I am wondering if we could solve the current madness with arbitrary content policing by waiving copyright protection for monopolistic platforms and enforcing interoperability.
Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content, and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some content, the fork could easily show it from a backup, leading the users to quickly flee the over-restrictive platform to the fork with the most reasonable moderation.
As a nice side effect, this would kill the rotten ad-based revenue model where everything is free, but your data is sold to the highest bidder. Ad-blocking forks would quickly take over the originals, so in order to be profitable, the original platforms would have to charge the costs to the users directly (or to the forks that would pass them to the users with a possible markup for their added value).
That said, it would be completely against the interests of the VC crowd that wields considerable political influence, so I cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Europe is another story though.
So I pay my monthly subscription to FAANG which obliges me to allow every spammer in the world to syndicate my content, and the result is that conversations I start have replies spread across an unlimited number of platforms, each with their own EULA. Jeez, and I thought the status quo of social media verged on dystopic...
Thats true but the license users agree to usually says they grant the platform full rights. Users still retain their rights but you would have to contact every reddit user for their permission individually.
Waiving copyright protection for FAANG wouldn't let you get at the content of the platforms - it'd just give you some poorly-debugged code for running your own platform.
What you're asking for is some kind of legally-mandated interoperability between platforms.
Telephone companies have had it for decades, maybe even centuries. It works great. They're not responsible for words spoken on their telephone network as long as they don't regulate that content in any way.
Section 230 simply should have offered common carrier immunity to websites when they act as common carriers. Problem solved.
Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content, and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some content, the fork could easily show it from a backup, leading the users to quickly flee the over-restrictive platform to the fork with the most reasonable moderation.
As a nice side effect, this would kill the rotten ad-based revenue model where everything is free, but your data is sold to the highest bidder. Ad-blocking forks would quickly take over the originals, so in order to be profitable, the original platforms would have to charge the costs to the users directly (or to the forks that would pass them to the users with a possible markup for their added value).
That said, it would be completely against the interests of the VC crowd that wields considerable political influence, so I cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Europe is another story though.