Allen Farrington writes about

a rather odd belief about where, precisely, the power lies in this relationship—that Twitter, Facebook, and the like have amassed enormous power, are throwing it about wantonly, spiralling out of control, and must be constrained by the wise and impartial. A simpler thesis would be that the reason so much of “Big Tech” spontaneously coordinated as it did was a political calculus aimed at avoiding onerous regulation by currying favour with the incoming administration. Journalist Michael Tracey summarised the essential misdiagnosis of power like this: “The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to be absolutely ruthless. And in 12 days it is merging with the state. This [is] only the beginning. The real ‘threat’ at this point is crazed oligarchs + politicians using the ‘crisis’ to consolidate power.”

Michael Lind writes,

Define online opinion and video platforms as regular publishers, subject to traditional publishing regulations that seek to deter dissemination of libels, profanity, obscenity, intellectual property theft and so on. And define all the other big tech firms either as common carriers or public accommodations that are clothed in a public interest.

It sounds like an interesting idea, but it needs to be spelled out. I am not sure that I really understand what Lind means. And I am not sure that I would agree with him if I did.

I interpret Lind as saying that Amazon Web Services and Apple are common carriers, so that they cannot exclude Parler. But Parler is a regular publisher, so it is subject to all of the laws that apply to magazines.

I first learned about the Internet in terms of Ed Krol’s “pony express” metaphor. You put your content into an envelope, and the Internet delivers it to the recipient the way that the Pony Express used to deliver mail. In this metaphor, all of the responsibility for the content is on the sender, and all of the responsibility for what gets done with the content is on the recipient. The Pony Express riders who are in the middle are not responsible. That means that the companies that manufacture the routers are not responsible. The Internet backbone providers are not responsible. The Internet access providers are not responsible. They are all common carriers, if I understand Lind’s use of that term. Common carriers can plausibly deny responsibility for what the user sees.

Suppose we went with Lind’s system as I interpret it. If I were running YouTube, I would want to classify it as a common carrier, so that it is not allowed to exclude any content. I would push the responsibility for complying with publishing laws out to those who post content on YouTube. But that means I would have to stop creating “feeds” that offer suggestions of what to watch. The job of creating feeds is a publishing job, and YouTube would have to outsource that if it wants to avoid the burdens of being a publisher.

But what about, say, Gmail? Does the spam filter make Gmail a publisher?

National Affairs has an interesting forum on this topic. In an article about the issue of speech regulation on the big social media sites, Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman write,

Writing increasingly specific policies, hiring more moderators, developing appeals processes, automating speech moderation with machine learning, and outsourcing fact-checking decisions to “trusted sources” are all attempts shore up legitimacy by bolstering the validity of a process. “Because that’s the policy” holds much more legitimacy for us moderns than “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “Because I said so.”

. . .Any kind of legitimacy requires communal norms. Ironically, despite the language of the platforms — all that talk of community standards and norms — it is precisely in the ways they have failed to form coherent communities that they have been unable to find the legitimacy to enforce norms of speech.

They talk about the good old days when there were actual communities on the Internet. They formed around old Usenet groups or blogs. These have a real human moderator serving to police norms.

They have written a great essay, difficult to excerpt. Yet I found their diagnosis more persuasive than their prescription.

Some of it reminds me of my essay, How the Internet turned bad.

That is a subject of a memorial symposium for John Perry Barlow. So far, I have only read James Boyle’s essay asking whether the Internet is over. In a footnote, he writes,

6 One of the true architects of the internet, Vint Cerf, has a slide deck about blockchain with one slide in it. It takes the form of a flowchart. The flowchart box asks the question “Do I need a blockchain?” The arrow goes to a single answer. “No.”

Here is a provocative remark:

only the state has the power, status and administrative capability to become the Kantian superego of corporations

What I believe Boyle is saying is that a corporation is just a set of contracts, not a human being capable of understanding and following the Golden Rule. Therefore, only a set of legal constraints imposed by the government can induce corporations to act as if they were moral human beings.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. Some thoughts of mine.

1. Hal Varian took Barlow’s economic ideas very seriously, even though Barlow was no economist. Back when I was just starting to try to figure out the Internet, Varian recommended to me Barlow’s “economy of ideas” article in Wired, which now ironically resides behind a paywall.

2. In 1993, I heard a talk on the Internet’s governance structure by Vint Cerf (a last-minute substitute speaker!) at an MIT alumni dinner. I was struck by the beauty of it–the way that the IETFs formed, solved problems, an then went away.

3. I wrote a brief essay on the topics related to the symposium which I called How the Internet turned bad. It’s a good essay. A sample:

The masses came to the Internet. Many of the new arrivals were less technically savvy, were more interested in passively consuming entertainment than in contributing creatively, and were less able to handle uncensored content in a mature way. They have been willing to give up autonomy in exchange for convenience.

Also,

catering to the mass market can lead software developers to focus on making the software easy to learn rather than easy to use. This distinction may be useful for understanding how Facebook triumphed over blogging.

I recently noticed that one of the most favorably-viewed essays of mine on medium is the one about How the Internet Turned Bad. It says many things, including

I compare IETFs with government agencies this way:

— IETFs are staffed by part-time or limited-term volunteers, whose compensation comes from their regular employers (universities, corporations, government agencies). Agencies are staffed by full-time permanent employees, using taxpayer dollars.

— IETFs solve the problems that they work on. Agencies perpetuate the problems that they work on.

— A particular group of engineers in an IETF disbands once it has solved its problem. An agency never disbands.

When I hear calls for government regulation of the Internet, to me that sounds like a step backward. The IETF approach to regulation seems much better than the agency approach.

The whole essay is worth a re-read.