alt Hacker NewsThis bears repeating:
It has been clear for a while that certain providers and services need to be regulated as utilities - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Visa, Mastercard, and soon Openai and Anthropic.
Social media companies, as de-facto public squares, should be clubbed into that category once they gain a certain reach.
It should be illegal for these companies, just like utilities, to deny service to anyone or any entity in good standing for dues.
There is little hope for getting this through in the US where most politicians of any stripe hate the public, and the ones that don't have hardly any power. But it might be possible to do this in the EU.
Then, we non-EU folks need to apply for Estonian e-residency [5] which may get us EU regulatory coverage.
But it's not sufficient to stop there: it is way past time to build a 'people's phone', funding it through a platform like LiberaPay [1][2] or Open Collective [3][4], with a requirement for the device to be completely open-source.
If we start today, we could have a new phone in 2-3 years. Future generations will thank us.
It's not just phones. There is a concerted movement by massively-moneyed folks to destroy the fabric of open society, so there are a number of different areas that need attention. A coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain or improve the foundations of open society.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay
[3] https://opencollective.com/