Most entertaining and enlightening. I would, however, like to point out a few things.
- Our forepersons were a lot brighter than we are. Originally, an individual/organization could possess only so many, and it wasn't very many, broadcast licenses. This had nothing to do with making money and everything to do with ensuring diversity of the airwaves. This went by the wayside of Republican pressure years ago. But wait, you're going to say, the airwaves were a public good, that's why the government could control them. In the age of the interwebs, the government has nothing to control. Oh! ye of little imagination. ICANN controls the assignment of IP addresses which ultimately get translated into URLs. Without the IP, you're not on the web. That's part A. Part B is that the government gets to decide the definition of monopoly.
- Speaking of definitions, a monopoly is, of course, where there is only one company providing a good or service but another part of the definition revolves around the horizontal and/or vertical integration of the company. John D. Rockefeller wasn't the only guy pumping oil but he was one of the few that pumped the oil, refined it, and had the distribution system to sell the products. You have a similar situation here since Parler which is where all the right wing wackos went. Parler is essentially just a software house that has developed the apps to be facebook-like. But getting on line requires server farms, network operations centers (NOCs), and, most importantly, the sysadmins that keep the systems up to speed, and running smoothly, the dbadmins to keep the RDBMs that underlie a lot of the interface apps touched up and running, and then there's the hardware guys. Electronics has come a long way since when I started with vacuum tube equipment but it will still break. All that's expensive so you buy hosting services from the likes of Google. Until Google pulls the plug on you. Parler has an option - they can set up their own NOC, get an assignment from ICANN and they'll be up and running again and millions poorer. Or, they could get another web hosting service like godaddy. Frankly, a thinking person would probably conclude that those hosting services were a whole lot like a utility.
- Finally (yes, I will shut up), we need to address the new, unique aspects driven solely by the new technology known as computing. The most evil corporation in the world is Kraft but the second most evil one is Micro$oft. What all this has to do with is facebook. I mean what do you do if you want to be on a more open system and sign onto Parler and you have correspondents (they certainly wouldn't be friends probably) over on facebook? They're screwed because almost certainly facebook and Parler don't talk to each other. But that doesn't have to be. I don't know how much time you spend out on the interwebs but there's a lot of apps that will let you sign in using a bunch of different other apps. You want to sign in using Twitter, Discus, facebook, etc.? No es problemo. How's that done you ask. The acronym you're looking for is API - application programming interface. That tells third party programmers what they have to feed the application to get answers and how those answers will be structured. Could you log onto Parler and have your stuff viewable by someone on facebook? Yes. But only if the government told them they had to.
- One final thought. The government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (which I consider unconstitutional) granting as it does government power they didn't have before. Can they not pass a law that denies powers to companies that are denied to the government?
Most entertaining and enlightening. I would, however, like to point out a few things.
- Our forepersons were a lot brighter than we are. Originally, an individual/organization could possess only so many, and it wasn't very many, broadcast licenses. This had nothing to do with making money and everything to do with ensuring diversity of the airwaves. This went by the wayside of Republican pressure years ago. But wait, you're going to say, the airwaves were a public good, that's why the government could control them. In the age of the interwebs, the government has nothing to control. Oh! ye of little imagination. ICANN controls the assignment of IP addresses which ultimately get translated into URLs. Without the IP, you're not on the web. That's part A. Part B is that the government gets to decide the definition of monopoly.
- Speaking of definitions, a monopoly is, of course, where there is only one company providing a good or service but another part of the definition revolves around the horizontal and/or vertical integration of the company. John D. Rockefeller wasn't the only guy pumping oil but he was one of the few that pumped the oil, refined it, and had the distribution system to sell the products. You have a similar situation here since Parler which is where all the right wing wackos went. Parler is essentially just a software house that has developed the apps to be facebook-like. But getting on line requires server farms, network operations centers (NOCs), and, most importantly, the sysadmins that keep the systems up to speed, and running smoothly, the dbadmins to keep the RDBMs that underlie a lot of the interface apps touched up and running, and then there's the hardware guys. Electronics has come a long way since when I started with vacuum tube equipment but it will still break. All that's expensive so you buy hosting services from the likes of Google. Until Google pulls the plug on you. Parler has an option - they can set up their own NOC, get an assignment from ICANN and they'll be up and running again and millions poorer. Or, they could get another web hosting service like godaddy. Frankly, a thinking person would probably conclude that those hosting services were a whole lot like a utility.
- Finally (yes, I will shut up), we need to address the new, unique aspects driven solely by the new technology known as computing. The most evil corporation in the world is Kraft but the second most evil one is Micro$oft. What all this has to do with is facebook. I mean what do you do if you want to be on a more open system and sign onto Parler and you have correspondents (they certainly wouldn't be friends probably) over on facebook? They're screwed because almost certainly facebook and Parler don't talk to each other. But that doesn't have to be. I don't know how much time you spend out on the interwebs but there's a lot of apps that will let you sign in using a bunch of different other apps. You want to sign in using Twitter, Discus, facebook, etc.? No es problemo. How's that done you ask. The acronym you're looking for is API - application programming interface. That tells third party programmers what they have to feed the application to get answers and how those answers will be structured. Could you log onto Parler and have your stuff viewable by someone on facebook? Yes. But only if the government told them they had to.
- One final thought. The government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act (which I consider unconstitutional) granting as it does government power they didn't have before. Can they not pass a law that denies powers to companies that are denied to the government?