A Regulatory Framework for the Internet – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
▻https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-internet
The Three Frees
There are, in Internet parlance, three types of “free”:
“Free as in speech” means the freedom or right to do something
“Free as in beer” means that you get something for free without any additional responsibility
“Free as in puppy” means that you get something for free, but the longterm costs are substantial
(…)This distinction might square some of the circles I presented at the beginning: how might society regulate content without infringing on rights or destroying competitive threats to the largest incumbents?
Start with this precept: the Internet ought to be available to anyone without any restriction. This means banning content blocking or throttling at the ISP level with regulation designed for the Internet. It also means that platform providers generally speaking should continue to not be liable for content posted on their services (platform providers include everything from AWS to Azure to shared hosts, and everything in-between); these platform providers can, though, choose to not host content suppliers they do not want to, whether because of their own corporate values or because they fear boycott from other customers.
I think, though, that platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic content; in fact, the incentives of an advertising business drive them to focus on engagement, i.e. giving users what they want, no matter how noxious.
This distinct categorization is critical to developing regulation that actually addresses problems without adverse side effects. Australia, for example, has no need to be concerned about shared hosting sites, but rather Facebook and YouTube; similarly, Europe wants to rein in tech giants without — and I will give the E.U. the benefit of the doubt here — burdening small online businesses with massive amounts of red tape. And, from a theoretical perspective, the appropriate place for regulation is where there is market failure; constraining the application to that failure is what is so difficult.
Proposition selon laquelle les plateformes publicitaires telles que #facebook devraient être réglementées par le gouvernement, alors que les autres plateformes devraient être réglementées par le marché, le tout avec une infra neutre et libre pour tous. L’idée est que le contenu problématique ne soit pas intégré dans le modèle de tarification d’une plateforme publicitaire.
#Régulation #Plateformes #Plateformes_publicitaires #publicité #Liberté_expression #Monopoles #domination #GAFAM #Super-Aggrégateurs #censure #youtube #Apple #Google #Amazon #Facebook