None of these private firms can punish you for not using their service.

None of these private firms can punish you for not paying for their service.

None of these private firms can prevent anyone and everyone from competing with them on any metric, with the caveat that the MONOPOLY power, government, does grant some benefits of monopoly on these firms by granting them “corporation” status.

None of these firms has power over you. Yet you argue that govt, the institution WITH POWER OVER YOU ought to get involved and invest these firms with power?

Hell no! You don’t like the road, use another. Oh, you can’t, because it’s a GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY. Ready for there to be no Diaspora, because Facebook has a govt granted monopoly?

Competition after the government abolished its monopoly on the “internet” in 1993 is what has allowed all these great services to evolve and grow. To assume that such innovation will continue if that monopoly power is reasserted is to ignore not just history, but basic economics.

Maybe you’re too young to remember what it was like living with a monopoly telephone provider. Looking at the cheap flat-rate ubiquitous service I have now, I do NOT want to go back!

I remember a few years back when Twitter was still pretty new and there were all sorts of great ideas for using the Twitter environment to do things like citizen science.

Indeed. I knew of several starts on interesting ways to use Twitter in classes – Purdue was, at one time, doing some interesting things with it in some classes. Many of the changes Twitter has made has ended those discussions, not because the changes were impossible to deal with, but the “promise” (read that as likelihood) of more future changes made the prospect of maintenance and adaption unappealing.

The US Senate can pass a resolution requiring Obama to bomb Twitter. That would not solve anything, and of course it can’t really happen, but the debate in the Senate would be high entertainment.

I would not be surprised to find out that there are some clowns who would consider that possible. I’m not sure how so many of the current crop of law and policy makers can seemingly be so ignorant of the powers and dangers of today’s technology and social media, but they are.