An observation

[jsburbidge]

 For all that the Guardian continues to publish both news and opinion articles heavily critical of Facebook, I still see the little "f" indicators of Facebook sharing on their webpages.  

Comments

[graydon]

Facebook has made itself necessary to everything -- which is to say, effectively all news media -- which relies on advertising.

The appropriate thing to do is to expropriate the entirety and make it part of the post office, but I can't say as I expect that.

[ndrosen]

Who ends up running the “post office”? Could politicians or bureaucrats use their position to control what people get to see?

[graydon]

Who runs the post office now?

If they're not selling ads, this is a very simple job involving planning server capacity, a small office for public service announcements ("flu shots will be available on September 25th") and another small office for people who want to get grandma's photos transferred to portable media now that the funeral's done with. There are already laws that would cover most of that just fine. Minor incremental update stuff for the new bits. (there's now an address concept of "public" is the only big change I'm thinking of at this hour of the morning.)

It is right and proper that the folks running social media prevent certain kinds of speech; any "kill all the" or "we are inherently superior and may take our due by force" stuff is properly forbidden.

Being afraid of government control and not worrying about corporate control is a mistake. The corporate (extracting profit via ads) has a bunch of strong incentives to do harm.

There are certainly better design approaches -- lots of little regional data centres is better than one national one for a lot of reasons -- but an ad-free post office social media system with a mandate to provide rural broadband and the taxation or fee power to fund it would be way better than what we have now.