're a cartel.
Social media companies harm the public. Glad they finally admitted to this.
It's weird that there's so much talk about Google and Facebook being public utilities and no talk about ISPs, which obviously are public utilities and treat their customers like crap. I think Big Tech needs to shake up their lobbying division.
ISP's don't ban you from using the internet for saying things they disagree with. Google, Facebook and Twitter do.
Admittedly bans/refusals from IPSs are orders of magnitude more rare, but I find it disturbing that there there are no regulations or oversight to an ISP refusing or terminating service, when access to the internet is so fundamental to modern life, and to many people's livelihoods.
I can't do my job without high-speed internet access, but I either don't use, or can easily replace Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
To me there’s way more nuance than simply the question “is big tech a common carrier?” I don't really care if Google discriminates in its search results to provide a better user experience. If I don’t like that UX I can use another search engine. But what about Twitter? Twitter is not just discriminating in tweet search results, they deplatform Tweet authors and organizations (e.g. Unity 2020) on a whim and with no r…