[could be considered an “in kind contribution” under federal election laws,]
IS an in kind contribution. Far exceeds $5,000.
I fact can comletely cripple a campaign.
Yep. From campaign contribution laws to “net neutrality” to court rulings about private property being a “town square” in which opposing points of view could not be discriminated against, to the original net neutrality executive order, there is a sound basis for introducing a nice hefty dose of federal regulation to prevent censorship by Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter, etc etc.
Alphabet is an illegal trust as defined by US law and should be broken up. Same with Amazon.
Facebook is just a dominant player in a niche market, and while they warrant scrutiny, especially as a “platform”, they have not otherwise violated any US law.
Facebook should not have platform immunity while also exercising editorial control.
Issue an order that as long as social media companies engage in censorship or content regulation they will no longer be considered neutral platforms and will be subject to libel laws like every other form of mass media.
You can be a neutral platform or you can edit/censor/shadowban - but you can’t be both at the same time. Make them choose, then katy bar the door.
So now we are in favor of Net Neutrality?
Good grief.
All to prop up some companies with the protection of the state, that people here are addicted to like some 15 year old teenage girl.
The term “Net Neutrality” has been misused and abused. I think as a matter of commerce, an Internet Service Provide and a ‘public’ forum, should provide services equally to everyone without regard to content so long as content is legal (e.g., first amendment). The ISP should not throttle my content or deny me access to otherwise legal content because they don’t like it. Likewise, if an ISP provides up to x GB bandwidth per day, hour, or month, then they should do so without regard to content and usage. Always irked me that many made this promise, then throttled continuous users, contrary to their terms. The ‘public’ forums are really no different than ISP today. Especially since they are also trying or are ISPs themselves. They should be held to the same standard. If it is legal, allow it. No bias filtering, etc. And for monetizing, they should be held financially and legally accountable for their monopolistic tactics of favoring and disfavoring content providers. It’s a topic needing comprehensive discussion but one that I think can be summed with Net Neutrality—as American companies, give equal access to all Americans so long as the content is legal. And foreigners, who cares? Block them, censor them, whatever. I don’t care what Google, for example, does in communist China so long as they do not do the same here. They should, company and employees, though, register as foreign agents. Let’s see how that affects their communist ties and activities.
Now just a cotton pickin’ minit here. Let’s be fair. “Net neutrality” was intended to simply regulate access speeds to the Internet, not to allow righttards to say whatever they want. Righttards should be allowed to be banned from platforms at the same speed that progressives are given access to those same platforms. Private forums can be regulated so that they don’t discriminate against the poor while they are discriminating against righttards.
Caveat: All just-a-cotton-pickin’ minit posts are inherently satirical and sarcastic. Sarc tabs would be as counterproductive to creating that effect as the players in Mid-summer Night’s Dream warning the audience that they are not a lion or not a wall.
How can an appeals court force an alphabet agency to reenact their own policy? That reeks of judicial tyrannism and no separation of powers.
The left loves socialism so much, how about have the Federal government set up the best search engine ever, have its search algorithms open source and the search api’s free for all us eager to consume developers. Have our military provide declassified sat photos near real time and great mapping.
Call it google.gov and search.gov.
Do the same for Facebook and Twitter.
Checkmate leftist dirtbag tech giants.
very interesting take on the situation, and one that could be troublesome for the monopolies.
They have this exactly a@@ backward— net neutrality would cinch total censorship in the control of the big techs. Anti-trust needs to break these up.
The purpose of net neutrality was to empower further censorship. This article is flawed, and influenced by socialist mumbo jumbo.
I bring this up constantly with NN supporters who usually somehow support censorship by the social media giants at the same time that if ISPs need to be regulated to protect free speech, social media does too and they never have an answer except to ignore or deflect.