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Regulate Twitter as a Utility?
Should Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram be considered as Public Utilities and regulated accordingly? This was the question posed yesterday by Scott Adams, of Dilbert (and election 2016 prognostication) fame. Of course the question itself assumes that the existing regulation of utilities, in their operations and services, is already a good (or least a necessary) activity of government, and that regulation in turn requires us to define what a Public Utility is. Merriam Webster’s definition is, to my mind, unsatisfactorily circular:
a business organization (as an electric company) performing a public service and subject to special governmental regulationhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public%20utility
Other definitions are more expansive and cogent:
A public utility is a business that furnishes an everyday necessity to the public at large… Typically a public utility has a Monopoly on the service it provides. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utilities
The first condition listed above is “an everyday necessity to the public at large.” Looking strictly at traditional utilities, we would all agree that water, electricity, sewage disposal, and natural gas are “everyday necessities”. Increasingly, internet access is considered essential too. The companies (or in many cases the municipalities) that provide these to us are providing them to all comers (for a price) within their service areas. Are the issues of necessity and “to the public at large” the only factors, however, in the motivation for regulation?
The corollary condition above: “Typically a public utility has a monopoly on the service it provides,” is key to understanding the motivation for government regulation. After all, our electricity, tap water, sewage disposal, natural gas, and cable TV / internet are nearly always sole source to us as end users – that is to say we lack any competitive choice because it is highly unlikely that there would be multiple sources of any of these services available at our homes or businesses; sewers, water pipes, gas, and electric lines are expensive to lay and there just is not room to have competing branches of these under our streets and foundations. For entirely natural reasons, we are all largely stuck with what’s there. These are natural local monopolies, and we have more than a century of legal precedent for treating monopolies differently from other businesses. These services are deemed necessary, we are all stuck with monopolies providing them, and so our state and federal governments regulated them.
Why the regulation? The justification usually given is that this is for our own protection. Monopolies (so the argument usually goes) will act with caprice towards their captive customers, inflate prices beyond what is fair, arbitrarily deny necessary services, restrict services beyond reason, and otherwise abuse customers who cannot seek redress through a competitive marketplace. In other words, utilities have no competition and so there is no natural limit to what they might do to us, including cutting off service just because they do not like us, or do not approve of us for racial, religious, political, or social reasons. (mind you, I’m not saying I agree with this rationale, I’m just laying it out)
A public utility, once regulated, is restricted in how it conducts its business. Its prices are negotiated with the government. Its services are dictated by the government. Its every-day practices and rules are set by the government. For instance, if you are late in paying your water bill, your water company cannot immediately turn off your water – it must follow a defined process and give you ample time to make your account current. The utilities cannot put undue restrictions on what you do with the service either, nor arbitrarily change its terms of service. Whether you decide to use your electricity to play video games all day, run a wood shop, or write for a white-supremacist website, your electric company cannot stop or censure you (with exceptions being made for activities or equipment that could damage the grid or degrade service for your neighbors). So long as you pay your bills (and whatever you are doing is legal), they have to let you use their product at your own discretion, and they cannot punish you or cancel your service.
Now to the meat of Adams’s argument (emphasis mine):
My sketchy understanding of the law is that the government is only responsible for making sure the government itself is not abridging free speech. I think most of us agree that we don’t want the government volunteering for any more work than the constitution says it should be doing.
But shouldn’t the federal government get involved if a few monopoly corporations start to control the national conversation by filtering out voices that disagree with them?
Why is Adams looking at this?
For example, Twitter is apparently “shadowbanning” me because of my past Trump tweets, or so I assume. That means my tweets only go out to a subset of my followers. The rest don’t know I tweeted. My followers tell me this is the case. They have to visit my timeline to see my tweets…
Realistically, can I quit Twitter and be a successful media personality without it? Not in today’s world. The only way I could make that work is by having a huge presence on Facebook or Instagram.
But that might be a problem too…
Adams here is a necessity for being “a successful media personality”, which on its own hardly seems to about “an everyday necessity to the public at large”, but is it a necessity in a more general sense? Is Twitter a necessity for the public at large outside of celebrities and pundits? Is it a public necessity to be able to broadcast your thoughts to anyone who wants to listen? Has social media in general (which Adams also addresses) turned into a necessity in our lives? Strictly speaking, electricity is not a necessity per se, but even the Amish find ways to use it within their lives. Has mass communication capability offered by social media raised to the level of necessity as well? One could argue that social media is turning that way as it is now a means open to all for the spread of news (or disinformation), opinion, and gossip, and that it bypasses the traditional outlets and gatekeepers of information.
