There is no way to do it without the law being super complex and overreaching.
Platforms cannot be common carriers because one of the main motivations for the creation of that classification was that there were geographical restrictions to access to competitors. AT&T is the only game in town in a lot of places in the US. This is not so online, you can easily within 5 minutes begin using any of a plethora of alternatives to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Reddit to publish your thoughts and engage with other people.
I don't see how that translates to "platforms cannot be common carriers".
But yes there's lots of alternatives to Twitter.
I can make an account on the well-respected and not-at-all-blocked-by-my-work-VPN site "Gab".
I can write an article on medium.
I can make a webpage.
I can robodial my message to random numbers in the phone book.
I can go outside and yell.
Many of those same arguments apply to phone calls. Taking the argument the other way, now that we don't have geographical restrictions with cell phones, T-Mobile should be able to censor links to TheDonald, and maybe even listen to our calls and decide to drop us if they don't like what we're saying, because there's competitors.
I think it would help limit the scope of the legislation if it were only applied to corporations (or big companies, by some definition), and small-time independent operators still had 230 protections. That's getting off the discussion of why we're repealing 230 though.
There is no way to do it without the law being super complex and overreaching.
Platforms cannot be common carriers because one of the main motivations for the creation of that classification was that there were geographical restrictions to access to competitors. AT&T is the only game in town in a lot of places in the US. This is not so online, you can easily within 5 minutes begin using any of a plethora of alternatives to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Reddit to publish your thoughts and engage with other people.
I don't see how that translates to "platforms cannot be common carriers".
But yes there's lots of alternatives to Twitter.
I can make an account on the well-respected and not-at-all-blocked-by-my-work-VPN site "Gab".
I can write an article on medium.
I can make a webpage.
I can robodial my message to random numbers in the phone book.
I can go outside and yell.
Many of those same arguments apply to phone calls. Taking the argument the other way, now that we don't have geographical restrictions with cell phones, T-Mobile should be able to censor links to TheDonald, and maybe even listen to our calls and decide to drop us if they don't like what we're saying, because there's competitors.
I think it would help limit the scope of the legislation if it were only applied to corporations (or big companies, by some definition), and small-time independent operators still had 230 protections. That's getting off the discussion of why we're repealing 230 though.
You make a good point with the mobile carriers.