Posted on 09/02/2018 7:43:16 AM PDT by PapaBear3625
Investor’s Business Daily charged in an editorial on Thursday that net neutrality advocates unintentionally “made the case” for regulating Google and Facebook.
This week a coalition of large tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, urged a U.S. appeals court to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rule.
The editorial board found regarding the agency’s Obama-era net neutrality, “Those 2015 rules were supposed to protect the ‘free and open’ internet by forbidding ISPs from, as the filing puts it, ‘engaging in discriminatory practices that limit consumer choice, competition, and innovation online.'”
The business publication noted that if one were to replace “Internet service provider” (ISP) with “Google, Facebook, etc.,” then “Google, Facebook, and the others end up making the case for imposing similar rules on their own businesses.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
[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.
Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980):
This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.[3] The Pruneyard case, therefore, raised the question of whether an implied right of free speech could arise under a state constitution without conflicting with the federal Constitution. In answering yes to that question, the Court rejected the shopping center's argument that California's broader free speech right amounted to a "taking" of the shopping center under federal constitutional law.And Facebook and Google are headquartered in California.
There was also a 1946 case from Alabama in which a company town tried to bar protestors and was prevented from doing so by the courts under similar logic ie “town square”.
There’s a good case to be made that Amazon, Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are monopolies (it’d be a much tougher case to argue that against Apple). The “town square” rationale is another. Net Neutrality and the reasoning behind it is another rational basis for introducing regulation that would prevent censoring any but clearly illegal speech like kiddie porn, terrorism or making terroristic threats.
We cannot allow a few tech giants to come to utterly dominate the internet - like the do now - gaining their current size with a relatively free libertarian ethos and then once they’ve gained dominance impose draconian Leftist censorship. That would be very harmful to democracy and free speech. These have essentially become media companies rather than mere conduits which had no editorial oversight and therefore need to be regulated as such.
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.
“We cannot allow a few tech giants to come to utterly dominate the internet”
Use an alternative.
I do. But then that is just me being proactive.
Read the article. The arguments that Google, Facebook, etc, made in their support of Net Neutrality can be used against them. But this is not about Net Neutrality as much as “in kind” political contributions (via favoring some viewpoints over others).
We’ve been down this road before. There are not effective alternatives. The barriers to entry due to network effects are too large.
“There are not effective alternatives.”
There are none that you want to use or gives you the same opportunity to get into flame wars with libs, and you just dont care to take the time to build those alternatives up.
“Effective” is a meaningless weasel word.
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.
There are no effective alternatives. Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc. are ‘public’ forums. You can go to GAB or some other porn supporting/welcoming site, but you have an audience of 0.000001 or less compared to Facebook. It is not the same, not even close. If you want to talk with and converse with the public, it is currently on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. And for search results, it is Google. Wish for it to be different all you want, but facts are facts.
“Wish for it to be different all you want, but facts are facts.”
The facts are that these companies now have idiots on the right looking to fuse a new love of soft nationalization with a completely bizarre idea of what “public” means in a absurd attempt to wrestle control of the operations of private services in the name of your apparently inalienable right to tweet, reblog, or otherwise engage in running flame wars online.
And you are willing to give these damn companies the protection and resources of the state to do that, instead of supporting alternatives and helping to push these companies out of prominence.
Like what will happen if Twitter goes out of business while it is considered an “essential utility”?
No one is suggesting giving them protection. But yes, we must insist on even, unbiased commerce. Beyond that, the marketplace can pick the winners and losers.
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.
There are none that have a meaningful market share. Maybe you think confining conservative thought to a small digital ghetto is a viable alternative. I don’t think that’s a remotely realistic alternative.
and yes, gab and vimeo and the like are tiny. They’re like gnats compared to giants like Twitter and Youtube. No, they would not suddenly experience some kind of explosive growth. They cannot effectively compete in their segments with the giants who got their first and entrenched themselves.
How can an appeals court force an alphabet agency to reenact their own policy? That reeks of judicial tyrannism and no separation of powers.
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