For me the challenge becomes "which government?" Should 200 different national governments be able to decide how the platform is run in their country? Should different sub-regions be able to decide?
Makes me wonder what global governance would look like for this or even platform-specific governance could be. Maybe there's a play for users of specific platforms to unite and demand more representation over how a platform is governed, as workers united for more representation in companies.
These platforms have became a sort of super states with citizens from all around the world. A single nation's definition of what is acceptable or not is hard to apply to the platform as a whole.
Platforms should be utilities. We can't really do without them, and there should not be too many of them for practical reasons. But use them, and we risk giving one or few players all the power. Also platforms give rise to internally regulated markets, and it's one thing if the government regulates a market, but yet another if a company regulates it.
I'm guessing we need special economic rules for platforms, or governments should own them.
There is no easy answer that I can see to this dilemma.
Advertising driven platforms lead to people seeking meme type approval and are encouraged to share outlandish claims. On the other hand allowing government to set policy is obviously problematic (insert CCP, United Russia, or even the Dem or Repub parties in the US setting the rules). Other than perhaps dispersed federation (to cap growth) I don’t see a good way to manage this.
don't you sometimes think you'd want a platform where the users are in control of the platform rules? of course we'd all be held to the standards to which we hold others...
You make some good points. I want to reply to a couple of them.
I like the idea of a decentralized platform, but I agree that the solution has to be a legislative one. What's being lost is the "national conversation" on the subject and now private companies are deciding for everyone. Billions of people are now being told they don't get to decide how they interact with society; instead, literally a few people are deciding on behalf of billions. There is very little way to spin that as a positive result. This is what democracy is literally for - "we all decide together what we want the rules to be". I'm... honestly so saddened to see that people can't see that.
If "the people" decide, and what's happening now is what everyone votes for? Great! I may not like it but at least we know that we used good means since the means determine the ends. Right now, the means we are using is literally corporations acting as governments - making decisions for billions.
Re: idea has to pass the child porn test: agree. There's a few others too like illegal incitement etc. A platform needs a meaningful way to detect and remove this (not only because the law requires it, but this is a protective measure to ensure everyone gets to interact on that platform instead of it just disappearing).
the idea I think is that certain platforms would emerge that have to allow all content or get into legal trouble. Even if those are just base layers such as an ISP
How do we decide which platforms it applies to? And once the infrastructure is in place, how do we ensure the list of platforms does not grow at the whim of the administration of the month?
Absolutely, local platform competitors can pop up, but the network effects of national platforms is powerful and their influence and actions damaging in the interim. We may just disagree on this, and that's to be expected. As previously stated, I believe more regulation is required, even if that puts national platforms out of business.
Better perhaps, but what's your proposed path to implementing that? Is it achievable, and what eggs get broken in the course of cooking that omelette?
One huge roadblock I can see is that you would need to address the question of what would replace privately held platforms? If the suggested replacement is something the government operates, you now have to address how that conflicts with the overall neoliberal philosophy of government that we've been operating under for the past couple of decades that precludes the notion of such a thing being operated in that manner. So now we're looking at quite a lot of smashed eggs.
Whereas the former suggestion is something that has, at first glance, a reasonably straightforward path to implementation via legislation, and related precedent to boot. It's easier to make a targeted override of a behavior that is an inherent part of the system under which it emerged, than it is to overhaul the entire system to correct that particular behavior.
the issues are trust. not whether you can get users to produce content for it.
edit: someone else mentioned distributed systems, again the point is not these became decentralized or federated or anything like it, the point is them being Free, as in you can see how things are done, it gets harder to perverse the trust. And lets say a bad platform from a foreign entity is shown to compromise your national security, there are multiple options besides just showing the issues, presenting solutions/patches to the problem that troubles your nation, and last case scenario, migration path to the citizens using that service to a in.country managed one. The last one was being tried, having Microsoft/Oracle managing TikTok in the states, would a situation like that become easier with time, had all these platforms been Free Software?
I mean... this is what I'm trying to get at and why it is complicated. The issue I see is that the conversation has become reductionist. I see a few options:
1) Business as usual (i.e. private entities make their own rules on their own property).
2) We classify these as public spaces. We then run into problems of "all" or "of a certain size." Both of which will have weird effects. "All" makes it difficult for competitors or niche groups (do we allow all articles on HN?). Of a certain size means companies have to transition and creates a new major speed bump in companies going through that transition.
3) We create a government owned platform. Now we'd be legally required to have free speech protected as this is clearly public property and free speech applies to government controlled platforms. But this has the downside of potential for abuse and turnkey tyranny. This becomes a bigger problem because these platforms tend to be multi-national. So does each nation run their own? Do we connect them? Does the UN run it?
4) We radically restructure the internet to be privacy forward. No one can dip their fingers in the pudding and taste it. No governments, no private entities. Do we do this centralized? Federated? Mixture? Do we do domain fronting? Do we force large private entities to facilitate such techniques so that we have a cultural fight? (i.e. encourage secure communications in oppressed countries) Or do we leave everyone alone?
There's a lot of other options too, but I see these as at least covering a few major points. The conversation is really difficult and we need to think about how to solve it and what the problems are instead of just shouting about it being a problem. I think everyone agrees that it is a problem, so let's move the conversation forward. Especially on a form for people that are able to solve many of the technological challenges to some of the above options. But society needs to decide the societal parts of the solutions and that requires discussion.
I worry about a platform controlled by China influencing so much of the world's conversation. For instance, the CCP could use moderation and algorithms to alter exposure of protests concerning Hong Kong or movements to free Tibet. Alternatively they could amplify the most extreme and divisive political content that destabilizes their adversaries. Whenever a platform grows to be this big, we need to treat it like a government unto itself, because it literally has government-scale influence and power. Platforms at that scale need to be regulated and treated like a public-run service (with transparency, neutrality, and local government control). It is absolutely bizarre to outsource control of society's speech to giant private platforms, especially ones that are under the control of a foreign government with a long track record of coercing its private companies.
Makes me wonder what global governance would look like for this or even platform-specific governance could be. Maybe there's a play for users of specific platforms to unite and demand more representation over how a platform is governed, as workers united for more representation in companies.
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