Comment by baq
5 years ago
it's easy enough - make it a paid-for service and regulate - read ban - free versions.
not going to happen because apparently people paying with their attention instead of dollars in manipulative ways is just fine. the argument goes that they can always not read it, but that's a false dichotomy in social networks and why i'd like to see twitter, google and facebook get labeled as utilities.
I'd love to see ISPs become utilities, which would be the first step.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, etc.
Google, the search engine, I could see being a utility. The rest is iffy. Now, how you disentangle that from the rest of the business... I can either see it being impossible or essentially already done (depends whether you think their existing ads system is biased in some way that regulations/utilit-ification would change - I'm not in ads, I wouldn't know).
Twitter and Facebook as utilities... I mean, I'm not sure I buy it. What kind of utility is it? A utility is something I imagine to be somewhat required by society. A search engine is kind of required in modern society. Facebook and Twitter are incredibly easy to do without.
POTUS is on Twitter. If you want access to his tweets, you absolutely must use Twitter.
Maybe it's a policy problem of the US in particular and politicians in general instead of Twitter/Facebook being an utility. As is, status quo is for me that they're utilities for that single reason.
This POTUS is a huge abnormality that I hope can be forgotten to the annals of time and a jail cell. I would hope not to use him as an example of anything that represents normalcy, like accessibility of his tweets.
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