[zeroz]

> Germany and France attacked Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. after U.S. President Donald Trump was shut off from the social media platforms, in an extension of Europe’s battle with big tech. German Chancellor Angela Merkel objected to the decisions, saying on Monday that lawmakers should set the rules governing free speech and not private technology companies.

> Rights like the freedom of speech “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”

As much as I support this pure democratic view of Angela Merkel, and as much as I hope Ben Thompson is right with his Internet 3.0 "Return of technology" and "open protocols" idea to have a counterweight to big corp, I think it's really difficult to escape Internet 2.0 economics.

e.g. EU Cookie law - Good intention and poor implementation. Whatsapp vs. X - We all on HN know, we want better, but network effects are really strong.

[greatgib]

This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians.

Things are ok and not problematic when it is them that do it because they have the power. But when they are the subjects of similar things, then they don't like and want to have this power for them.

There is a very good and ironic example of that in France:

The former president Nicolas Sarkozy created and pushed a lot of nefarious 'security' laws when he was president. For example, the possibility for police to monitor phone calls without a warrant and things like that.

To critics, he was replying that the state is 'trustful' and that only bad people could fear for their privacy.

Back now, a few years later, police wiretapped a phone line that he opened under a fake name to secretly discuss about another police investigation that is currently targeting him and he allegedly used this line to abuse of authority and try to get insider knowledge from law officials in exchange for a special position.

At his trial and in medias, he cried everywhere that it is unfair and abused that his phone lines could have been wiretapped like that to provide evidences against him. Like if he is a victim and not the person that pushed these bad security laws against the population despite a lot of critics of people concerned by freedom and privacy topics.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don’t know that I’d call it hypocrisy. Most European politicians who’ve commented on this seem to be expressing a strong, principled view that the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it. This sounds strange to a lot of us in the US, where we don’t generally believe the government deserves special respect, but it’s our attitude that’s atypical from a global perspective.

[greatgib]

I can understand that from far you could have this impression that they have good will and for them "the state is on top and nobody should be allowed to exercise power over it".

But make no mistake, this is just communication/propaganda and what makes me say that it is hypocrisy. Politics here are champions of double talk. Despite pretending to be democracies, a lot of leaders are now trying to grab the maximum power and undermine citizen decision power.

For example, in France, normally the President and government is just here to execute the laws decided by the national assembly. But in the past decade, majority members of the national assembly are now in a party whose purpose is to "support the president" and so, you could be excluded if you would not vote like the president want you to.

Also, more and more the government decide new laws unilaterally, sometimes in secret or after secret negotiations with lobbies, and will do everything needed to force the assembly to approve it.

Sometimes it is just pressure, sometimes it is manipulations like presenting multiple time the same law, even if it is rejected, until it will pass. Or a present it at a specific time, like at night when there are other events, so that opposition will not have time to come to vote.

They are also more frequently using anti democratic tools when they can't manage to have their law to pass, like something call 49.1 that enact a law without vote of the national assembly.

And lastly, we have seen the case a lot with "fake news" and "hate speech", where governement or governement member will spread "fake news" or send bad "hate" messages.

But when you have breaking news of bad behavior of them, then they will pretend that it is "fake news"/"hate" message, and that the state should be able to censor that. In this regard, they are very similar to Trump.

To give one last example, during the first part of the covid crisis, the government knew that they did not have enough mask, because of bad management, and instead of telling the truth, they said that pharmacy were not allowed to sell them, because people would not know how to use them and that they are useless to deal with the covid.

Later the proof was given that they were voluntarily lying.

[oscargrouch]

> This is the usual hypocrisy of european politicians.

If a chimp somehow learned that 2 + 2 = 4, would you point out that given he is a chimp and "chimps don't not math", that the statement about the subject is wrong, even that is clear it has a merit in itself and who says what basically don't matter when we think about something being right or wrong?

This is not as simple as 2+2 of course, but i rather prefer that the merit of what being discussed is taken the proper focus while who says what, only have more prominence when hidden intentions that can actually cause harm cant be neglected.

And i think this is clearly not the case unless your name is Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey or anyone who will profit from this digital neo-feudalism power grab.

People seen to forget easily how and why sovereign states with the rule of the law were built, and how, if we forget the lessons of the past, it will be very hard to get out of a state where we all have no recourse against our new lords once we go through this path of powerless, anemic sovereign states.

