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January 14, 2020 12:20 am PST

Podcast: Inaction is a form of action

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action,, where I 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.

Imagine two different restaurants: one prohibits any discussion of any subject the management deems political and the other has no such restriction. Its easy to see that wed say that you have more right to freely express yourself in the Anything Goes Bistro than in the No Politics at the Table Diner across the street.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/GgmEFhxQwbM/podcast-inaction-is-a-form-of.html

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