When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".
Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
Yes, actually. It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network. If you wanted to use an answering machine not sold by Bell, you had to get it custom rewired by Bell and pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege:
> AT&T, citing the Communications Act of 1934, which stated in part that the company had the right to make changes and dictate "the classifications, practices, and regulations affecting such charges," claimed the right to "forbid attachment to the telephone of any device 'not furnished by the telephone company.'"
> Initially, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in AT&T's favor. It found that the device was a "foreign attachment" subject to AT&T control and that unrestricted use of the device could, in the commission's opinion, result in a general deterioration of the quality of telephone service.
It was challenged and the seller of the amplifier device ultimately won in federal court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... (Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.)
> Even then, you couldn't actually electronically connect a device, you could only acoustically couple it. Direct connection of modems wouldn't be legal until the 1980s.
In the late 90s, I remember watching the scenes in WarGames
(which came out in 1983) where Matthew Broderick's character is using a modem where you had to place the phone cradle on top of it and thinking why would you ever design a modem that way?
And of course the reason was to work around this stupidity.
> It was not until a landmark U.S. court ruling regarding the Hush-A-Phone in 1956 that the use of a phone attachment (by a third party vendor) was allowed for the first time; though AT&T's right to regulate any device connected to the telephone system was upheld by the courts, they were instructed to cease interference towards Hush-A-Phone users. A second court decision in 1968 regarding the Carterfone further allowed any device not harmful to the system to be connected directly to the AT&T network. This decision enabled the proliferation of later innovations like answering machines, fax machines, and modems.
From [2]:
> After the ruling, it was still illegal to connect some equipment to the AT&T network. For example, modems could not electronically connect to the phone system. Instead, Americans had to connect their modems mechanically by attaching a phone receiver to an acoustic coupler via suction cups.
It's not entirely stupidity. Acoustic modems also made sense for portability. Reporters in the 80s used to use things like TRS-80 Model 100 + an Acoustic modem to send stories back to the office over public telephones rather than have to hunt down a phone jack somewhere.
Australian here. I remember that scene, and I’ve always wondered what that was about too. I was using modems in the mid 90s and I never saw anything like that cradle device! Thankyou. That makes horrible, awful sense to me now.
+1 and this mentality persisted all the way through the Lucent bankruptcy, prior to which their business model was to sue everyone who had ever talked on a phone, right on up to the previous presidential administration which involved trying to place former telco execs on FCC regulatory boards to rewrite rules which aren't really rules.
But what they don't address is that HBOMax is already the worst streaming app on my TV, and therefore it doesn't matter how much money AT&T throws at politics. Their stuff sucks because they're AT&T, not because of some political misfortune.
The existing AT&T is just a zombie formed from 5 of the original 8 fragments of the old AT&T. I can’t help but wonder how many former coworkers at AT&T in 1981 where reunited in 2014 without ever having left the fragments.
At least some of the fragments were doing a lot of pushing out of older employees in the 2000s, so probably not a whole lot left, but I like the concept.
No, it's the previous AT&T with some parts factored out (most notably, Verizon). It also apparently managed to remerge several parts of itself over the years, which is mind boggling (how that didn't trigger immediate court action is beyond me): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Sounds like you can imagine the law permitting something horrific & ghastly.
I too can imagine that. But the restraints the law allowed to be imposed on our freedom sound absurd, sound outlandish to me now. We were in a situation that de-legitimizes the law & the legal system, and eventually we fixed that.
> Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
Also, it was illegal to sell connecting equipment, sure, but AT&T didn't go nearly as far as what we see today. They didn't do anything this bad. The question posed wasn't about the legality or ability to interoperate, to make devices.
The question was about the reprecussion. Hush-A-Phone & other companies did not have their corporate phone numbers dropped, did not lose their ability to make phone calls when the started making a device AT&T didn't like. AT&T took them to court & tried to get them to stop making devices, but they didn't retaliate by kicking their corporate entity off the network. AT&T also didn't search for people using the phone system to talk about using other means of communication & kick them off the phone network (something we've seen repeatedly, recently with Mastodon, although those policies may/may not have been improved recently). Facebook is acting far more like a bully than AT&T did, in my view.
>> It was illegal to connect any equipment beside Bell's equipment to the US telephone system. Not only would you be disconnected and possibly fined by your phone provider for doing so, but American law also made it illegal to sell such devices as well for use on the phone network.
Which is the exact thing which gave rise to phone phreaking and getting around the limitations on Bell Systems.
"Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley is a great book that examines these early hackers:
Directly-connected modems were an obvious threat to AT&T as this would enable high-bandwidth packet-based distribution over AT&T's network, including ultimately what we know as VOIP. AT&T fought packet-switched networks from the start:
Paul Baran: The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.
But they didn't ban the seller from using the phone system, they banned people from attaching a different machine to the system. That's like the Facebook trying to detect the extension and trying to block it. That's similar to some websites blocking ad blockers, while it would not go down well with Facebook users I think it's very different to what Facebook does here.
I wonder how much of the ban was from concern of poorly regulated voltage related device damage. Now at least FCC regulations alone protect against the worst because anything that cheap also tends to output significant noise on reserved spectrum(s).
Yeah, I always defend there should be a "law of scale". When you start making your own project, taking a risk, spending hours and hours working on something, it's fair for a single individual to have the right to make any calls in what they are doing. But when it expands to thousands of workers and millions of users (or even much, much less), your responsibilities and reach can not be the same anymore. Saying "I built it" is no justification. The growth and the contributions that are making something possible, users included, do not support the logic of "my house my rules" anymore.
This wasn't particularly related to this specific case, and visions and missions of companies should still be respected, but society does have a very warped concept of "property" when it involves their work or ideas.
Facebook isn't a monopoly, as evidenced by their recent outage resulting in 70M new Telegram users overnight.
Even so, as others have pointed out, the telcos did have arguably reasonable restrictions placed on what one could connect to the network.
But to put glorified web sites in the same class as government-sanctioned monopolies utilities tend to necessarily be is asinine. Your telco had to run physical wires across the land, gas company physical pipes everywhere, there was no practical means of a free competitive market, it's a completely different situation.
Nah. Nobody needs to use FB to communicate, there are many dozens of available communication platforms, you can't even sign up for FB without a phone number anyway, this idea that FB is some critical communication infrastructure is totally false.
For some countries Facebook, Instagram and WhatApp are the internet.
Official entities and company use them as the only form of communication with the citizens and customers.
This argument gives the platforms more credit than they're worth. It's been obvious for half a decade that social media is bad for mental health. I've cut it out of my life. I tell others to cut it out of their life. No one's under the impression that these platforms are good for anything. They're popular now, but they are not important.
Cigarettes are obviously bad for people's individual health, but we don't rely on individual responsibility to ensure children don't purchase themselves cigarettes.
I cut facebook out of my life almost 5 years ago before it was "cool" to do so. Its like junk food or cigarettes or anything else that is net bad for a person. I would say let people decide for themselves if they want to use it and you hope they make the smart choice of just saying no to facebook and all its toxicity that comes with it.
They are important because they contain a significant portion of many people's address books. When Facebook was offline a few days ago, I had no way of reaching about two thirds of my contacts. And I'm someone who's made a significant effort to move off of Facebook. There were people I wanted to contact that day that the only way to reach them would have been to ask mutual friends for other contact details. And there were a few people that I either don't have mutual friends with or who our mutual friends were also only reachable via Facebook. If legislation aims for some form of "interoperability" the main condition should be that, if Facebook were to disappear again, I would still have the ability to reach all of my Facebook contacts via another network.
I loathe Facebook and am hesitant to take its side on any issue. But if you cannot be bothered to ask your "contacts" for a phone number, email address, Telegram, whatever, I don't see why it is Facebook's responsibility to ensure you have access to these people 24/7.
That's a social issue, not a Facebook one. Interoperability is an insane ask that has absolutely no precedent, and I say that as one of the biggest FOSS enthusiasts this side of the Mississippi. There's simply no way that the United States government could force a private company's hand like that, and even if they did the fallout from that would be insane. Where do we stop with interoperability? Do all browsers need to share the same history storage format? Do all cloud storage providers need to use the same app? Do all of us need to use the same operating system, communication protocols and news outlets?
