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Comment by eeks | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the topic, censorship (private or public) can never be an acceptable reaction. To quote Louis Brandeis (Supreme Court Justice): "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

EDIT: I was not expecting to be downvoted when quoting a SCOTUS Justice arguing for openness of debates, education and spreading of knowledge. I'm savoring the irony.

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This is a stronger comment if you first make the case that refusal to do business with someone is censorship.

I mean, I see at least a vague analogy between not doing business with Nazis and not inviting boring people over for dinner. Is choosing dinner guests censorship?

It becomes censorship when all accesses to a medium (ie. DNS resolvers) are privatized. In other words, if all private providers refuse them access to a medium and if we agree this people still have rights, there is nothing in place to defend these rights. The collective action to refuse them access is therefore censorship.

So what you're suggesting is that DNS and domain registration and web hosting should all be public services operated by the government, because only the government is obligated to protect internet content from censorship? Or are you simply arguing that private businesses should be required to accept money from anyone to host any content, including content that is illegal in other countries or content that is against their personal beliefs?

Those are real questions to which I don't have an answer.

Although I don't believe web hosting is the problem here. Anyone can build a server and have it accessed using his own IP. So censorship (by design or as a byproduct) would be hard to achieve (except DDoS obviously).

Registrar are a lot more relevant because they are a service that make internet addresses intelligible to humans. So preventing one from accessing this service (either by design or as a byproduct) is an hindrance to their ability to communicate more broadly the content of their server. Same goes with search engines BTW.

Also, there is another solutions worth exploring: decentralized DNS registration.

Is canonical DNS a medium or a convention?

(I'm not aware of anything restricting me from setting up a server that answers DNS queries with quotes from Dune, it's just that, because I'm not following the convention, pretty much everyone would just ignore it)

The issue at hand is not about serving the DNS but registering a DNS. One could serve its own domain name server as long as they have been able to register it first. Unfortunately, not everyone can become a registrar. And if all registrar refuse to register you, you don't have a domain name.

You are begging the question.

I'm questioning whether entries stored on a particular set of DNS servers constitutes a medium.

So you're arguing a private business has no right to refuse to do business with an individual customer, for any reason? What's your reasoning behind that? Are you against personal liberty and freedom, or do you believe the liberties of the Daily Stormer's operators somehow override the liberties of the people who operate Google's domain registration services?

That is not my point.

I do not see a problem with Google refusing service to the Daily Stormer. However, the story started with GoDaddy kicking them out then Google refusing their services.

Two occurrences are too few to infer a trend, but enough for me to start wondering: DNS providers are all private companies.

So what would happen if provider after provider the site goes after denies them their services? Does the union of the these refusals amount to censorship?

In principle, it's only the union of individual private refusal. But in effect the Daily Stormer is barred from DNS service access.

Also, I did not think that I would need to clarify, but this is a legitimate, non-partisan question. The arguments are still valid regardless of the object of the topic.

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