- Mar 2022
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www.eff.org www.eff.org
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But now the government of Ukraine has called on ICANN to disconnect Russia from the internet by revoking its Top Level domain names
What is striking about this request and EFF's argument against is how this goes against "common carrier" principles—although this phrase isn't specifically used. In the net neutrality wars, "common carrier" status means that the network pipes are dumb...they neither understand nor promote/demote particular kinds of traffic. Their utility is in passing bits from one location another in the service of broader connectivity. "Common carrier" is a useful phrase for net neutrality in the United States...as a phrase, it may not translate well to other languages.
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- Aug 2021
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The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.
Compare social media with the newspaper business from this perspective.
People joined social media not knowing the end effects, but now don't have a choice of platform after-the-fact. Social platforms accelerate the disinformation using algorithms.
Because there is choice amongst newspapers, people can easily move and if they'd subscribed to a racist fringe newspaper, they could easily end their subscription and go somewhere else. This is patently not the case for any social media. There's a high hidden personal cost for connectivity that isn't taken into account. The government needs to regulate this and not the speech portion.
Social media should be considered a common carrier and considered as such. It was an easier and more logical process in the telephone, electricity and other areas to force this as the cost of implementation for them was magnitudes of order higher. The data formats and storage for social should be standardized (potentially even in three or more formats) and that should be the common carrier imposed. Would this properly skirt the First Amendment issues?
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- Dec 2019
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www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov