[potluckyears]

Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.

[sumedh]

> In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say

So just like real life, where a rich corporation can use its money to spend on Ads to attack politicians who dont support the corporation.

[CryptoPunk]

The government mismanages almost everything it takes over. If it owned Twitter, the employees would take over, unionize, and demand and get a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees annual pay raises while making them almost totally immune to dismissal.

There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of using the profit motive and competition to engender innovation and efficiency is not corporate propaganda. It's the lesson of the last 400 years.

The sanctification of the government, as some kind of healthy antidote to corporate greed, and representative of the collective will, is a deeply misguided and extraordinarily dangerous notion. Thomas Sowell's account of his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 is a poignant example of how untrue it is: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38

[potluckyears]

I didn't mention "the government." There are other models for democratic governance of businesses, such as co-ops. Credit unions and REI are examples consumer-owned co-ops that have been very successful and provide great service. REI shows that it is possible to govern a business in the US on the principle of "one member, one vote" instead of "more money, more votes" and still make billions in revenue.

[CryptoPunk]

I would agree that Twitter transitioning to a DAO owned by its users might turn out great.

Going a bit on this tangent: one problem with a DAO for Twitter is that the tools for DAO management are still in their infancy, and in practice it means that a centralized administration holds the keys to power in existing DAOs. E.g. the administrators of the main Discord channels, the mods of the main Reddit channels, etc, have the ability to control the narrative by deciding what messages are made prominent, and which ones are censored, in community discussions.

[oblio]

We should definitely have public owned non profits, maybe even government sponsored ones.

They're utilities and should be treated as such.

I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a Great Digital Depression.

[dawnim]

Would be interesting to see something like this governed by a community. Interesting in the light of DAO ownership. Any notable projects like this?

[potluckyears]

Member-owned co-ops like credit unions and REI come to mind. They follow a "one member, one vote" rule. Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, and both provide great service. They're an existence proof that it's possible to still be a good business while governed democratically.

In some countries like Finland, the democratic government holds some large non-majority stake in companies that affect the public interest. However, I don't think that model would work in the US, particularly in light of some unique jurisprudence (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta) that make all three branches of government captive institutions to a small number of wealthy donors.

[PantaloonFlames]

> Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue,

Periodic reminder: revenue is not profit. A not-for-profit can bring in billions in revenue. (I don’t know of any non-profit organizations that fit this description)

[jordanpg]

The US Supreme Court is within spitting distance of wading into these waters. See Justice Thomas' concurrence in the grant of cert for Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute[1]. "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms."

See also https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th....

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/040521zor_32...

[PantaloonFlames]

It sounds like Justice Thomas is suggesting that this might be a reasonable thing for legislators to write laws about. It is not Justice Thomas saying, the US Supreme Court is likely to issue opinions on Twitter as a common carrier.

Maybe that’s what you intended to suggest, by the phrase “wading in.”