Oligopólio x Censura

In my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action, I discuss how the US government's unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn't allowed -- that is, how the USG's complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment. 


We're often told that "it's not censorship when a private actor tells you to shut up on their own private platform" -- but when the government decides not to create any public spaces (say, by declining to create publicly owned internet infrastructure) and then allows a handful of private companies to dominate the privately owned world of online communications, then those companies' decisions about who may speak and what they may say become a form of government speech regulation -- albeit one at arm's length.

I don't think that the solution to this is regulating the tech platforms so they have better speech rules -- I think it's breaking them up and forcing them to allow interoperability, so that their speech rules no longer dictate what kind of discourse we're allowed to have. 

(via aqui)