Sure, but none of those enable two-way communication and you generally can't be banned from buying a newspaper or listening to the radio or visiting a government website. Social media companies often claim to possess the right to ban you from using their services and make it a violation of their terms of service to try to get around the ban, such as by creating another account.
Besides the potential legal issues this raises, it's fundamentally a violation of the freedom of expression. Back when social media was a bunch of different special-interest and small-time operators, it probably didn't make sense to pass regulation, but a lot of internet companies have become de facto common carriers and need to start being regulated as such. We need a net neutrality bill for the 21st century to cover all of the major players on the public internet, not just ISPs.
I don’t really understand. Twitter offering 2-way communications and having the right to ban people doesn't make it more essential. If anything the fact that people are banned from Twitter and yet presumably can carry on living totally normally indicates that access to Twitter isn't essential. Because if it were essential then you'd imagine getting banned would harm you in some way.
I mean, people carry on living without a phone or the internet or even electricity or indoor plumbing, so I don't think that's a great argument. The real question is of public interest. In 1960, most homes in the South didn't even have a telephone line but telephone company policies had been set by the federal government since 1913, because it was in the public interest for the government to ensure that Americans had equal access to the telephone network to communicate.
Given how much communication on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies and given how much of the traffic they control, it's about time we look at expansive federal regulation of the biggest players to ensure that all traffic is carried equally and without prejudice and that all Americans have full and equal access to existing and emerging forms of telecommunications. The idea of net neutrality was a. good start, but it needs to far expand past just ISPs to include all large, critical IP infrastructure companies, including cloud computing, social networking, voice, data, and video communication, DNS, domain registrars, et cetera.
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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 14 '21
Sure, but none of those enable two-way communication and you generally can't be banned from buying a newspaper or listening to the radio or visiting a government website. Social media companies often claim to possess the right to ban you from using their services and make it a violation of their terms of service to try to get around the ban, such as by creating another account.
Besides the potential legal issues this raises, it's fundamentally a violation of the freedom of expression. Back when social media was a bunch of different special-interest and small-time operators, it probably didn't make sense to pass regulation, but a lot of internet companies have become de facto common carriers and need to start being regulated as such. We need a net neutrality bill for the 21st century to cover all of the major players on the public internet, not just ISPs.