A Different View On Splitting Facebook, Deplatforming And Shutting Down Conservative Speech

Two days ago, the news was that Facebook's co-founder, Chris Hughes, says it's time for the government to split them up.  I just think the real agenda might not be what it appears to be.

It struck me when I heard that Zuckerberg had asked for more government oversight for Facebook and the internet in general (overview) that the play is to get more power and control for his company.  Getting government involved absolves Facebook of any responsibility.  "We were just following orders", to borrow a phrase.

In legalese there's a difference between being a publisher and a platform.  A platform simply relays what anybody posts and isn't expected to be able to monitor every word.  A publisher decides what gets published so they're responsible for anything that they publish.  Think of a platform as a bulletin board that gets plastered with notices for babysitters, pets, pet sitters, jobs and so on.  A publisher is the news media companies you know.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest have been platforms, but are being pushed into being publishers by legal rulings around the world.  That makes them responsible for all the content that shows up there.

Facebook is the 900 pound gorilla in the room of social media.  They have essentially zero competition, having swamped out the early approaches (MySpace, and so on) and bought up any place that threatened to be competition.  But just as they replaced the predecessors, and just like all High Tech companies, they're in constant fear of the Next Big Thing that pushes them into irrelevance.  They're afraid of a smart startup. 

So let's say Chris Hughes gets his way and Facebook gets split up and made into a utility.  That will ensure that they can never get any competition.  It's the same viewpoint that made all the large Internet companies back Net Neutrality: they already have a lawyers on the payroll so it's less of a burden for them to comply with the Fed.gov rules than a small, startup company would.  The startups would have to hire lawyers.

Here’s what’s was really going on with net neutrality. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. The imposition of a rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.

Assuming the big ones, Facebook, Twitter, and Google (YouTube) are begging the Feds to control them so that they become untouchable monopolies (in perpetuity) how could they force that?  How about making a bunch of egregious decisions about whom and what to ban?  Create lots of public outrage to make people say the Feds "have got to do something!"  Oh, it would be deliciously ironic if they could get those icky, deplorable "small government conservatives" to beg for government control, so let's make sure we make lots of them mad.  And if the Feds don't do anything, it's not like there's some place else for those deplorables to go.

(900 lb. gorilla in the room)

Just a concept that's been running in my mind.  I'm not saying it's definitely what's going on.  I'm asking how what's going on would be different if it was what they were doing.