Applying the nondiscrimination principle to Facebook and YouTube could play out in various ways. Congress has broad authority to regulate the business model of public utilities, and it could ban targeted advertising or any form of algorithmic amplification. Another option would be to ban all advertising, targeted or not, meaning that the platforms would be funded either by non-targeted ads or a subscription service. Instead of ads, YouTube might cost $10 a month, roughly as much as Amazon Prime. Instead of picking and choosing what content is likely to appeal to usersor, put more cynically, to addict usersFacebook would serve up content in the order that it was put on the platform. The upshot of public-utility regulation is that citizens would have their choice among a handful of platforms administered by technology companies and, separately, news outlets run by (hopefully) responsible publishers.
Big Tech doesnt want any reform. It will spend billions of dollars trying to persuade us all to do nothing. And, because the tech companies finally decided to throttle Donald Trump, and to kick off anti-vaxxers, progressives may be tempted to believe that doing nothing is, in fact, the best option. So long as Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and Googles Sundar Pichai make the decisions that progressives might like, we are relieved of either justifying a governmental ban, or allowing speech that we might not want to exist. It allows us to pay lip service to the expansive mid-20th-century version of the First Amendment, and the importance of a thriving, open, public sphere, instead of proposing a more curbed First Amendment or defending the right of those with horrific views to speak. Facebook, in particular, understands this dynamic, and even hired a group of elite academics and journalists and made a large public show of giving them power to override a fraction of Zuckerbergs decisions. The goal of the Facebook Oversight Board is clearly to give the public comfort that speech decisions are made by philosopher kings, not investors who want to maximize behavioral-targeting profitsand to stave off legal reforms.
Read: Facebook is a doomsday machine
Those who are drawn to this apparent safety should be aware that they are effectively endorsing an alternative to a democracy. The jurist Louis Brandeis famously said, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cant have both. That statement is even more apt when it comes to communications: We can have democracy, or we can have editing power in the hands of a few ad moguls, but we definitely cant have both.
Break up the ad moguls, break up the publishers, reinstate the rule of law, recognize the public-utility role of big, networked social-media companies, and we have a fighting chance. In other words, follow the communications policy that defined American law until the 1970s: Regulate the infrastructure, enforce the common law of libel and defamation, and otherwise maximally disperse power.
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The Government Needs to Find Big Tech a New Business Model - The Atlantic
