Large Platforms as Public Infrastructure: The Case for Common Carrier Regulation

This argument applies the common carrier doctrine to digital platforms, contending that beyond a critical scale threshold — roughly five million unique monthly visitors — network effects governed by Metcalfe's Law render meaningful competition structurally impossible. The value of a network grows exponentially with its user base, which means incumbents enjoy compounding advantages that no startup can realistically overcome. At this point, the libertarian injunction to "build your own platform" becomes as hollow as telling someone to "build your own phone company" or "build your own town."

The constitutional analogy is drawn from cases like Marsh v. Alabama, where the Supreme Court held that a company town must observe First Amendment obligations, and PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, which extended petition rights into privately owned commercial spaces. The principle is consistent: when private infrastructure becomes the de facto venue for public discourse, it inherits public obligations. The telephone provider thought experiment sharpens the point — content-based call termination would be immediately recognized as intolerable, yet functionally identical behavior by platforms is normalized.

The regulatory framework proposed has three structural requirements: viewpoint neutrality, prohibiting suppression based on political or ideological content; transparency, requiring specific identification of the violated rule and triggering content; and due process, mandating an appealable mechanism with genuine possibility of reversal. The current regime — where bans function as unreviewable sentences, sometimes silently reversed under social pressure without acknowledgment — is characterized as Kafkaesque authoritarian architecture. The insight is that the absence of these procedural safeguards is not a bug in platform governance but a feature of unchecked private power operating at public scale.