[TameAntelope]

I don't see a way out of this that doesn't include government-funded technology services.

If Twitter is a free speech platform to be used by the people, there is no way to exercise that consistently without violating Twitter's rights.

I know the US built a public postal service because we saw mail delivery as a requirement for a functioning country. Is the infrastructure necessary to run an Internet now falling into the same category?

And not just the cables, but the routing technology, hosting technology, etc. More like AWS than Comcast. Where is the line, other than for protected classes?

[bcheung]

I would much rather see something more decentralized. It seems like politics is increasingly looking like whichever party is in power uses their power to get more power.

There is definitely an argument to be made that the Internet is so much ingrained in society that denying people Internet access is like denying people access to grocery stores and electricity.

[tannhaeuser]

Merkel's view might be interpreted as pro-free speech at a glance, but the corollary of what she's saying is that no single entity should wield as much power as Facebook, Twitter, and Google at all. It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.

[kodah]

Having followed Angela Merkel's comments in the past I did not read her comments as "pro free speech". I read them as a concern about power. What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history.

[chipotle_coyote]

> What happened this week, in the long term, will likely be looked on poorly by history.

It might well be, but it's worth keeping in mind that this isn't mutually exclusive with what happened last week. I don't just mean the armed insurrection in the Capitol with the tacit support of a sitting president who lost his re-election bid; I mean that, for a full week, no government agency even made an official statement about that insurrection.

The real story of January 2021 may well be that private companies have stepped in to take action not merely because they could, but because the government refused to do so. While I share Ben Thompson's discomfort at private entities having this kind of power over the public sphere, the even more uncomfortable truth is that we -- both (primarily American) citizenry and (primarily American) government -- have ceded that power to them.

[kodah]

> but because the government refused to do so.

This is just narrative. Immediately after the Capitol riots people were trying to create narratives that the FBI and Capitol Hill police intentionally didn't do their job. That turned out not to be true, as the piece by Brian Stelter showed. This reasoning seems to be a further manipulated form of that. I would not expect the American government to be making public statements. Generally it's the president that addresses the public and obviously in this case he didn't.

[chipotle_coyote]

s/just narrative/plain statement of fact/

I didn't mention the FBI or the Capitol Police. There was an armed attack on Congress while it was in session and the federal government has not made an official public statement about it. Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't.

[kodah]

> Maybe you think there's nothing remotely weird about that. I do. Maybe you think no other administration would have had multiple briefings from law enforcement by now. I don't.

I do not. I would expect that in any terrorist incident, like 9/11 or others, that the President would be orchestrating a response. Clearly the President has been implicated in these things so that's not going to happen. You have Congress preparing impeachment documents and the FBI has responded to journalists, many of which created immediately hostile narratives about law enforcement. I do not know what else you're expecting them to do at this point.

If I were the FBI I would not be saying anything either. I'd have agents out in the field collecting evidence and arresting people, getting the story and having them turn in their coconspirators. If you make some sort of statement it prompts them to destroy evidence.

[qsort]

> It's to be interpreted in the sense that additional legislative weight should be put behind disrupting the quasi-monopolistic dominance of these entities.

I tend to agree with your read, i.e. this has nothing to do with freedom-of-speech type issues and everything to do with Germany (and Europe more generally) positioning themselves against Big Tech; my only question is why now.

I'd love nothing more than to see Facebook/Twitter take a beating, but in this particular case there isn't really any strong argument that the government should have intervened and prevented Twitter from blocking Trump. Is this just an extreme case of carpe diem?

[qsort]

> As much as I support this pure democratic view

Honestly I really struggle to see why this would even be 'democratic'. There's a pretty strong and convincing argument that it would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump, but the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic.

I get it, Twitter bad, I agree. But the implications of this idea are frankly much scarier than any "corporate decision" will ever be.

[zeroz]

With constitutionality free speech the government shouldn't be allowed to force a private entity to amplify or censor speech. And don't get me wrong. I was happy about the ban in this moment.

On the other hand I wouldn't like to give all moderation power to private entities alone. If not opportune with current business model, company ethics are quickly changed (e.g. don't be evil). As long as you have small decentralized shops and platforms that's ok. With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility. Maybe some kind of neutral and elected ethics committee could help large private platforms to maintain transparent and democratic standards. Would they have blocked him even earlier?

