Declare Facebook a public utility and eliminate advertising by replacing with a fee or what you call a tariff. Breaking up does not always work. Facebook is like a natural monopoly - people want one site to connect with all their 'friends'. No one is going to use several Facebooks as social media platform. They want one. Regards, Roderick. ________________________________ From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2021 11:57 PM To: nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org> Cc: Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> Subject: Re: not a utility, was Parler In article <MWHPR13MB1742905824973AB606D9B80BE4AC0@MWHPR13MB1742.namprd13.prod.outlook.com> you write:
-=-=-=-=-=- Unless the courts rule or the legislators enact legislation making them a public utility. In legal circles there is a theory that platforms like Facebook, messaging services, etc. might achieve such importance to public life and discourse as to merit regulation under the grounds they are an essential utility. I am neutral regarding this idea - I have not studied it and also realize that Amazon is not strictly speaking a social media. So my point is tangential.
That is a dream of some factions, but it is not realistic. You can certainly make an argument that Google and Facebook are monopolies, but the remedies for that are to break them up or to require them to provide access to their competitors to some of their internal facilities, e.g., allow other ad networks to bid on and provide the ads that show up with your Google search or Facebook page. Utilities have tariffs under which everyone who orders the same kind of service gets the same service at the same price. I understand how to apply that to a railroad or a power company or a telephone company, but I do not understand how to apply it to a search engine or social media provider or online megastore and neither does anyone else. R's, John