What core principles have been lost? If you want to argue Twitter is a public space where public figures should be able to say whatever they want, I'm going to argue your front lawn is too.
America is fully subservient to corporations. Out rights end at their doorways, including freedom of assembly and speech.
To say social media is an exception because it applies rules equally to previously exempt demographics is a joke.
Nope. I just thought the analogy was quite bad.
Similarly, let us imagine that your garden is your own private property and you can ask individuals to leave your BBQ for whatever whimsical reason you choose.
You can open Twitter to the public, just as you can open your BBQ to the public.
Protesting on a front lawn is not a problem because of what is said, it’s a problem because they are trespassing.
Good luck protesting on lawns, try not to get bitten by a dog, arrested, or worse.
There is one Twitter. Losing access to Twitter, YouTube, etc. looks like losing access to a utility to me.
And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense. One could just as easily say "ISPs are not utilities or monopolies, you can start your own intranet easily with OSS!"
> And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense.
Apparently it is - Trump started his very own, just like that. didn't even take that long.
Not everyone got a free newspaper in the 1800s. The political leaders of the day had various newspapers that were favorable.
The fact and point remains: it's easy to start a social network. Just because it is unpopular/fails doesn't mean it is equivalent to a utility.
But the real defining characteristic that makes an ISP a public utility is that the utility (in the sense of "usefulness") of the internet is strongly bound to its uniqueness, just like the phone system or the road network. Phones and roads and the internet become inherently less useful if there is more than one network. Videos do not become less useful if you have to get some of them from one provider and others from another.
That is not true, though. Self-publishing video on my personal site has effectively no utility compared to publishing it on YouTube. For my job (and the job of, thousands? millions?), it is the only game in town.
An ISP comparison would be hosting my personal site on The Internet vs. a splinternet.
This statement is false. There are plenty of websites that self publish video and receive utility for it.
Just because your unpopular video on your unpopular website doesn't get utility, doesn't mean others don't. On top of that, plenty of videos posted on YouTube also get no utility.
This is a "0.001 is technically greater than 0" argument that could be made for ISPs as well. Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
> Do you accept that there are thousands/millions of people who rely on access to YT to support themselves, and have an income dependent on that site that would vanish if they were expelled from it?
Do you accept that all of these content creators signed an agreement to use YouTube's platform, which is a private entity? If the agreement is illegal then it is a civil matter and they have remedy - the court system. This isn't a matter of free speech.
Do you accept that users sign an agreement with their ISP, also a private entity? Why should the ISP, a private entity, not be able to censor traffic for which it provides the infrastructure? Because it (like social media) has few competitors?
The usefulness of public utilities is measured relative to consumers, not producers. You have a right to publish. You do not have a right to monetize. You don't even have a right to an audience. All you have a right to is a potential audience. If someone wants to watch your self-published video, they can.
The problem is not the YT is a utility, the problem is that YT is owned by Google and Google has an effective monopoly on on-line advertising.
There are plenty of places to publish videos. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, etc. So it is obviously not scarce or difficult to do, with that many players. So it fails that definition of a utility, it's not scarce, nor difficult to implement.
Is it necessary? I don't think so. What basic necessities does Twitter provide?
Access to the internet is also not currently a public utility. And yet, some seem to be fine with government censoring speech via one of these non-public-utilities and not okay with it through another.
My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water? The utility argument just doesn't make sense. Perhaps you're thinking more of the "public square" argument.
> My point is that there is no reason good reason to treat them differently. There are bad reasons to treat them differently, though, which are covered extensively on this page and mostly due to our conditioning by gov and ISPs alike.
I see many reasons to treat utilities different than YouTube, and I also see no reason why YouTube should be treated like them.
There are too many private remedies available. On top of that, the government should not be forcing any private entity to moderate a certain way, this sets an extremely dangerous precedent, and will certainly be abused. I should be able to moderate my blog how I choose.
> Why is YouTube equivalent to Electricity/Water?
This is not the comparison I am making. I am comparing YouTube to ISPs and claiming that arguments for or against censorship in the former could also apply to the latter.