it's because the worst case scenario is usually what happens when you try to force things to be what you want

What if we just... don't make them permanent institutions? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.

i'm pretty sure the regulators are not going to solve it in the way we want them to. you're talking from a position of you having control of what the regulation says, and it wont be lobbied by the corporations to support their dominance

I'm not even in favor of this being done, that just seems like a bad argument. "If you do the bad but unnecesarry thing it will be bad"

Well if I can have no input on it none of this discussion matters either way and I'm just gonna tuck into my sweet race car bed

it's kind of my point, we dont really have any say
we wave our signs in protest saying "help, government, protect our free speech from evil corporations"
and then they write up regulation in a closed doors meeting with shady industry consultants, and then they propose a thousands of pages proposal and give people 5 minutes to read it, but nobody reads proposals anyway and then they pass one more regulatory capture problem for the history books, and people wonder why corporations keep amassing more power

and even if the regulation is good and well, you have another problem of increasing regulatory burden that the platforms have to navigate to be compliant, and that gives the dominant ones an advantage, because they can afford an entire legal division to navigate it, while smaller competitors can't, so you keep raising the barrier to entry.
even if the law doesn't apply to small companies, they still have to do work to find out that that is the case.

They'd have to do what would be basic research on the law before starting a business?

well the more regulations we add, the more we're turning basic research into advanced research

When you make a company highly regulated like that of a public utility, you now make the cost of entry astronomically high. This means the only people capable of now competing is other companies of already beyond a certain size. The only way to not have this happen would be to create legislation that specifically targeted just facebook twitter youtube by name.

Anti-trust laws would be a better alternative before making them utilities

when you make them utilities you declare defeat and seal the market.

more over, these are global platforms. If they like being utilities they stay, if they don't, they leave and don't do business here. China is a MUCH bigger market and google is already showing willingness to go there anyway.

The issue is that the alternatives just aren't appearing. They're being attacked and the major players already control enough mindshare that alternatives just don't gain traction.

Google is smart. They won't take themselves out without MS taking themselves out too. But Google and Bing blacklisting a website can and will kill it. Everyone goes on about Gab or whatever, but if you can't install it from the walled garden that is Android, does it matter? The major social networks, Google, Apple and MS in particular, have the ability to blacklist your app or de-rank it into irrelevance (yeah, sure, you might reach 100 people or so but you don't matter in that case).

If only one or two was being censorious, this wouldn't be an issue. But in effect the whole of the tech industry is acting as a large collective hivemind (see Alex Jones). More to the point, the alternatives that are actually being creating (like Bumble) are even more censorious than the major players. The reality is that Silicon Valley is a bubble that is acting as a cartel. Breaking upt he major players wouldn't really change too much in the end. WeChat and the major players from China would come over (and they would have alot more resources). The small players would be very SJW in orientation and we'd just be beholden to someone else (and it would be harder to tell if someone is being censored).

----

As it is, the decision to regulate has already been decided in Europe. The GDPR is already cementing the market monopoly and it will be far from the last. The fact that GDPR could suppress the rise of alternatives has already been raised and dismissed. France is already pushing a fake news bill. Defeating the banning of memes was a close vote but it will not be the last.

Europe does not value free speech in the way the US does and if Europe regulates but the US doesn't, we will all be forced into a European level of censorship because it's cheaper and easier for all internet players (and don't say you're going to actually succeed in walling off your website to not reach Europe and still expect to grow to a size to challenge the current megacorps--it's simply not true). Even if you broke up all the players. Even if you created a viable alternative and managed to avoid getting harassed to your demise. You still have to deal with European regulations and censorious European attitudes. And Europe will not budge.

Addendum: We all have seen Stripe and Mastercard refusing to do business with people they don't like. If you think you can run a business without mainstream income sources, you're hopelessly naive. You *must* be able to take payment.

US-based Regulation forces the issue on essentially everyone. Want to know why parcel delivery services haven't gotten into the game? Why the telecoms haven't (to my knowledge) censored people or prevented people (even the hardest members of the alt-right) from using their phones? It's because they're common carriers and are basically not allowed to refuse service for non-economic reasons.

How can Android be a walled garden if all you need is an APK m8?

Google Play store is effectively required on any mainstream cellphone. Unless you activate developer mode and sideload apps (which, let's be honest, is not a common thing to do) you're looking at downloading things from Google.

Also, there's nothing stopping google from slipping in all sorts of analytics or blocking the use of certain apps or remotely disabling large parts of your phone.

It's true you can fork android. And it's true you can sideload apps. But that's *severly* limiting your potential.

I think people are going to have to learn the costs of convenience

That includes discord fwiw

so what you are saying is that government intervention has already fucked things up so we need more government intervention to fuck things up more?

And the non-google companies (mostly phone companies) have already complained about Google abusing the Play store to essentially mandate features and requirements.

@Grenade123 That's one way to interpret it. An unfortunate one, but a possibly necessary one.

Unless you have a plan to deal with Europe and China somehow.

@Beemann Spoiler alert: they won't.

I would say the solution needs to be user sought, or we're not solving the problem

Up until they're staving on the streets or something, peoplejust don't care.

If that means we have hordes of normies using shit platforms then so be it

That's not really true either though

People care once they're affected to a significant degree, as determined by them

For some people the fappening was a reason to not use the apple cloud. For some people Facebook being scummy was enough to leave the platform

For some people Alex Jones being on twitter was reason enough to leave

Also, why are we assuming Social media is all that important? "But the discourse is all on here" yeah, because its free and everyone is here. We lived before the internet, we can live without it again. If anything, it has aid out rage mobs, taken focus away from local issues and thrust them into parts of the world where you have no control. And they make money off of your privacy. They are not a good force. Let them ban people they dislike, it will only bring more surprises like trump.

I don't think a singular centralized platform is necessary for humans to function, or even a necessary part of the web

people will be forced to talk to their neighbors again. Heaven forbid!

conservatives at least. the leftists would still be stuck in the matrix

they will care about the shithole their town is becoming again. They will know their fellow humans are not as bad as they think because there is a face and a name they can relate to. They will have a shared interest.

so much focus has been put on global/national problems people ignored hte local and it will kill us.

social media is not important. not nearly as important as people think.

its a trend used by children who forgot to grow up.