It's not like ordinary people were running their own mail servers or other p2p tech in the pre-Big-Tech days, nor would it have been considerably harder for the government to disrupt email traffic than it is for them to block Facebook/etc. This isn't a pro-Big-Tech or pro-centralization message, only that we never actually lived in a golden age of ubiquitous decentralized communication that was robust against state actor censorship.
this just sounds like whataboutism and is skirting the issue. there is an enormous amount of censorship power within BigTech right now. given the “value” their core businesses provide, which is funded by manipulating your attention to get ad impressions, they should be broken up. why does facebook get to run whatsapp when it’s an ad business?
