Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Private discretion that can remove a sitting president and suppress a newspaper’s reporting in the same season is not a coffee shop. A common-carrier rule that treats a ranking algorithm as a telephone line will be captured by whichever office writes it.

So the honest menu is unattractive in both directions.

What I’d support is thinner. If you have that reach and a liability shield, you don’t get to be a secret editor of candidate speech and legitimate news while calling the edits trust and safety. Publish the rules. Apply them to both sides. Make a removal appealable somewhere other than a company blog.

Justice Thomas wrote a concurrence in April arguing the common-carrier analogy applies. It’s a serious argument from a serious source and it isn’t the Court’s holding, and I’d want the legislative version tested against a future administration I dislike before I’d sign it.

Novi, MI Correspondent — A platform that ranks the country isn’t a diner, and a diner doesn’t set the volume knob on a national conversation.

Common carriage in the classic sense doesn’t map onto a ranking machine. Ranking is editorial even when the firm denies it, and forcing carriage of everything produces a product nobody will operate.

What does map is the bargain. The shield was written for a pass-through. A pass-through that boosts and buries has moved outside the spirit of it even if the text still covers them.

Condition the shield on published rules and even enforcement. That survives a change of majority, which is the test any of this has to pass.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — Mixed rooms here watched a newspaper get suppressed and a president get removed and were told it was hygiene.

Hygiene administered by four firms and their advertisers is a private ministry, and private ministries produce the common-carrier impulse. The impulse is understandable and the statute is the problem.

Florida passed one in May and a federal judge enjoined it a few days ago, largely on First Amendment grounds — the state was compelling a private party’s editorial choices and doing it selectively.

That’s the difficulty in one case. A carrier statute written in anger about a specific ban runs into the same amendment that protects the newspaper, and the version that survives will be narrow enough that it probably wasn’t worth the fight.

Condition the shield instead. Transparency and evenness are achievable and they survive review.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — They aren’t a diner and they aren’t a phone company.

Condition the shield. Publish the rules. Apply them both ways.

The rural version of this is that we have one broadband provider and increasingly one place where local information circulates, and that place is a platform group. When that’s the town square, moderation is a public matter whatever the corporate form.

I’d still rather have daylight than a bureau, because a bureau will be run by people who don’t live here either.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — A county paper can be ugly and still exist. A feed can bury the paper and call it trust.

That’s why people want a carrier rule, and wanting it isn’t the same as being able to write it without handing the next crowd a switch.

Limit the shield instead. If you rank and remove civic speech, publish the rule and live with even application.

I won’t defend a company that behaved like a ministry and then hid behind diner law. I also won’t hire a real ministry to replace it.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — A port has tariffs that are posted. A feed has community standards that move with the weather of a news cycle.

Posted rules, even application, and a harder off-ramp for candidates and legitimate news. Advertisers will still lean and the leaning should be visible.

The carrier analogy fails the pipe test, because these firms rank and a pipe doesn’t. Forcing them to be a pipe is forcing a different company into existence, and the different company will be leaned on too.

Keep them private. Make the shield honest.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I draft platform policies that have to survive a second reading, and both theories fail one.

Diner theory can’t explain suppression at civic scale. Utility theory can’t produce a ranking product without making the state an editor.

The remainder is conditioned immunity and forced disclosure. Immunity was the bargain for pass-through, and the bargain’s spirit is gone even where its text holds.

I’d write the conditions as process rather than outcome: public rules, an audit of whether enforcement is even, and a real procedure for takedowns at civic scale — a newspaper, a candidate, an officeholder. Not a hearing for every anonymous account.

And I’d write it knowing a different majority will hold it in four years, because that’s the only draft worth writing.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — Not a diner. Not a phone company.

Condition the shield. Publish the rule. Apply it both ways.

A carrier statute becomes a bureau, and a bureau picks a side the same way the firms did. Daylight is enough law for a ranking machine.