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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
posted at: 19:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments

comments...        (Jump to the end to add your own comment)


I believe your second criterion for common carriage is mistaken. Many common carriers (if I grok the term in fullness, which I admit I might not, as this is not my area of expertise) have "all you can eat" plans, though sometimes with "soft limits". This has been common for landline service in the USA for decades, for both local and long-distance, and is now common for high-end cellular plans.

(by Dave Aronson 20 Sep 2022 08:15)


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