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by Const-me 1977 days ago
Paragraph b3 says this: “It is the policy of the United States to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet”

I think the technologies where a centralized commercial company controls which information is received by users violates at least the spirit of that law.
1 comments
edmundsauto 1977 days ago
Centralized spam filters are an interesting test case. We generally agree they are good, and necessary. How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?
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Const-me 1977 days ago
> How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

People [would be] consuming the spam content being filtered agree with the filtering and are generally happy with it.

Failing that, when people are unhappy with their spam filter they can adjust or disable it.

As a last resort, they can migrate to another e-mail provider, there's no monopoly on e-mail. Moreover, e-mail is delivered almost equally between different providers.

Many people watching youtube or reading facebook are unhappy with their content policies. There's no way to control their filters or opt out of them. There's de-facto monopoly on these markets: the network effect is too strong, and antimonopoly laws don't seem to apply to their acquisitions of competitors.

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edmundsauto 1976 days ago
Interesting points. I don’t think I’m fully sold on it - something like Tinder would seem to be an interesting thought experiment, where people are unable to move due to network effects.

I definitely appreciate you taking the rime to respond. I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic. It feels more akin to losing a feature by switching off gmail.

Definitely valid points about turning off the filter, although on gmail, I believe that is only for your personal filters. Google still filters huge amounts of malicious stuff before it gets to the spam folder, by silently dropping it.

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Const-me 1976 days ago
> I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic.

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Source there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

A social network is very similar to railroad network, electricity distribution network, or landline phone network. Yet we allow Facebook or Youtube to do whatever they please with the servers they own, while regulating the hell out of the older ones.

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