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by brandmeyer
1805 days ago
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> My specific proposal doesn’t require compelling social media companies to publish anything. My proposal only turns social media companies into portals into an open platform, so you can leave Twitter or whomever without leaving your network (conversations, connections, etc). Take a good, hard look at WeChat. You just proposed that we force the plethora of existing social media platforms to transform themselves into WeChat.gov portals. > we should regulate them as utilities We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach. |
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No, that's obviously only true if we picked a protocol that was designed to support mass surveillance (a la WeChat), but there's no reason said protocol needs to be anti-privacy. This is baseless FUD.
> We tried that with the only elements of the internet that actually are utilities: the networks themselves. It was called Network Neutrality, and the Trump administration killed it as soon as they took office on the grounds that it was government overreach.
I don't think the Trump administration killed it because it wasn't working out very well in practice; they killed it because of an ideological disagreement (or more cynically, corruption). Which is to say, this is a political problem and indeed my proposal, like any proposal that pits the people against wealthy special interests, is subject to the same problem--we need to fix our national corruption problem, but that's an entirely different conversation so I'm ignoring it to focus on the practical aspects.