No, because we're different people. Some people are drawn to Facebook's firehose feed, and there's not really anything you can do to stop them in a free world. It's a disgusting, albeit perfectly legal exchange of goods and services. Microsoft and Apple fought long and hard to make sure consumer protection laws like that never saw the light of day.
>When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".
Facebook is nowhere near the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, as evidenced by the fact that the world didn't crash to a halt when it went down a few days ago. It's merely popular, but being popular doesn't mean it controls society or dictates its rules.
>Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?
That would be a valid comparison of Facebook owned the infrastructure of the internet, but they don't. It's trivially easy to communicate without Facebook.
This is like saying if you don't like the rules you can build your own multinational telephone network. There's a reason telecoms are subject to common carrier rules and I don't see why tech monopolies should be any different.
The crucial difference is lack of a right of way. The thing which creates an actual monopoly instead of the language degradation of monopoly to mean "But it is big and I don't like it!".
My understanding of common carrier rules is that they want to avoid a situation where a railroad or telephone operator who controlled the only available line could charge exorbitant rates to customers who had no alternatives. I don't really see how the same concern is true for Facebook - we have lots of options to disseminate information online.
I think you are seriously and intentionally misunderstanding the point. So far it was completely fine for Facebook to ban whoever they wanted and it was justified by them being a private company. Anybody who complained about it was told that they can build their own social network/cloud provider/payment provider.
It's fine if you're a small or medium size business that commands at most single digit % of the market. Facebook dominates ad spending and reach to the point that you can't just build your own, because they have a de facto monopoly/oligopoly over digital ads.
Let me ask you this: do you think Apple should be allowed to ban whoever they want from their platform justified by them being a private company? If you say no, then you should also say no to Facebook being allowed to do so. Otherwise you're just twisting the facts to support your political position.
Different people on the Internet will say different things. You can't really assign one collective motive to everything on the Internet and then say it's hypocritical.
And your own social network will fail because of network effects. If Facebook can be as terrible as they have been and retain their users, it's really because of their users that they're being propped up with a successful business. I gotta say at that point even I start thinking they owe their users more than a free market exchange would imply.
Not to mention we're talking about them sending a pretty formal legal threat. Would you philosophy in this case not be "if you don't like their browser extension, don't use it?"
If you're building a new social network today, it makes sense to tap into an existing social graph so you can bootstrap your network with an existing ecosystem. Michelle Lim made a great case for this in her post here:
> And your own social network will fail because of network effects
Speak for yourself. Not everything needs to be 'planet scale', I run a few social networks and they do just fine.
And I agree with Facebook in this case, if you have someone come into your house with the sole intent of burning it down, of course you're going to kick them out. It's no different than dealing with trolls or other bad actors.
Burning down Facebook? What on Earth are you talking about? It makes it easier for users to remove their own accounts across multiple services. It's a common interface to features the social networks themselves provide. This is the opposite of a bad actor.
I certainly think the same argument applies, FWIW - I don't think Apple is being reasonable if they ban people from services for fixing their own devices or other people's devices. Not sure if you were implying I would feel differently about that instance.
If you don't like the rules of English you can always invent your own language - sure you won't be able to talk to anyone but isn't that freedom enough?
All these large technology platforms are as ubiquitous as utilities, as powerful as governments, and as unregulated as can be. Their network effects and access to capital gives them unusually strong protection from competition, and also the ability to just copy smaller competitors with impunity. After all, what legal action could a cash-tight startup take up against a behemoth with a war chest in the tens of billions of Dollars? Given their size, scope, and the lack of healthy competition, they need to be reigned in. We need to treat social media platforms like we treat telecom services - as common carriers. And we need to treat other large tech platforms as public utilities as well.
When they are the de facto form of communication for a significant percentage of the population, it starts to go from "their rules" territory to "society's rules".
Can you imagine being cut off from the phone system 40 years ago because you were selling answering machines?