thinking of housing shortage in terms if raw numbers of homes is just stupid, because homes aren’t fungible. scatter 40 million new homes across the tundra of Alaska and you’ll do nothing to address housing miseries. build a neighborhood 50,000 people are excited to live in and you’ll do a lot more.

ht @smtuffy.bsky.social

until very recently, individual newspapers were much closer to pamphleteers—limited reach, lots of alternatives—than contemporary internet platforms are. straightforward 1st-amendment speech claims were more defensible, even though as you say, journalistic norms and tort risk did regulate them. 1/

(craigslistation and resulting consolidation have altered this. The New York Times was "the paper of record" then, but never bestrode the industry in the way it does now. i'd not favor therefore lifting its free speech rights! but consolidation renders the traditional arguments harder calls.) /fin

are TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook, even BlueSky "private platforms"? certainly there are senses in which they are! they are organized under private firms. 1/

but there are senses in which they may not be "private". for some of them, their ubiquity and reach is such that they can significantly, unilateral, affect coordination at a systemic level. i'd argue makes them inherently public in an important sense. drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/31/s... 2/

plus, the fact that much of the value of these platforms comes from enclosing network effects—which I'd argue should be understood normatively and ultimately legally as property of the public—undermines a claim to their merely being ordinary firms, private speakers under the constitution. 3/

does this mean that Newsom — or DeSantis or Abbott — are right or righteous in the ways they have tried or proposed to regulate these firms? absolutely not. 4/

but i do think that arguments of the form "these are private firms, we have a first amendment, therefore these firms' rights claims trump all other complaints by all other stakeholders QED" are insufficient. 5/

these are not pamphleteers. you can just distribute your own pamphlet if you don't like their speech. they present more serious problems to traditional understandings of free speech than that. /fin