[crunchlibrarian]

"Tech will always need to act in a quasi-governmental manner, making judgments on political speech and operating teams in parallel to the U.S. intelligence community,"

No, absolutely not Alex.

The fact that these massive tech monopolies are so powerful that it's now just taken for granted that they are pseudo-governmental entities should be a wake up call for everyone. It's high time we start talking about anti-trust and the breakup of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and maybe others. This is completely unacceptable.

Our laws are woefully out of date, they were written when the only foreseeable damage from companies this large and powerful was pricing abuse. The damage they have caused is far more extensive and severe than that, we need new laws and aggressive anit-trust/anti-monopoly stances to undo this damage, hopefully before it becomes too late to stop them at all.

[esotericn]

Indeed.

The fact that we've let online speech fall in to a narrow set of patterns defined by companies that are larger than some governments is completely ridiculous.

We need platforms that are controlled by users. And no, we don't need to wait for them before we kill the centralized data miners either. We survived before Facebook, we'll survive without it.