““Look,” he says, “there are private companies and there are private companies.” The conventional argument about the First Amendment is right when it comes to a company like Simon & Schuster, which pulled the plug on a book by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri in disapproval of his challenge to the presidential election results. Mr. Hawley can take the book somewhere else.
The situation with Mr. Trump and the social-media giants is different. If they are monopolies—not “an easy question,” Mr. Epstein acknowledges—the common-law rule is that “no private monopoly has the right to turn away customers.” It must take them all on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.
“These are common-law rules,” he says. “It’s not as though you can post a little notice on top of your website that says, ‘Not subject to common-carrier rules.’ ”
But the nondiscrimination side of the formula is still with us,” Mr. Epstein says, “and it is that duty that’s at issue today with Trump and Twitter. And if the monopoly constraint applies, then it is not a defense to say that these companies are privately owned.”
But the nondiscrimination side of the formula is still with us,” Mr. Epstein says, “and it is that duty that’s at issue today with Trump and Twitter. And if the monopoly constraint applies, then it is not a defense to say that these companies are privately owned.”
“You cannot be both a platform operator and a partisan. Jack Dorsey is not, shall we say, a neutral party.”
Mr. Epstein has two recommendations for Twitter and Facebook, which he’s sure they won’t follow: “First, they should take the control of access to their networks and give it to somebody who doesn’t care about the outcome. And then, to have a relatively narrow, consistently applied, definition of what counts as violence and threats of force.””
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-common-carrier-solution-to-social-media-censorship-11610732343
