Follow this authorMatt Bai's opinions

The debate here has been a long time coming. It remains unresolved, in part, because the tech companies themselves have always tried to have it both ways.

When outraged leftists demand more regulation around content that spreads hatred or misinformation, the companies are quick to assert that they are essentially pipelines for public discourse, rather than content providers. In fact, Congress codified this argument with something called Section 230, a provision that shields social media companies from the same kind of legal jeopardy that a newspaper might face for printing something false.

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But when the right tries to impose some version of political neutrality, as it did in Texas, the same companies embrace exactly the opposite conceit — that they are media companies, no different from any news site, and thus can’t be forced to publish content they find offensive.

If they can’t decide which kind of company they really are, it’s now up to the justices to decide for them, I guess.

Writing in the New York Times this week, Tim Wu — a left-leaning law professor at Columbia University and much more of an expert than I am in all of this — argued that the court should uphold the Texas law and treat the tech companies as though they were utilities.

Wu doesn’t like the law itself, but striking it down, he says, would effectively bar any kind of government regulation of social media platforms, under the theory that there’s no difference, constitutionally speaking, between editors at CNN and an algorithm at Instagram.

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I have some sympathy for this argument, in part because I’ve worked for two of these companies in my career. (I spent five years as the national political columnist for Yahoo and then published a newsletter on Meta’s now-defunct Bulletin platform.) I can attest to the idea that tech companies behave nothing like traditional journalism outlets. They’re run by engineers who might as well be wiring your house for cable or fixing your water main for all they care about the quality of information you consume online.

And yet, as a nonlawyer, I ultimately come down on the other side of the argument — that social media companies really aren’t utilities at all. They maintain no infrastructures of their own — no pipes or towers. They provide no service that we can’t live without — nothing as basic as drinking water or electric lights. They require no government license to operate. Most important, they enjoy no monopoly, however much it may feel that way in the........

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