Feedback for ACP's Social Media Reform

Point 8 of the ACP party program says the following:

"The Communist Party stands for the breakup and nationalization of social media monopolies and the expansion of First Amendment speech protections to all social media platforms owned or subsidized by the State.

The Communist Party stands for the right of individuals to monitor, correct, and erase data collected about them by Internet services and for severe penalties when these services fail to minimize and protect sensitive data. The Communist Party stands for the promotion of healthy, positive, and family-oriented trends online."

While I agree with the spirit of the whole point, as well as many of the specific components, I'd like to call out an issue I have with the word "breakup" as it relates to social media monopolies.

I don't think breaking up monopolies is a useful action to take, it fragments the information landscape and ends up with more inefficiency. Monopolies are efficient, and nationalization will address the "monopolies for whom?" question. i.e. monopolies should be operated for We The People, rather than profit-seeking shareholders.

The Baby Bell System is a good example of this problem of "breakup" in that over the years the baby bells ended up re-merging back into large firms ... obviously that occurred under a capitalist relations of production, so perhaps under socialist relations of production such a breakup might actually be viable and fruitful.

So long as industry standards and data portability is enforced so as to prevent fragmentation, this breakup strategy could work. I think this is worth elaborating in the program, as we obviously stand for the increasing of the productive forces, which could be threatened by a "breakup for its own sake" type of approach.

Furthermore, forcibly open-sourcing the whole codebases of these platforms would be very cool and good. This would lead to an explosion of innovations, as others would be able to "look under the hood" of these platforms to better understand them and see what sorts of things might be useful in other fields.

I hope this criticism finds its way to the right people.

Hopefully WeWrite will be finished soon enough such that others will enjoy putting their debates and discussions on here too.