| This is going too far. The Internet absolutely should be classified as a public utility, but the services on it should never be considered as such. Telephones are a public utility, but a conference room service is not. This is by design, because the conference room service isn't integral to having a telephone system, but having a telephone system is integral to having a conference room service. Likewise, the Internet is integral to accessing all of the sites that you visit, but all of the sites that you visit are not integral to the existence and continued functioning of the Internet. You're suggesting that once a privately owned website grows large enough, that the private entity controlling should lose control of the service they created. I am curious where you would draw the line. If Facebook and Twitter are Public Utilities, what about Reddit? What about that web forum you're running in AWS that just hit 10,000 active users? What about a popular personal blog with server-side comments? Classifying individual websites as public utilities was never the mission of net neutrality to begin with, and could actually be harmful. If such rules were to exist, all of the content-based censorship arguments against Facebook and Twitter for removing hate-speech from their platforms would be validated, because as public utilities these websites would have no right to moderate their own platforms anymore without government oversight. Furthermore, it would give our government control over social networks, as they are now a highly-regulated public utility. And how messy would it be for a website like Facebook to many any major change to their platform once such a rule took effect? By classifying it as a Public Utility, any feature Facebook added would be unable to be removed without a plausible argument that users were being robbed of utility. This would kill innovation, because why would any website implement a feature when doing so could result in immediate lawsuits, and the removal of such a feature once launched would be virtually impossible without legal consequences? |