Letting facebook be part telco and part newspaper would make it the greatest propaganda machine in human history - one that is controlled by one person. Hopefully countries will start banning facebook outright soon.
Like a telco, Facebook allows people to communicate with one another without going through another intermediary. However, it's not one-to-one like your phone, it's one-to-many.
Like a newspaper the messages are broadcast out to everyone that's subscribed to receive them. However, there's limited editorial control by Facebook (except for content breaching their policies).
If we thought of Facebook as a glorified listserv with a pretty UI (and a bunch of tracking cookies and injected ads) would it still seem like it should be treated as a publisher?
The questions that matter are:
1. How is Facebook harming people?
2. How can we stop Facebook from harming people?
The difference with Zuckerberg is that he is so brazen about the conflict of interest. Goes to show that our antitrust laws are a joke and not taken seriously by anyone in the industry.
not gonna happen in the u.s. the u.s. government has 99% removed themselves from anti-trust deliberations. i suspect the government is deeply benefiting from facebook's data. in other words, they care about keeping it around.
and in many countries, facebook is the internet, consisting of both user facing applications and the backbone.
After living long time in a country where “ban it” is the answer to all the problems (drugs, child abuse, election interference, terrorism, name it) (USSR, and then recent Putin’s Russia) I’m deeply worried about western voters seriously consider banning the solution to all the problems.
If you don’t like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, just make another one, better, safer, fairer.
Split it if you consider it a monopoly. (I’d personally prefer Apple to stop advertising their streaming service using their devices).
Don’t open the door of government censorship. Once opened that door is very hard to close.