I suspect trying to apply industrial-era antitrust and common carrier ideas to internet tech will break the idea of a liberal democracy. The “public utility” endgame only makes sense in an illiberal nondemocracy like China, and even then requires extreme cultural homogeneity.
Conversation
This is one of my opinions that people suspect is insincere tech shilling but really is not. I just don’t think antitrust logic works at all on distribution aggregation. It works in production and buying (monopoly, monopsony) because of rivalrous physical goods.
The reduction ad absurdum is really absurdum. Attention in a way is created by whoever commands it. The macro is limited at 18h/day * 7.5b, but that’s potential, not actual. If all media magically shuts down, local conversation claims it all.
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It’s simpler to see when the attention-pool creator is an individual rather than a platform. Remember when people were arguing Trump shouldn’t be allowed to block people from reading his tweets because freedom of information around public statements? What happened there btw?
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