Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

←2022→ Months Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own. Subscribe to this blog RSS feed

Home :: Internet 19 Sep 2022 Why Facebook is not a common carrier Internet The ever-entertaining Fifth Circuit has recently upheld a strange Texas law that forbids most kinds of social media moderation. (Techdirt explains many of the reasons the court is wrong, so I won't try.) This brings us to the trendy question of whether Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be treated as common carriers. You can make a good argument to separate the lower level point to point data transport from the ISP, and make the former common carriage. Most countries in Europe do that, and it works well, with lots of competing ISPs sharing the common carriage wires that run into everyone's house. If I squint I can sort of see making ISP packet transport common carriage, what many people mean by network neutrality. There you run into issues of what is reasonable network management against overloads and abuse, and what is disfavoring people who aren't your friends. (Zero rating some services on mobile has that problem.) It also runs into the issue that most ISPs do more than transport packets. If they provide DNS and mail service, how is that regulated, since I don't think anyone would want to use a mail system that can't reject spam its users don't want, even if the spam is not illegal. But treating anything higher in the network stack than that as common carriage just shows that people don't understand what common carriage means. I believe every actual instance of common carriage has these two features: It sends physical things or messages from one point to another point, or at most one point to a specific set of points, like a multi-drop leased telephone line. The people who use it pay for it in proportion to how much stuff they send between those points. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and everything else on the web fail both of those tests. The idea that some online service should be required to distribute stuff for free, much less that they distribute stuff they dislike, is crazy.   posted at: 19:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/common.html

Topics Copyright Law - 29 Email - 228 ICANN - 127 Internet - 73 Money - 31 Security - 3 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam. 31 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Italian Apple Cake 589 days ago Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Network Abuse Clearinghouse My Mastodon feed

© 2005-2020 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.