| > The point of the government is to be a steward of our society and to ensure it is fair, healthy and prosperous This is your understanding of government, and it is a paternalistic understanding of government. I do not share this view and that is a source of contention between us. > Why does the past or future matter? Their decisions can impact our democracy now. The fact is, they own the market now and they can impact our democracy now. They own some of the servers people spend some of their time and do some of their communication on. Everything from Netflix to POTS is their competition, and Facebook does not have a monopoly on community. > So are you saying we just let facebook do whatever they want until they are replaced by competition? What if that impacts our society negatively for a year? A decade? 100 years? At what point do we step in and enact laws to protect our society from negative consequences? At what point do we charge people with the responsibility of managing their own time and making their own choices independent of where they choose to spend it and how they choose to socialize and communicate? Our democracy is the countless choices people make every day, at the ballot box, in the courts, and how we live with our communities. Facebook is an option. Whatever relative power Facebook holds today, has held in the past and will hold in the future is a consequence of the choices of billions of individuals, but power has its own economy that competes against power for varying outcomes. Power, no matter how concentrated, does not exist in a vacuum. |