Vox

Google and Facebook aren’t just incredibly profitable tech companies — they are “public goods” with a responsibility to serve the public, says former President Barack Obama. “I do think the large platforms — Google and Facebook being the most obvious, Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem — have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise,” the former president said at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference. “They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.”

The aftermath of the 2016 election has been dominated by two questions. How did Donald Trump win? And did the Democratic Party tilt too much toward Hillary Clinton, choking Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and condemning America to a Trump presidency? Lurking in these questions is a very modern vision of electoral politics. Today, we see elections, and even party primaries, as open platforms; to imagine anything else is unnatural. But primary elections didn’t exist in American politics until the beginning of the 20th century, and they did not decide presidential nominees until the 1970s.