Okay, but that's a technicality.

Twitter has almost never "editorialized", barring a few announcements from @jack.

Instead what it has been doing has been controlling, sometimes in very sneaky ways (see "shadowbanning") what content its users can post, or that other people can see.

That is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. Not editorials.

If you knew much about me, you'd know how much I hate government regulation in general.

Though of course there are exceptions like Flint, Michigan, public utilities regulated mostly by their own local governments have worked pretty well.

Community-based last-mile ISP services are among the things that have worked. I'd even rather spend a little more on one of those than sending even more money to one of the ever-expanding cable monopolies.

It actually makes very good sense to do this from a "fair and balanced" point of view.

"Section 230" is what gives forum hosting providers like Twitter immunity from prosecution from, say, libel suits, as long as what they publish is solely user-supplied content.

But Twitter has been doing an awful lot of "selective" removal of certain points of view in recent months.

Which suggests they want to waive their immunity under 230. Or at least don't care enough about it to be careful.

There is already some old (by now) case law which says that if a provider controls what content it publishes, i.e. decides what content can and cannot be posted, they then assume liability for that content, and at the same time jeopardize their immunity under Section 230.

The reasoning for that is very simple: if the provider is deciding what the content can be, then they are really publishing their own opinions, and not just raw user-provided content anymore.

If Twitter wants to take political sides, as it demonstrably has, and regardless of what side it takes, it's going to end up without 230 protection.

And just watch the lawsuits start to roll in.

This is a joke, right???

The reason I say this is because in highly populated areas, there is plenty of real competition for things like ISP services.

But in about 80% of the land area of the U.S., there hasn't been.

In my area, for example, the ONLY practical way to get affordable high speed internet, for years, was via cable.

And there was only one cable company. (Again, that is true in most of the U.S.)

Things like DSL came around, eventually, but they were not cheap, and though they were symmetric, they were relatively slow.

And you could get direct service by radio, but that was expensive.

Every year our City Council had a vote on whether to allow other companies to compete with the one and only cable company, for space on the utility poles in the city.

Every year it has been voted down.

I am in favor of treating them more like regulated utilities. But so far it hasn't happened anywhere near here.

Then we're going to have to disagree. I wrote a program that generated very readable English text... in 1989. That is something that was once thought to require "intelligence" to do. But in fact the only "intelligence" required was mine. (The program ran on an HP calculator, by the way.)

No, I'm talking about the actual annual Turing Test contests. Actually fooling people who knew they were being tested was first accomplished some years ago. (I'm not counting programs like Eliza, which duped unsuspecting people.)

Perhaps so. But not really what I was talking about.

No, I am not. What I wrote is not only falsifiable, it is provable: we can do things that were once thought to require intelligence, but we now know do not.

There is nothing "unfalsifiable" about that. Unless you are asserting that my calculator is "intelligent" in some meaningful way.

No. If that were true, then Ma Bell and the later Telcos would not have basically been treated like utilities.

Make no mistake: cable, hard-line telephone, and mobile phone companies ALL use up a lot of public resources, in the form of communications lines, both on utility poles and underground.

The argument for "space" also doesn't hold water when competing services are required to share the same infrastructure (wires, fiber, etc.).

Community-based internet, in which municipalities supply the last-mile services themselves, have seen some real success.

But cable and other ISP services, in most of the U.S., have just been getting to be bigger and bigger monopolies.

I don't need to, since I very clearly do know what I'm talking about.

Hey, my memory is not perfect, so I get some things turned around sometimes. You are upset that I am human?

Yes, it is total misuse of the term.

The issue here is that these things were formerly thought to require intelligence.

We now know that it not so. They merely require massive and fast data manipulation.

Just like the original Turing test. We know now (because it has been done) that fooling people into thinking a machine is intelligent does not actually require the machine to be intelligent.

Disagree. We are at that point because we have been learning that what the machines are doing is not so particularly special. It's just that we once thought it was.

Which brings up that under current U.S. law, the port scans are probably illegal.

Sure it makes a difference. Definitely.

But in theory, if you had lots of time, the same computations could be made by turning valves in a complicated system of tanks and pipes.

So are the tanks and pipes "intelligent"?

I am aware that is no more than an argument over semantics. I don't pretend it's anything else.

Needless to say, when even New York Times says "U.S. officials have long complained", there has pretty clearly been more than once violation. "Forbidding flights" is plural.

My mistake. I had it backward. Here is the reason, from the New York Times:

I'm not trying to be a smartass. I guess part of what I'm trying to say is, if we're going to re-define the phrase "artificial intelligence" to mean something other than a thing that is both artificial and intelligent, then what do we call the hypothetical real thing?

Real artificial intelligence?

Something else?

Misuse is misuse. I don't care how long it has been misused.

As far as I am concerned, it is like what our Supreme Court said about abuse of the law: the fact that a law has been violated or misused for a day or a century has absolutely no bearing on whether it is a violation of the law.

Words have meaning. You can use them for other things if you want, but that won't change the fact that the words "artificial" and "intelligence" already have have actual, commonly understood meanings.