Comment by eximius
5 years ago
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.
abnormality or no, unfortunately that's status quo that we're dealing with here. situation changes, we can rethink going back to status quo ante.