[qsort]

> With concentration of power a private company nearly acts like a utility.

I agree this is a problem. I believe the more rational way to solve it is to break the monopoly, i.e. using antitrust powers more aggressively and letting the market decide, rather than having some committee decide what's kosher.

> elected

Holy cow please no. I'm willing to believe you have the best of intentions, but anything elected would 100% become a stupid political game from day one. And even if it didn't, popular votes on issues that potentially impact individual rights are a terrible idea: if 51% of the public votes $VERY_BAD_THING, do we have to go along with it? We enshrine fundamental rights in constitutions precisely because we don't want them to be endangered by the current political wind.

[piaste]

> the notion that the government should be allowed to force at gunpoint a private entity to amplify speech that such entity disagrees with doesn't strike me as particularly democratic.

"Private entity" is a very broad category that encompasses everything from individual citizens/entrepreneurs to trillion-dollar multinational corporations with armies of shareholders, lobbyists, and lawyers.

I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law should discriminate between the latter and the former, and this is one of them.

[qsort]

> I think there are plenty of scenarios where the law should discriminate between the latter and the former,

I don't see why this is the case. Private entities are made of people. If Twitter vehemently disagrees with something, I don't see any reason why the government should force them to go against their wishes.

> very broad category that encompasses everything

This is exactly the problem. While there is an argument that Twitter was wrong in the specific case, the implications of having the government force Twitter to say/amplify things they don't believe are __chilling__. Restricting speech is bad enough, but often understandable, this is frankly several steps beyond what I'm comfortable with.

[satyrnein]

If you're deemed a common carrier, you can no longer exercise full editorial control over the content you're carrying. We've gone back and forth on whether ISPs are common carriers or not. Twitter is a step even further, but possible.

[qsort]

Sure, but does the comparison really hold? ISPs provide a service that's strictly tied to very expensive and hard to duplicate infrastructure (often with strategic significance, even). To make an even more extreme example, if the companies controlling the North Atlantic TAT cables suddenly decided to arbitrarily deny service we'd have a huge problem, nobody is denying that. But social media are literally a database and some javascript, that's not even remotely in the same league.

Again, I do agree we have a quasi-monopoly problem; but if we do, the logical solution is to break the monopoly. Imposing political control creates more problems than it solves.

[satyrnein]

Agreed that social networks are not natural monopolies due to physical characteristics, but the network effects are still significant barriers to entry. Another angle is mandating interoperability of some kind, such as mandating that mobile carriers had to support porting of phone numbers. None of these ideas seem like a slam dunk, though.

[twmiller]

> There's a pretty strong and convincing argument that it would be better if Twitter hadn't blocked Trump...

There is? I haven't heard it.

[qsort]

From a strictly utilitarian perspective, Twitter's actions generated backlash that was probably avoidable had they continued with their previous policy of placing a label that basically said "this guy is an idiot" on every tweet. This obviously has to be balanced against the damage caused by letting him break very rule without (apparent) consequences. I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but I can see an argument for both sides.

This is however a completely disjoint topic. "Should they have done X" and "Should they be able to do X if they so choose" are very different questions.

[twmiller]

From my perspective, we're still talking about the actual events of Jan. 6, rather than whatever inane thing Trump would have tweeted this morning to deflect that conversation. In my mind, that's a HUGE win that far outweighs any backlash. I also, personally, wonder how overstated that backlash actually is. I don't know anyone IRL that is lamenting the fact that Trump lost his Twitter account.

[qu-everything]

Fuck lawmakers. it's their platform, they can ban whoever break their TOS.

[dominotw]

> Fuck lawmakers.

you are against anti trust, anti labor, anti discrimination laws that were passed by "lawmakers" .

I pray this thinking doesn't go mainstream.

[galuggus]

Do you think you shops should be allowed to refuse service to anyone they want to?

[qu-everything]

if they break rules, yes

[dominotw]

they can come up with whatever "rules" they want. So its superfluous to say "if they break rules" .

[oscargrouch]

To give more context to this: imagine a seller that defines as a rule to discriminate clients by their skin color.

The rule of the law prevents we get back to the rule of the jungle which resorts to the more powerful actors forcing their will against all others.