Is Twitter monopoly-like? If it is a monopoly, is it exhibiting the worst behaviors so feared of monopolies? Twitter is certainly proving to be arbitrary and capricious with its users, if reports from Adams and others are true. If a customer is using the service in a way that Twitter does not approve, then Twitter will remove the user, but the terms under which this is done are opaque. If Shadow-banning (that is filtering or blocking communications without admitting to it or citing just cause) is a real phenomenon, is Twitter not abusing its customers? Is Twitter restricting service to its customers because of their personal politics?
If social media is a public necessity, something that, like electricity and running water, should be equally accessible to all under equal terms, and if Twitter is a monopoly for its particular type of service, should it then be audited and regulated by state or federal governments to ensure its good behavior?
I can’t be 100% sure that Twitter is shadowbanning me to limit my political speech. They might have a bug in their system, for example. But it would be a big coincidence if they are not, given how many Trump supporters were targeted by Twitter in the past year.
…That lack of transparency is just as much of a problem as an actual abridgement of free speech. if I can’t know whether my freedom of speech is being limited by corporate overlords, how can I have trust in the Republic? And without trust, the system falls apart.
I want to trust my government, but without freedom of speech, I find that impossible. That’s why I support creating a law requiring the government to audit the major social media sites to certify that freedom of speech still exists for all classes of users. (Within reason.)
You might think there is not much risk of losing the right of free speech in the United States. But keep in mind that I have already lost my free speech in a practical sense. The social media tools you take for granted are not available to me in their full form.
Is Adams right here? Is Twitter interfering in the free speech of Americans, and should it be tamed? Or should we allow the marketplace to eventually sort this out, letting competitors eventually break its monopoly on communication?
Published in Law
Then many republicans will boycott twitter (removing its advantage of having many people already on the network) and the market will be open to a new business that has more free speech principles. It may be good thing in the long run.
If even National Review uses Facebook for its commenting system, and people on Ricochet still watch network news and American film, I pretty much despaired of that ever happening. But then again, I never thought the Soviet Union would cease to exist in my lifetime, either.
I agree with Jamie. And Instagram actually lends itself better to artwork. The political commentary might seem out of place there, but he can make it work. He can also get millions of followers on there, and he can tell them what Twitter did to him. To me, a utility is a necessity of life, like water and power. I’m not on Twitter, and I’m still alive. The day we call Twitter a necessity of life will be a sad one.
SA has an Instagram story too. Am I correct that FB owns Istagram?
Wow, I didn’t know that. But yes they do, according to Forbes.
This entire discussion is ridiculous.
1. Twitter and Facebook directly compete against each other in the same space. They’re not monopolies. Frankly, if Twitter is such a monopoly, it should be making much more money instead of being such a ramshackle mess of a company that nobody wants to buy.
2. If Mr. Adams’ new business venture is entirely dependent on one website that he doesn’t own or control, perhaps that indicates a flaw in his business model, rather than a flaw with everybody but him that the government needs to fix.
3. It is especially pathetic to see paying users on a conservative social media site suddenly claim that everything must be on Twitter or Facebook because nothing else can compete.
You mean Ricochet? Scott Adams isn’t a member.
I agree. But also is there a hint of paranoia going on with Mr. Adams? After all, doesn’t Trump himself have about 30 million followers? Why would twitter shadow ban Adams while allowing Trump the “full Monty”?
One of the points Adams raised was that Instagram too has gone after people by revoking their “verified” status, something that is vital for celebrities, models, etc. The whole point of a “verified” status is that you are proving that this account is really you and not an imitator, of which there are many.
So the upshot is, on Instagram, that if they don’t like you they will not allow you to have a verified account, and that will allow detractors and frauds to swamp you off. It is capricious.
Here is another problem on the barriers-to-entry issue: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Tumblr are all integrated into many devices now. If you started a competing service to Twitter you are already operating at a severe disadvantage as IOS, Android, OSX, and Windows provide automatic access to the mainline services, not yours. You have no chance of achieving similar hard-coding integration unless you attain a large user base, and you will find it very hard to attain that user base without the integration.
Shadow banning Trump, the POTUS, would be a disaster for Twitter. Doing the same to a low level goad like Adams does not carry any penalty.
I’d say it is rather interesting actually. As I said earlier, this is just an opening discussion on this topic. I put it forth because I thought it was worth the debate, and because I do expect many more people to start asking similar things. Better to “get our ducks in a row” now than to wait till some airhead Congress Critter or some hack state attorney general actually puts forth a bill or files a lawsuit.
And bear in mind I’m largely playing devil’s advocate here.
Your point on Twitter being a hot mess is quite true. How they intend to make money is anyone’s guess. But Twitter and Facebook do not really compete against each other, they are different services entirely.
Now now, let’s not get harsh here. This has been anything but pathetic.
Don’t go insulting your fellow members.
I do not twit, facebook or instawhatsis. I believe I am happier for that. I have noticed no limitation in my life. Ergo, not a utility.
