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To: Boogieman
AT&T used to be the only phone company and if social media sites can censor you then what is to stop all the individual telecommunications companies from doing the same for voice communications? What is to stop ISPs from blocking content from any site they dislike or from forbidding the routing of packets to any IP address, even the one for your mobile phone? The Internet infrastructure in America is the public square now and social media sites run on it.

Sorry, but your reasoning sounds like a religion and you refuse to acknowledge that the government might have a compelling interest in protecting the right of individual citizens to exercise free speech on the Internet’s public square. Twitter might be a private company but it is operating on our internet that is installed on rights-of-way granted by the public and over spectrums regulated by the government.

31 posted on 10/18/2018 1:53:49 PM PDT by WMarshal (America First)
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To: WMarshal

“AT&T used to be the only phone company and if social media sites can censor you then what is to stop all the individual telecommunications companies from doing the same for voice communications?”

You’re not making much sense here. What does AT&T have to do with social media sites? Social media sites are not service providers or carriers. They certainly do not have a monopoly on communication on the internet.

“What is to stop ISPs from blocking content from any site they dislike or from forbidding the routing of packets to any IP address, even the one for your mobile phone?”

Well, competition for one. An ISP that chose to do that would lose business to other ISPs that don’t.

“The Internet infrastructure in America is the public square now and social media sites run on it.”

Still not making much sense. If the infrastructure is the public square (and it hasn’t been legally defined as such yet) that still doesn’t make a social media site the public square.

“Sorry, but your reasoning sounds like a religion”

Huh? What have I said that is religious in nature?

“... you refuse to acknowledge that the government might have a compelling interest in protecting the right of individual citizens to exercise free speech on the Internet’s public square.”

Well, it’s not really up to me to acknowledge anything of the sort. It’s up to the courts to do that, and they haven’t.

“Twitter might be a private company but it is operating on our internet that is installed on rights-of-way granted by the public and over spectrums regulated by the government.”

So is FreeRepublic. You going to argue that they have to let every leftie troll that wants to post here do that too? Otherwise, your argument that operating on the internet somehow opens a private company up to government regulation of what they can and can’t censor really doesn’t seem to be consistent.


34 posted on 10/18/2018 2:48:11 PM PDT by Boogieman
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