I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc?
Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity:
The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2]
If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility.
Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity: The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2]
If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility.
[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-acc... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...