Re: The Daily Beast: Devin Nunes Says 'Republicans Have No Way to Communicate'—on Fox News

[jim bell]

 On Monday, January 11, 2021, 10:57:30 PM PST, Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
 
 
 On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 06:24:31PM +0000, coderman wrote:
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> On Monday, January 11, 2021 7:26 AM, jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > >Jim Bell's comment:
> >
> > >Again:. This is a blatant Anti-trust violation.
> >
> >> See Sherman and Clayton Antitrust acts.
> 
>> Jim, when every provider out there rejects your platform for facilitating treason and mob violence, it's not anti-trust - it's common sense and national consensus!

>Aka "censorship is the new national concensus".

>A stunning position for a purported anarchist to take...


It's not clear to which comment you are responding.
I should point out that my reference to the Sherman and Clayton Anti-trust acts should not be taken as if it were my 'approval' of those laws, or their enforcement, and certainly not as if I approved the Federal Government of the United States.  I mean that those laws do exist, and with the current controversy we can reasonably ask ourselves how 'we' (the country's people, and including various levels of government) have gotten to where we currently are.  
Myself, I am absolutely outraged that, the country and virtually the world moving the "Town Square" of the 1700's to the Internet in about 1995, and seemingly having it functioning smoothly until the last few years, suddenly mammoth corporations (that got that way, and that big, in part due to toeing the government line, and getting government protections such as Section 320).   
While I do agree that a tiny bit of Federal Government research planted a tiny 'seed' in designing the Internet Protocol, I believe that credit for making the Internet available to most citizens was...the few companies that actually designed and made those 9600 bps modems, followed by the 14.4Kbps modems, and even later the 28.8kbps modems.  Put simply, if those modems hadn't existed, we wouldn't have been able to take advantage of our POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines, sampled at 8,000 samples per second, using the companding compression system, "mu-law".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C-law_algorithm      (I don't know how to make my computer display the Greek letter "mu", which looks somewhat like a script 'u'.)
Since 'we', the early users of the Internet, were using government-regulated 


Yes, I have a "libertarian hat" and I usually wear it.  Nevertheless, since I did spend more than 15,000 hours in a Federal prison law library learning many different kinds of Federal laws (Contract Law, Tort Law, Libel Law, Criminal Law, Civil Rights Law, and yes, even INCLUDING Federal Anti-Trust law, surprisingly enough!), I feel qualified to point out problems and inconsistencies, and indeed places where government could choose (following, at least, its own laws and rules) to step away, in some ways, or step in, in other ways, to correct a now-major problem that its own actions partly caused.  


That doesn't mean that my observations (all of them) should be considered to comply with "libertarian principles".  The reality is that America isn't (yet) a libertarian society, nor is the rest of the world.   Yet, I feel that I am intellectually entitled to propose ideas for making society better than it is today, even if these limited proposals don't 'go all the way' to a libertarian society.  In other words, going in the right direction, but not as far as I'd like.  
The way I see it, government (and mostly the Federal Government) CAUSED, at least indirectly (and somewhat directly, too) the problems we have been seeing with the censorship in the major Socialist-Media (What I call 'Social Media").   I say that at this moment, the biggest threat to our freedom, at least the most immediate and imminent threat right now, comes from companies named Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Apple.  
Consider:  When Facebook decided to offer a service, did it string up it own data links, all over the country?  No, it piggy-backed onto an already-existing system, which once was called "Arpanet" but was eventually split into "Internet" and "Milnet".   It did that, of course, to avoid duplication of effort.  From a POV of 'conventional' American law, maybe it would/could be determined by the existing (non-libertarian) government that the service 'has to follow' rules.
Today's local Internet service already has a problem:  Not too many localities have any realistic competition in Internet service.  Many areas have telephone-line legacy services, and cable-TV legacy services.   But you rarely find localities with more than three Internet providers.  
We've had a situation where for years, Facebook and Twitter, etc, appeared to not 'play sides'.  They lobbied for Section 320, which gave them serious advantages, but knowingly with the requirement that they not censor.  (except, arguably, certain minor kinds of censorship not relevant to this discussion).  They 'won out' over other services, and possibly won over (deterred)  services that never came into existence, because they provided a seemingly-unbiased service.  But now, for obviously 'political' reasons, they have VERY quickly changed.  
Under conventional, American law, are they entitled to do that?  It is arguable that by blocking some users, Facebook and Twitter may have (for example) libelled those users, possibly falsely claiming th at those users have violated "Terms of Service" that it is obvious to many people aren't objectively enforced.  (This analysis, not by 'libertarian' principles, but by conventional American Federal law.)  
Quite recently, it appears that three huge market-controllers have attempted to crush Parler by their joint action.  That is so obviously a violation of American Anti-trust law that it's pointless to argue otherwise.  NOT, necessarily, violating 'libertarian principles'.  
There is a very serious danger that the Biden Administration won't stop that, simply because it is so dependent on, and grateful for, this media misconduct.  

>> you're either ignorant of the hate on the platform, or a willing party to it...

>And "hate" speech is no longer protected.
And I'm reminded that the 1st Amendment is NOT intended, not needed, for speech that everybody likes:  It's intended to protect speech that, perhaps, most people hate.  But unfortunately, a major sector of utterly-clueless people today (not here...) seem to be displaying little or no respect for the concept of 'free speech'.  In the late 1960's, people marched on campuses FOR free-speech.  In late 2017, people RIOTED on the campus of UC Berkely AGAINST free speech.  

                    Jim Bell



  
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