I think most people are operating under the outdated assumption that these companies are American. This assumption is false. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are international corporations that function more like digital nation states, and they should be treated as such by actual nations. Right now, these digital national states qualify as hostile foreign powers in America. They are staffed by non-americans who do not respect or abide by our Constitution or Bill of Rights, and yet they decide news and information for hundreds of millions of Americans. Until we utterly divorce ourselves from these corporations, we will not have sovereignty again.
I think the other problem is most lolbertarians and leftists who complain about this shit with the "muh private business" excuse don't realize these companies are fucking monopolies that have the backing of far left wing institutions with lots of money.
THEY HAVE TRIED TO MAKE ALTERNATE PLATFORMS - every time they do Twitter and the retards who defend it follow them and try to shut those down. At this point these platforms MUST be regulated to contain their power. We already have issues with the government censoring our views (despite our 1st Amendment protections) but now we're dealing with corporations that are too big to fail also fucking us over. One big entity that I did not elect (and well, since I voted Trump I obviously didn't elect these fucks) is bad enough, but another completely unelected entity with too much money and political power should not have that power over us plebs, period.
Having resembled that remark, I am fully aware of the fact that these companies have too much power, that's why I don't want them regulated, I want them utterly destroyed. The only way that's going to happen is with the market. Regulations protect the largest businesses by being a barrier against competition that only the extremely wealthy and well connected can avoid.
Instead of regulating them, what we need to do is stop funding and protecting them.
Stop subsidizing them, stop giving them tax breaks, stop protecting them as a national interest, stop having them meet and co-operate with the intelligence agencies, stop having them participate in government programs which introduce more funding.
Let me make a more clear position by taking a hyperbolic scenario. I want Twitter to fucking die as a company. The one way thing could guarantee that Twitter could become immortal, would be for someone to pass a constitutional amendment certifying that having a Twitter account was a constitutional right. Every branch of the government would be fully invested in fighting over that "right", and as such it would exist as long as the fucking state has.
The government always does this. It identifies that one of it's sponsored cartels is violating the rights of people, so it introduces whole swathes of legal framework, entire court systems, and massive bureaucracies to arbitrate whether these rights have been protected. They did this with Labor rights, they did this with Family law, they did this with Civil Rights. You do not want to do this with speech and the internet.
Lets take the classic Mining Town example of this. The only reason coal mines were able to form "mining towns" that acted as their own personal corporate plantations and fiefdoms is because the state invested heavily into protecting those businesses in both law and finance. Otherwise, you can't actually make any damn money as a corporation if you have to fully fund a colony and cover all of the costs of it's inhabitants.
We don't need regulation to control these companies, we have to stop supporting them altogether. Introducing regulation only creates another avenue of approach for the government to add methods of control, and the tech giants fucking know this.
They're not on the side of the American people, which is not to say that they are not on the side of the American ruling class. And the American government is responsive to the ruling class, not the people.
I think most people are operating under the outdated assumption that these companies are American. This assumption is false. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are international corporations that function more like digital nation states, and they should be treated as such by actual nations. Right now, these digital national states qualify as hostile foreign powers in America. They are staffed by non-americans who do not respect or abide by our Constitution or Bill of Rights, and yet they decide news and information for hundreds of millions of Americans. Until we utterly divorce ourselves from these corporations, we will not have sovereignty again.
I think the other problem is most lolbertarians and leftists who complain about this shit with the "muh private business" excuse don't realize these companies are fucking monopolies that have the backing of far left wing institutions with lots of money.
THEY HAVE TRIED TO MAKE ALTERNATE PLATFORMS - every time they do Twitter and the retards who defend it follow them and try to shut those down. At this point these platforms MUST be regulated to contain their power. We already have issues with the government censoring our views (despite our 1st Amendment protections) but now we're dealing with corporations that are too big to fail also fucking us over. One big entity that I did not elect (and well, since I voted Trump I obviously didn't elect these fucks) is bad enough, but another completely unelected entity with too much money and political power should not have that power over us plebs, period.
Having resembled that remark, I am fully aware of the fact that these companies have too much power, that's why I don't want them regulated, I want them utterly destroyed. The only way that's going to happen is with the market. Regulations protect the largest businesses by being a barrier against competition that only the extremely wealthy and well connected can avoid.
Instead of regulating them, what we need to do is stop funding and protecting them.
Stop subsidizing them, stop giving them tax breaks, stop protecting them as a national interest, stop having them meet and co-operate with the intelligence agencies, stop having them participate in government programs which introduce more funding.
Let me make a more clear position by taking a hyperbolic scenario. I want Twitter to fucking die as a company. The one way thing could guarantee that Twitter could become immortal, would be for someone to pass a constitutional amendment certifying that having a Twitter account was a constitutional right. Every branch of the government would be fully invested in fighting over that "right", and as such it would exist as long as the fucking state has.
The government always does this. It identifies that one of it's sponsored cartels is violating the rights of people, so it introduces whole swathes of legal framework, entire court systems, and massive bureaucracies to arbitrate whether these rights have been protected. They did this with Labor rights, they did this with Family law, they did this with Civil Rights. You do not want to do this with speech and the internet.
Lets take the classic Mining Town example of this. The only reason coal mines were able to form "mining towns" that acted as their own personal corporate plantations and fiefdoms is because the state invested heavily into protecting those businesses in both law and finance. Otherwise, you can't actually make any damn money as a corporation if you have to fully fund a colony and cover all of the costs of it's inhabitants.
We don't need regulation to control these companies, we have to stop supporting them altogether. Introducing regulation only creates another avenue of approach for the government to add methods of control, and the tech giants fucking know this.
They're not on the side of the American people, which is not to say that they are not on the side of the American ruling class. And the American government is responsive to the ruling class, not the people.