| If you're looking for an alternative take, check out some of Cory Doctorow's writing on this. His position is that forcing platform neutrality is less important when platforms don't have a monopoly over communication. Different people have come up with different plans about how you could address tech monopolies, with varying degrees of extremity: - Splitting up companies that control entire vertical slices of a market. Warren in particular was campaigning pretty hard on this, especially in regards to Amazon/Apple app stores. - Forcing companies to allow data exports by consumers, and specifically to allow automated data exports. For example, Facebook would need to allow you to access an API to pull your data, so you could plug that API into a competitor instead of manually downloading everything. - Weakening Computer Fraud and Abuse laws around site scraping and adversarial interoperability. - Adding additional exceptions to the DMCA around interoperability. For example, allowing companies to break Kindle DRM for the purpose of moving books to a competing service if Amazon didn't provide a way for them to migrate books on its own. - Forcing certain data formats to be standardized, or requiring standardized API layers on top of services. There's a lot of debate in those areas about how far is too far, and what counts as a natural monopoly, and what negative side effects might exist for particular strategies. But, the thread running through all of them is that Section 230 is fine, awesome even. There's no need to get rid of it, 99% of the time we want moderation on most of our platforms. Platform censorship is really only a problem when consumers don't have the ability to easily switch platforms/hosts, and in that case we should break the monopolies, not the Right to Filter[0]. You see people complain about censorship on Twitter, you don't see as many people complain about censorship on Mastodon, because on Mastodon you can set up your own server if you really need to. One of the biggest points of federated services is to allow communities to choose how aggressive they want to be about moderation. [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter |
- splitting up: seems like a temporary fix at best (see ma bell).
- data exports: exporting is nice, but... then what? the network is still a network.
- weakening CFAA/DMCA and allowing scraping/interop: It'd be a terrible hacky world, but I could imagine it working. Probably would end up looking like a weird inverted version of the Wuph! bit from The Office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WUPHF.com So not a good solution but maybe actually a solution. Plus we should do this anyways.
- standardized API: I like this combined with the sibling proposal of allowing people to build their own filters. I think that's my new position unless someone can convince me otherwise :)