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posted by mrpg on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the poke dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Facebook calls for government regulation

Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content.

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook's chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone. He calls for new laws in four areas: "Harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability."

It comes two weeks after a gunman used the site to livestream his attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Mr Zuckerberg writes, adding that Facebook was "creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions" about what is posted and what is taken down.

He also describes a new set of rules he would like to see enforced on tech companies. These new regulations should be the same for all websites, he says, so that it's easier to stop "harmful content" from spreading quickly across platforms.

Also at The Telegraph, CNBC, CNET


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @06:34PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @06:34PM (#822787)
    Broadcast frequency monopolies exist for a perfectly sound technical reason. If anyone were allowed to use any particular frequency band, then unless all of them agreed on a protocol for how to multiplex usage (e.g. by restricting use to only low power levels), then no one would be able to use that frequency at all, as anyone who tried to use it would just cause interference for everyone else. Cable monopolies though, I don't see much sense with those, especially if the cable monopolist is the only one able to use those cables to provide service. A cable monopoly would only make sense if it were a common carrier, like the FLET'S fibre optic network in Japan, which, while the physical infrastructure is owned by NTT, isn't restricted to providing Internet service only from NTT itself. You could just as easily use the FLET'S network to get Internet service from any number of ISPs, sort of like how you could use a POTS phone line to connect to any number of ISPs in the dial-up days (in fact, FLET'S uses similar underlying tech: you'd connect to an ISP via PPPoe).
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:56PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Sunday March 31 2019, @09:56PM (#822862) Journal

    If anyone were allowed to use any particular frequency band, then unless all of them agreed on a protocol for how to multiplex usage (e.g. by restricting use to only low power levels), then no one would be able to use that frequency at all, as anyone who tried to use it would just cause interference for everyone else.

    This is not true at all for a great deal of the country. There is one AM and one FM station here. Nothing can overpower that AM station locally, even at night (it's right here in our tiny little town.) At night, the AM band becomes a wide-area band, and that's... interesting... but for most stations, they fade in and out and they aren't really listenable in the normal sense (fun to DX, though.) So half the time, most of the band is unlistenable because the FCC did it the way they did it. FM broadcast freqs in the US, which act kind of like light in that they typically go straight to the horizon and then mostly off into space, don't act like that, and there's no good reason at all that any little town like couldn't have a station on every adjacent FM broadcast channel with old-school IF tech, or one every broadcast channel with modern SDR tech. Well, of course, except that it has been made prohibitively and entirely artificially expensive.

    What happened is that the FCC took a public resource and decided to make money the deciding factor in who gets to run a station, and who does not, thereby ensuring a pure corporate / rich playing field. That's what really went seriously wrong here. The only way you get to speak to the people in a broadcast is if you have pockets full of money. Just listen to the crap that packs the AM band and you'll know exactly where that led us.

    Finally, there's no contradiction between "there are rules" and anywhere there is an opening, it's reasonable to obtain a station license. The only reason license == money is because the FCC made it that way. You get exactly one guess why, and if you get it wrong, well, that says a lot about your thought processes, and nothing good, either.

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