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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same. If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want. Now if your government will try to fine or arrest you because you hosted some video on your website, that's censorship. You can avoid youtube, but you can't avoid your government.

That said, I agree that huge websites like youtube, facebook, instagram are something more than just another web resource and probably some regulations should be applied to them. But it's very sensitive subject.

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> As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same.

Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day).

If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And that's before you consider the network effects of YouTube.

Video hosting scalability is not the problem it was if you use a technology like Webtorrent, allowing peer-to-peer distribution of your video files. See PeerTube for a relatively easy platform for your private video hosting.

Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly getting more than that, you can surely afford a CDN or a proper infrastructure.

I do agree that the network effects of YouTube are very hard to compete with, however.

I'm not a lawyer; but, relentlessly downloading and then assisting in the distribution of content I've not personally validated sounds like a legal minefield filled mostly with mines and very little green space.

Then they don't need to use video, they can use written words.

There's no reason why they should be able to use the infrastructure of private companies to scale their message as much as they want.

Or they can just pay for a CDN as you say. This just highlights the differences between the West and China even more. In the west, harmful messages need to stand on their own two feet. If they don't have support, then they can be kicked off private platforms. No need for the government to intervene.

CloudFlare, the biggest CDN, despite their words and claims routinely censors sites meanwhile defending hosting terrorist site's free speech.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...

> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.

> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.

So CF bans even remotely right leaning content but claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/

CloudFlare is under no obligation to follow a policy you find logical. If you dislike their business practices or find them problematic you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation. Otherwise you’ll have to wait and see if the magic of the free market changes anything.

All I am pointing out is the hypocrisy and false statements CF and others make. CF's actions are much different from their words. They say they need to allow dangerous terrorists because of free speech but then ban other speech which they don't like.

> you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation

Voicing my opinion on a public forum is one way to do that.

Why is everyone downvoting comments without even explaining?

And then the CDNs no platform them and and then someone who agrees with the Wojcickis of the world DoS attacks you and then you're gone.

This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.

This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.

I have to a pay a lot of money to put some words up in Times Square, versus posting a paper sign on my local telephone poll. Is this different?

Torrenting is a pretty good CDN. Then you just need to host a magnet link

That's actually a really interesting thought. I wonder if you can just serve a tiny JS torrent client and a magnet link and automatically download the content. You would need to have a way for visitors to seed the content too, otherwise you still have to serve everything anyway.

& this exists, https://webtorrent.io/faq

> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.

The case of the baker refusing to decorate cake for the gay couple comes to mind. He's in court for the third time. Same people who talk about "private company can do whatever they like" attack the baker.

Soon this will evolve into letting private companies being able to censor minority opinions. Don't forget, just few decades ago, LGBT rights opinions weren't mainstream and would therefore have been banned from private companies.

EDIT: Please explain the downvote.

> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.

There is a difference between can and should. They can, but should not.

Why not? Should revnode-videos.net not be able to decide which videos it hosts, pays for in storage and bandwidth?

> not be able to decide which videos it hosts, pays for in storage and bandwidth?

I didn't say they shouldn't be able to. I said they shouldn't, even if they are able to.

> Why not?

Why should they?

Did everyone forget what happened to these unsavory characters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

Someone I know rather well is their sysadmin, and their site is still up: https://dailystormer.su/

Admittedly, they’ve had a hell of a time, but the hard data is that it continues to run. I don’t condone domain names or hosting accounts getting shut down based on content (ANY content) but it appears that it is still at least a little bit possible to host the most extreme of incorrect/offensive content, it’s just not convenient.

I imagine they might even still be on Cloudflare if they hadn’t promoted the (incorrect) theory that Cloudflare not canceling them was actually a dogwhistle endorsement of their content. Cloudflare cited this incorrect claim as the reason for their termination.

That said, large hosting platforms used by majorities of the population (eg YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) should absolutely have to carry data uncritically, just like the phone company, or at least as long as they are actively trying to kill the federated open web with things like censored native app stores, censored browser extension indices, censored and surveilled messaging platforms, and AMP. Things would be quite a bit different if our hardware didn’t forcibly opt us in to dictatorial censorship of native apps.

It also grinds my gears that they call it “community standards”, which are weasel words to pretend that their userbase likes being forced to watch only what their dictator approves of. They’re unilateral, and invoking the term “community” is a dishonest, unprofessional move.

The Daily Stormer is on a Soviet Union domain. That's really ironic.

> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.

I absolutely agree with you here, but we also have the right to criticize and/or stop using platforms that use this. Your parent post said it was wrong, not that you tube didn't have the right to do this.

The difference between practically the same and purely the same is minimal.

In China you can easily get around the firewall if you try hard enough.

In American you can easily distribute your video on your own website if you try hard enough.

Do you see how these two things are fundamentally the same?

These huge web sites are using public right-of-ways and wireless spectrum to transmit their data. It'd be like the phone company censoring your speech. The 1st amendment ought to apply to them unless they are using a fully private means of distributing their information.

Everyone uses public right of ways to communicate. There's nothing stopping someone from setting up their own site using the same public infrastructure.

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