common carrier

American  

noun

1. Transportation. (in federal regulatory and other legal usage) a carrier offering its services at published rates to all persons for interstate transportation.

2. a public service or public utility company, as a telephone or telegraph company, engaged in the transmitting of messages for the public.

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common carrier British  

noun

1. a person or firm engaged in the business of transporting goods or passengers

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common carrier Cultural  

1. A company or individual providing public transportation on a regular basis in return for a fee that is uniformly charged to all users.

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Other Word Forms

• common carriage noun
• common-carrier adjective

Example Sentences

As professor Eugene Volokh, one of the originators of the common carrier analogy, explains, what separates entities such as newspapers from entities such as phone companies is whether they produce a “coherent speech product.”

From Slate • Feb. 23, 2024

That was the only thing Jeanine had consumed, and it was a common carrier of Cronobacter.

From New York Times • Sep. 6, 2022

We cannot stress this enough: No, an Ohio judge did not declare Google a common carrier this week.

From Washington Post • May 26, 2022

He then ran through an extended analogy in which Verizon listened to every phone call and cut off any pro-LGBT conversation, ignoring interjections that Twitter simply isn’t a common carrier and the comparison doesn’t apply.

From The Verge • May 13, 2022

What good am I, anyway, except as a common carrier for all the blinkety blinked aches and pains that ever existed?

From On With Torchy by Lincoln, Foster