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Comment by stcroixx | Hacker News Reader

So the government will get to decide whose business is defined as a 'platform' before they enforce this requirement of maintaining an API suitable for 3rd party clients? Do they also decide what features are required to be in that API? I guess on a case by case basis?

Software in the pharma industry works kind of like this. That's why it can take months to years to make a tiny one line change to an application once it's been validated by the FDA.

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At some point a public company becomes an utility. I'd argue that Meta and Google are at this point, albeit for different reasons.

The specifics are obviously difficult to reason about, but the scale of network effects and/or amount of internet communities which only exist as facebook groups or whatsapp groups and would simply be gone if either stopped existing is... troubling.

At the point that a public company becomes a utility, why not nationalize it? The alternative being presented here is that private companies should be legislated and regulated into behaving in a particular way which is an incredibly inefficient way to manage a public good.

Honestly in practice I'm not sure there's much difference. A "nationalized" utility would still be regulated by legislation to behave "correctly" when operated by the executive branch. See e.g. USPS.

I think the difference between the USPS--which has laws preventing it from making a profit--and a US-based tech firm that profits by selling user data to advertisers would be a massive one.

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