Common carriers are a tiny minority of businesses. Plenty of other exception exist too, but they are exceptions. Because the default is that businesses do reserve the right to refuse service.
They are exceptions yes. And people are advocating for additional exceptions to be made and they are giving justification for it.
So you cant just straight up dismiss the idea that we should consider requiring a few more businesses to fall under our existing and uncontroversial laws common carrier laws.
Telephone companies become common carriers when they offer their service indiscriminately to everyone. If a company is reserving its right to deny service based on its rules of conduct then it is by definition not a common carrier. You can’t just force common carrier status on a company when the facts don’t support that status.
Actually what you oppose is considering them common carriers. The government has forced business to accept customers in the past and they applied similar theory to net neutrality yesterday.
A company should not be able to refuse service for stating a true fact. Or even opinion about them. Especially when they have common carrier protections.
My opinion isn’t binding and I haven’t developed a position; more to the point, if they were a common carrier, I don’t see how their terms of service and code of conduct would not be applicable all the same. Common carriers can still refuse service to specific offending individuals if not the government as collective entity, for no reason, or for cause, such as violations of company policy or terms of service.
I’m not an expert, but: Can’t common carriers discriminate if there’s compelling reason? Like, a railway can refuse to carry a passenger if they’re disruptive to others. My ISP can cut me off if I’m running DDOS attacks. Is there any reason a (common) phone carrier shouldn’t be able to refuse service to a call that they believe is illegal in nature?
We view certain companies that provide essential services as “common carriers” — who aren’t allowed to discriminate based on how you use their product. Common carrier status for essential services is one of the ways we protect freedoms in the US.
Examples: power company, phone company, ISP.
People are starting to view Twitter et al as similar to phone companies — and hence think they should be bound by common carrier rules.
When it comes to wanting big companies to follow rules (a noble pursuit) many wish that common carrier status could be imposed on a business.
But remember why common carrier status exists. Imagine I rob a stagecoach and lie low until the next day, when I catch a train to the next town over.
Is the train engineer my accomplice in the robbery? Or my accessory after the fact? Is the train company?
He and it might be, except that the train company “holds itself out” as a transporter of goods and services open to all. In exchange, the law grants the company that holds itself out as a carrier for all the freedom not to worry about whether carriage is a criminal act for the customer.
But without holding one’s self out as a carrier for all, there is no common carrier status. You cannot hold out a company as sufficiently large; they must hold themselves out as wanting this status.
When I see people clamor for social media platforms, I get doubly confused, because not only have these companies never held themselves out as common carriers, they would take nothing they do not already have (under 230) from doing so.
To re-summarize my point; arguably even common carriers aren’t actually forced by the government to be content neutral. Rather they’re given certain benefits (such as the right to sell to the public without contract) in exchange for meeting certain standards of behavior, including content neutrality and regulations on rates and liability. Companies are free to reject those restrictions, but they lose access to the benefits as well.
Companies don't choose to be common carriers if they can still be a monopoly/oligopoly without it. The reason common carrier regulations were adopted was because companies that had monopolies (some natural, some not), would use those monopolies in ways that were seen to be unfair competition.
All else equal, any company would rather pick and choose their customers rather than be forced to serve customers that they'd rather not for one reason or another.
There's a very long history of industries considered so vital to other kinds of commerce that they can be classified as "common carriers" that are not allowed to discriminate against what things to transport.
These are known as common carriers. Here's a short list:
Every domestic passenger airline
Every domestic freight carrying airline
Busses
Ferries
Cabs
Lyft
Uber
FedEx
UPS
USPS
Passenger Railroads
Freight Rail Service
Many oil pipelines
Even roller coasters
Landlines
Mobile phone service
Applying Title II of the Communications Act to broadband service, which applies common carrier obligations and privileges (e.g. you can't get sued for what you carry) isn't a violation of Verizon's free speech rights and ruling so isn't conservative at all.
I think you have it backwards: one of the benefits of being treated as a "common carrier" is that you aren't responsible for others misusage of your service, since you are required to be open to the public.
No certainly not. I would say that common carrier regulation should be reserved for things which behave like utilities, especially if there are very few comparable players in the market. The precedent would be something like the railroads: if you want to move freight, your options are quite limited, and your business might live or die depending on access to the rail system, so rail providers are not allowed to pick favorites as this would give them undue influence on the economy as a whole.
I think it should be fairly simple to draw a common-sense distinction between small business and the tech-giants which gate keep the internet. If you are not allowed to host your site on the server in my basement, nobody is going out of business because of that. If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
To counter your analogy, if I am the CEO of one of the largest mobile carriers in the country, and I believe you hold unacceptable opinions, should I be able to deny you access to my network and prevent you from making phone calls?
IANAL but common carrier laws are there to protect the carrier. e.g., people can use a telephone to plan a crime, but you cannot hold the phone company responsible for that crime. So the phone company does not discriminate otherwise they lose common carrier protections.
Regardless, I was responding to the 1st amendment claim by the GP.
Because, either they are a common carrier or they aren't. If they are a common carrier, they shouldn't be deciding, but they are also not liable. If they are not a common carrier, they can do what they want, but it carries done liability. Problem is, they want it both ways, decide and have no liability.
reply