Getting price regulation right is difficult, its effect can be positive, negative, or ambiguous, depending on the industry, type of regulation, time period, and the method of comparison.

Turning Facebook and the other large tech platforms into price‐​regulated public utilities could be devastating. Some, such as New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufecki , have called for Facebook to charge users for its service, because a fee based model would allow customers to opt out of advertising. But mandating that social media platforms charge their users a price could seriously hamstring these services, and price millions out of a service they value. In a recent study on the topic, economist Caleb Fuller estimated that even under generous assumptions, Google could hope to make somewhere between $14 and $15 million per year if it charged a fee. To put that in perspective, the 2017 total revenue for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was $111 billion. In a survey conducted by Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar best known for his work in applying behavioral economics to public policy, nearly half of participants said that they would pay $0 if Facebook tried to charge them a fee.

Adding a common carriage requirement to platforms has its own kind of problems. Compelling platforms to carry certain kinds of speech would face a very serious challenge under the First Amendment . The government could compel platforms if it designated them as public forums, a suggestion pushed by Senator Ted Cruz. The traditional notion of a public forum encompasses government property such as streets or parks, which have been devoted to public expressive use “by long tradition or by government fiat.”

In rare cases, however, private property can be designated a public forum. The governing Supreme Court decision here is PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins . In PruneYard, some high school students set up a table in the PruneYard shopping center to distribute literature and solicit signatures for a petition against a United Nations resolution. A security guard told them to leave since their table violated the shopping center’s regulations against publicly expressive activities. In its decision, the Supreme Court gave California the ability to limit the private owner of a shopping center from using state trespass law to exclude peaceful expressive activity in the open areas of the shopping center. A crucial distinction here is that the Supreme Court merely allowed for California to designate the mall a public forum because the state constitution includes the affirmative right to “freely speak, write and publish … sentiments on all subjects.” Since few state constitutions have a speech provision like California’s, the public forum designation is largely limited to that state.

Public forum proponents have also tried to reach back to the 1946 Supreme Court case Marsh v. Alabama to ground legal action against platforms. In Marsh, the Court determined that a trespassing statue could not be used to stop the distribution of religious tracts in a privately‐​owned company town. Earlier this year, Prager University brought a case against Google on similar grounds. But District Court Judge Lucy Koh rejected the claim that YouTube “somehow engaged in one of the ‘very few’ functions that were traditionally ‘exclusively reserved to the State.’”

Successful court cases on online public forums have typically been limited to the actions that government officials can legally take in their official capacity. In Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, for example, a federal district court in New York held that the First Amendment prohibited President Trump from blocking Twitter users solely based on those users’ expression of their political views. He could, however, mute people as much as he wanted. In a Virginia court case , it was decided that a local official’s Facebook page was a limited public forum because the government had invited citizens’ speech on that page. Even so, a decision to delete a comment that was off topic did not violate the Constitution, the court found, because the comment violated an announced policy for social media comments. That same federal judge, in another case, found a slightly different holding. Again, it seems a local official had deleted political criticism from her Facebook page, which was otherwise held open for discussion and because of this, was found to be unconstitutional. On the other hand, in 2015 an Illinois district court agreed with a municipality that had prohibited political messages on its website and Facebook page because they were limited purpose forums intended to act only “as small business forums.”

What unites the court cases is that they focus on public officials limiting political speech on their own online pages. They aren’t instances where the government mandated that a platform transmit a certain kind of speech. As legal scholar Eugene Volokh noted , the Supreme Court has shot down many of these kinds of mandated speech laws, finding that there isn’t a compelling government interest in “equalizing the relative ability of individuals and groups to influence the outcome of elections,” in “reducing the allegedly skyrocketing costs of political campaigns,” in “preserving party unity during a primary,” or in protecting speakers who “are incapable of deciding for themselves the most effective way to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Applying a public forum designation to Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube would immediately strike down the terms of use and the community standards of these platforms. In doing so, the platforms would be severely limited in their ability to kick people off of their sites for hate speech or speech that is “misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.” The result would be a massive spike in spam, leading people to exit the platform and find better alternatives.

Whether the government took a public‐​utilities approach or a common‐​carriage approach to regulating the tech industry, the result would be massive disruption and destruction of value. Such sweeping direct regulation would almost certainly create far more problems than it would solve.