Currently we have corporations with total power to control content. Having a (somewhat) representative system making the decisions may not be great but it is better than what we have now.
> Currently we have corporations with total power to control content.
But see, this is exactly what I'm talking about above:
"The corporations control everything we post."
"Are you going to take away their power?"
"We're going to give them everybody's drivers license and then spy on teenagers. That will help, somehow."
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Even when you're outright stating the problem as "the companies are too big and have too much power and rival governments in their abilities to control discourse" you're still not jumping to antitrust, you're still jumping towards just giving the government power over speech. But what could possibly be a more straightforward and direct solution to "this company has too much power" than breaking up the company and just making it less powerful?
Just as a general reminder, nobody on HN owes these companies anything. We're not obligated to protect Meta's ability to own Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and a VR platform all at the same time. We're certainly not obligated to throw teenagers under the bus before we throw Facebook under the bus.
But hey, don't like antitrust? Weird, but OK that's fine. If you're extremely worried about Facebook controlling public squares online and you also don't want to break up the company, there are data-portability bills and account-migration bills and API-access bills and privacy bills that we could pass to help fix that problem and what's cool about those bills is that they don't likely violate the 1st Amendment and they don't open the doors up for the government to engage in viewpoint discrimination against marginalized groups.
Look, I'm not going to get into a debate about whether or not Facebook has too much power.
The absurd part is if somebody looks at Facebook and says, "wow, they have way too much power -- I guess the only thing to do is get rid of this constitution here." It's this weirdly additive model of power where the only solution to power abuse is more power. You can't not have a gatekeeper in front of the public square, that's unthinkable -- the only thing you're allowed to do is choose a different gatekeeper to have instead and to make them as powerful as the original gatekeeper. You're not allowed to pass laws directly removing an abusive behavior, you can only empower somebody else to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't abuse.
I'm not going to debate with you about whether Facebook is large enough to be a problem that requires a regulatory response; but I suspect regardless of your views on that both you and I agree that if Facebook does have too much power, requiring age verification online and massively expanding the government's ability to perform targeted censorship is not a rational response to that problem.
I expect they'll aim for a system where people looking to control others will use it as a bludgeon to force their self-righteous moralizing on everyone else.
They could as easily just require phone manufacturers to lock the phones of minors so parents have to approve what sites they can go to and what apps they can use. There already exists software to control PCs.
Instead, they wish to punish everyone online because irresponsible parents can't be arsed to control where their children roam.
