Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people. I don't see how that can remain the case and democracy can survive when you need only a handful of sites to censor some topic.
It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse.
This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.
Progressive free speech? Megacorporarions cannot censor, but people on their lawn can? Everyone uses the "would you like it if you couldn't censor your local coffee shop from nazis" or whatever example, but that intentionally ignores power dynamics that can be accounted for. Censorship's moral hazard against democracy only really comes into play at scale, so we can provide protection accordingly.
> Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people
They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.
> They own the sites, not the people or their discourse.
They sure believe they own the people and they do own the discourse, sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it. And this is part of the problem--that they censor communications between willing participants.
We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.
The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.
Otherwise, one of these days, someone you don't approve of will get power over these companies and then it will be too late to regret it.
I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.
With great power should come great responsibility. I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
> sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it
This is obviously false. These companies might reserve limited rights to reshare or redisplay your content at their discretion, but it is 100% wrong to say they have "unlimited IP rights" to anything posted by users.
> We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.
Websites are not phone companies. The reason why phone companies are different is because they control finite physical resources which are fundamentally essential to the logistics of communication. If the 3 most popular phone companies collude to exclude you from the network, communication becomes nearly impossible. This is not true of websites which sit at a higher level of abstraction, if the 3 most popular websites banned you there would still be many millions of alternative websites and communication platforms available to you or you could create your own venue or platform which is just as capable (if not nearly as popular) as any of the alternatives.
> The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.
Why? Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights? Should the same rules apply to arbitrarily popular books, movies, tv, or radio? What is it about a website that makes you believe the creative control of a popular website's content and behavior should be abdicated to the government?
> I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.
I don't care about "nazis on the front lawn", I simply reject the idea that someone other than the owner of a website should be dictating what appears on a website, especially based on an arbitrary metric like popularity.
> I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
This characterization is just wrong. If you don't want your speech controlled by a cartel of billionaires then stop posting your speech to websites literally controlled by billionaires. It's very easy and very cheap to do and many people have been doing it for many years.
There are millions of alternative websites but behind those websites are a small number of infrastructure providers who can, and do, completely end a website's ability to operate. Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896051
The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else. The reality is that even though there are millions of websites out there, if one of them starts to become popular and becomes a locus of bad content, if the ~20 or so companies that control the Internet clamp down on them and there's very little they can do about it.
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights?
Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes? Law defines the boundaries of property rights. You can't start a tire fire in your backyard and expect your neighbors to just say "it's his property, nothing we can do."
> Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them
PayPal terminated thier account because they run a digital currency and could not satisfy PayPal's KYC inquiries. This is nothing new.
> The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else
So what? How do you think things should be different? I am personally ok with companies coordinating to shut out Nazis, tens of millions of people died to deafeat them and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to say "you know what, I don't want to do businesses with nazis". I understand the fear of a slippery-slope, but keep in mind that the slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a fallacy, and I see no evidence to suggest that this is actually a widespread problem, with the example of the dailystormer and like two others constantly reused to emphasize your point. If there is enough demand for Nazi website hosting, someone will fill the market need, same as with porn and other things some people don't like.
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes?
What are you talking about? Racial discrimination is illegal in the U.S regardless of how popular your restaurant is. Also, refusing to serve food to black people isn't the same thing as refusing to display nazi ideas on your website.
It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse.
This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.