It’s time to rein it in.
[Update Friday morning]
The private-sector purge is beginning.
[Update a while later]
Are you now, or have you ever been a conservative?
The media crybullies are feeling their oats.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Collective guilt, and the new witchhunt.
[Bumped]
We won’t need these laws if social media is *decentralized* (see your Disrupting the Disruptors thread). Just the common carrier laws that prevent collusion and restraint of trade or speech that already exist.
As we have seen holding providers liable for content is a slippery slope towards censorship. Frankly, the companies hosting social media are exercising their contractual rights, read the fine print in your User Agreement. The exception is an outfit like Parler, where a restraint of trade, anti-trust action is probably justified. That issue is more of a cloud computing issue, not a social media one and is why I think Parler will have an excellent chance in court. Pushing liability for content back on the users is the only way to keep social media viable. And if you don’t like what a person has to say, don’t follow them. A person shouting alone, in a cave is usually not motivated to keep it up. Well most people. Of course there are also the Dear Diary types, but they aren’t typically looking to lead a mob.
Cutting people off from the internet is like cutting off their electricity or water because you disagree with their politics. Many of these companies function as utilities but want to abuse this status to force people to act how Democrats want them to. It isn’t just social media, internet backbone companies, and restaurants, it is also banks, hotels, and airlines.
If this was happening in another country, except China, we would sanction the country doing it and bring them before the UN HRC. Our progressive marxist overlords wont say anything about China because they helped send people to the concentration camps and set up the social credit system.
What a minute. For a long time, conservatives have decried government regulation, saying everything should be left to the market. Anti-trust law really hasn’t been enforced since Reagan took office. For example, mergers used to be blocked routinely if the result was 30% market share for any one firm. Now the only question is whether prices will rise in the short term. And Robert Bork’s ridiculous argument that vertical monopolies don’t matter is widely implemented.
Now suddenly conservatives don’t like what the market is doing to them, and their proposed solution is not to turn to the market but to the government. Why not solve the problem through the market, by building a competing business that caters to conservatives?
Parler tried that. It was ganged up on by Apple, Google, and Amazon, and killed.
Private entities seeking to maximize their profits have killed a product. What do you do now? Do you say, “Oh, well, apparently the product was not commercially viable”? Do you try to cancel Amazon? Do you demand government regulation?
“Just win, baby” – Al Davis
This is going to trial. It will be interesting to see how the court deals with the issues. Is it simply that Parler was in violation of the AWS User Agreement or something else? Parler claims to have had ‘jurors’ that were part of the organization that was there to remove posts that violated Parler’s terms of service, which I assume must have been compliant with what Amazon requires in order to obtain a service contract with Amazon in the first place. So a lot of the outcome of this case is likely to hinge on process. Was Amazon ‘fair’ in its trade handling of Parler? Was there collusion (yes I used that word) that effected Amazon’s decision which might fall afoul of anti-trust law?
Discovery in this case could get quite interesting…
Microsoft take notice….
Ken, anti-trust law isn’t anti-conservative. Most conservatives I know will tell you free trade implies a free and fair marketplace. Not one subject to manipulation by a monopolistic player or a trust of market manipulators. It’s why today we have >1 supplier of gasoline and heating oil.
Regards the Parler vs Amazon case, I have my concerns about the elder put in charge of this case, a Jimmy Carter nominee, and whether or not she is up to it. Parler may not have the wherewithal to conduct an appeal if the District Court ruling goes against them. That will depend upon how much pain and delay it’s investors are willing to tolerate. The capital loss will be low if they lose, its primarily people, most of whom are probably looking for work as I write this.
https://www.wawd.uscourts.gov/judges/rothstein-bio
Most conservatives I know will tell you free trade implies a free and fair marketplace.
I suspect most libertarians familiar with Ayn Rands work would too. It is not like she heaped praise on corporations like Taggart Transcontinental and their monopolistic behavior.
