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I gave you an upvote even though I'm going to disagree with you. In general, I'm very open-market and low-regulation - however in this particular case you're touching on the idea of a "common carrier," which is an important idea. When you have one (or a small number of) providers, in a high-barrier-to-entry industry, that provides a critical service - this gives these providers enormous power over us if they were to refuse to do business with us or charge us higher rates. Think water, electric, shipping/postal, internet access, telco, etc. What if the postal service decided to stop doing business with you, perhaps because of the offensive content of the letters you want to send? Or nobody will ship your merchandise because they don't approve of it? Or your internet provider cancels you? And what if there are a small number of them that collude on these bans, so now you can't even switch providers? By designating certain industries as "common carriers" it prohibits them from denying service to anyone for any reason, except for particularly obvious, egregious and illegal reasons. If you want to send out Nazi propaganda newsletters to people who have requested them - the US Postal Service will (and should, I believe) deliver them for you. We should not allow telcos to decide who's calls to put through. This is a job for legislators and law enforcement, however imperfect those solutions are. |