Yup. It’s more like a scourge. This argument is like claiming the Black Death is a utility.
Well for sure, but he wasn’t POTUS two years ago. The truth is I have never tweeted and only read tweets when they are reproduced in other formats, so I am really not qualified to talk. It is, philosophically, a difficult situation. Do we want them to regulate terrorists tweeting out instructions? Who is going to be the Tweet God?
I believe that both options have pros and cons.
I think it would be helpful if social media companies had to worry about it, like waking up in the middle of the night sweating, worry about it.
I think most of the benefits could be obtained without actually having to do much of anything.
Bullies prey on the weak.
Isn’t Adams using the same approach (his complaints) that he extolled Trump for all during the campaign except, of course, this time Adams is attacking the medium itself?
I don’t view this as a free speech issue at all since these social media sights are simply private business enterprises. But I do have difficulty seeing how discriminatory policies against individuals unrelated to infractions of some sort of prohibited relationship behavior serve a business model. Anyone here can tell me how this is a positive business act? This sort of precedent certainly seems to argue for stringent anti-trust approaches related to business mergers and consolidations in industries so that we don’t get into very undesirable monopoly conditions. New business entry into markets and consumer choice should be favored and not allowed to be foreclosed by a free market society.
I mean the people on Ricochet who have commented in this thread in favor of Twitter and Facebook being regulated, asserting that it is impossible to succeed in the social media space without being Twitter and Facebook, despite the fact they are making these statements on a site that is not Twitter or Facebook. And they’re paying money to do it, too.
Nobody can compete in this space? Somebody better tell @roblong, @peterrobinson, @blueyeti et al.
Scott Adams is simply a business owner who believes life is unfair to him and thinks the government should fix it. In that regard, he’s no different than the hardware store owner who gets run out of town by The Home Depot. Except he tried to make his hardware store dependent on the Internet version of the Home Depot after the Home Depot came to town ten years ago.
iOS, Android, OSX and Windows publish APIs that anyone who can write an app can use to “integrate.” That’s what all of those operating systems are for.
If you’re intending to be a serious competitor in this space and you want a mobile app, it isn’t that much more expensive to have than having a website.
Plus, all of those sites you just mentioned were not the first entrants in their markets and did not have the benefit of pre-existing integration when they started.
Well, in that case, the discussion is less ridiculous than than I suggested. I still consider the idea of regulating Twitter as a utility silly, but the discussion still has value.
I will note that before saying something that might be insulting again. ;)
Glad you lightened up a little. I agree with your position and when this issue shows up affecting the Left negatively somewhere they will start pushing to regulate it so we will have gone through the arguments. I don’t think we even know what Scott Adams’ true position is on what we have been discussing here.
Well, not quite.
They ended up in different positions in the now-more-stable dynamic equilibrium of the social networking market. But that was not the case early on, and may not remain that way in the future.
I remember quite vividly when Twitter started becoming a big deal, even though I was not a Twitter user, because Facebook started imitating them. My friends treated the arrival the News Feed by posting status updates basically saying “Facebook isn’t Twitter [CoC] YOU FACEBOOK!”
Facebook also tried to buy Twitter for $500 million at one point.
(Disclaimer: I now do not use either Facebook or Twitter)
Yeah, I regret using the word “pathetic” here. I think either “silly” or “ironic” would have been both more appropriate and accurate.
And this is precisely the point. The market can address this problem if it wants to. The fact that it doesn’t care if Scott Adams is shadowbanned is not an indicator that regulation is required.
Besides, if you want to depoliticize control over what content is acceptable on social media, who in their right mind thinks that getting governement regulators involved is a good way to do it?
Scott Adams is a smart guy, and it’s clear to me that he understands people and communications. This proposal makes it clear to me that he doesn’t understand economics or government.
That’s a pretty good observation. Dunno if it’s true but it’s worth considering.
It’s a speech issue because Twitter has free speech rights that would be curtailed under the proposed regulation scheme. But yes, Mr. Adams’ free speech is not being curtailed, even if Twitter is treating him unfairly.
Just minor pedantry on my part. I like reinforcing this idea that businesses have free speech rights also and that they’re important to protect.
I’ll defend Joe here. He didn’t say other members are pathetic. He said the argument is. I don’t think it’s helpful, but it’s different. I don’t think I’m pathetic, but when I reflect on my romantic history, I’ve plainly behaved in a pathetic manner at times.
I agree on the regulatory aspect as it relates to free speech. Hasn’t been raised here but questions lurk in the back of my mind about discrimination by bakers not serving those where doing so violates their religious beliefs. I don’t see how anti-discrimination laws fit very well in a free market where freedom of expression is a core value, maybe a little difference for corporations that get additional legal protections from the state not available to individuals in the marketplace. For clarity, I generally support anti-discrimination laws applied to governments.