Ken, anti-trust law isn’t anti-conservative. Most conservatives I know will tell you free trade implies a free and fair marketplace. Not one subject to manipulation by a monopolistic player or a trust of market manipulators. It’s why today we have >1 supplier of gasoline and heating oil.
That’s all true and good in theory. It remains the case, however, that concentration in the US economy has grown greatly in the last few decades. Yes, Standard Oil was broken up a century ago, but Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. are thriving.
Basically, I’m just agreeing with a statement in the New York Post article to which Rand links:
Simply put: The conservatives who argued against regulating Big Tech were wrong.
That’s Rupert Murdoch talking.
Anti-trust law really hasn’t been enforced since Reagan took office. – written in total ignorance of the subject in which he is about to opine.
Heck, it was the Reagan Administration that broke up AT&T.
AT&T’s break-up was the result of an anti-trust case filed in 1974.
The US economy has grown more concentrated over the last few decades, Amazon and Google being examples of that.
Favoring limited government isn’t favoring no government just as wanting limited regulations isn’t the same as wanting no regulations. Conservatives have also been against marxism, and these companies are progressive marxists subverting our rights to persecute dissidents on behalf of their party because at least for now, they can’t use their government powers to do so.
What we are experiencing is not the “free market”.
“For a long time, conservatives have decried government regulation, saying everything should be left to the market.”
Nice strawman. No one ever said that.
For example, Conservatives prefer strong anti-fraud laws.
So you are wrong there.
As was pointed out Reagan busted up AT&T so you are wrong there as well.
Ever get tired of being wrong?
As I pointed out in my response to Leland, the Reagan administration had little to do with the break-up of AT&T, which was the result of a court case filed years before.
In fact, the original case was about not AT&T’s control of the regional Bell companies but its relationship with Western Electric, which manufactured the Bell System’s equipment. The eventual result of the suit, including the freeing of the baby Bell companies, was an alternative remedy proposed by AT&T.
Since the original suit was about a vertical monopoly, I wonder whether Reagan’s DOJ would have pursued it. The Reagan administration obviously favored Robert Bork, who wrote a paper in the late 70’s to the effect that vertical monopolies are not harmful (I think he’s very wrong, but that’s another matter).
Anyway, the point is that the economy has become much more concentrated over the last few decades. How many airlines are left? How many major defense contractors? How many ISP’s can you choose from? How many Amazons are there (just one). How many Googles (ditto).
As a public service, allow me to offer some alternative hashtags to those still stuck on or stuck to FB…
#ArrestTheLarceny
#PreventThePurloin
#SwivelTheSwindle
#AbortTheAbduct
#PauseThePeculate
#DesistTheDespoil
” Even people who did not attend the rally where violence broke out could face legal perils from the feds if charged with “material support” (i.e., donations) to an organization later charged with terrorist offenses. ”
Democrats raised hundreds of millions of dollars for their revolutionaries. Money went to organizing, bail, housing, transportation, and supplies. The most power elected and unelected Democrats in the country worked with tech companies to promote and facilitate these activities. Will Democrats be held to the same standard?
What would be really hilarious is if the Democrats admitted that they stole the election, provided proof of same, and made Trump come back and be President…and then removed him from office! Heck, I’d pay to see that one…
“…depending on how Politico‘s management reacts, it might reveal that staff have veto power over editorial decisions — in other words, that, as in events last year at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the staff mob effectively runs the paper.”
I know that trendy libertarians and “sophisticated conservatives” love to denigrate, demonize, and otherwise trash Ayn Rand. But go back and read The Fountainhead, and pay attention to the surreptitious takeover of Gale Wynand’s newspaper empire by the Lenin-esque Ellsworth Toohey. When Wynand decides to use his admittedly lowest-common-denominator media empire to defend the man he admires most, Howard Roark, his collectivist “staff” turn on him, and do the equivalent of modern day “deplatforming.”
Rand was a genius, IMHO, but you should read the novel and decide for yourself.