That’s a fair point. I was limiting my thinking in the examples to cases in which the network operator is the one performing the manipulation. I think that is what is effectively both very novel and essentially dangerous for us socially speaking right now, in the sense that society has not developed basic defense mechanisms needed to deal with invisible distortions in the popular mediums of peer to peer communication. We’re used to those existing in traditional received media channels, but if a financially incentivized agent can invisibly prioritize and de-prioritize communications that you’re presented with originating from peers - that can produce a strange situation.
