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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

There is a vast difference between letting the government suppress speech, which is what China does, and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America.

When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere. When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.

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I would agree if there were multiple competing private companies with comparable market shares, representing the opinions of different social groups. This way, if certain companies started applying censorship that wouldn't reflect the interests of the users, they would lose the market share and would have to listen more to what people want.

Instead, we have an effective monopoly on online search, monopoly on content monetization and a monopoly on social media. These monopolies are sustained through network effects and lack the feedback loop.

Edit: I would even say, they have a wrong type of feedback loop, since they are directly incentivized to censor the opinions that go against the vocal social groups, since that could result in decreasing profits.

China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing. Would it make them more democratic or change anything for the end users?

I think, the distinction between private and government is a technicality. What is more important, is how many independent parties are making the censorship decisions, and whether they report to a single vs. distributed source of power. From that angle, the government-dominated Chinese web is very similar to Silicon Valley-dominated western web.

> China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing.

If the private company requires a state-issued license, and that license is dependent on the content on the site, then it's still government censorship.

In America, you can still start a competing private company and allow any opinion you want. In China you can't do that.

In theory, yes. In practice, since Google and Facebook are free to end users, outcompeting them would require raising enormous amounts of capital. So you would depend on the approval of a rather small (and mind you, non-elected) group of individuals.

I really don't think it's about the wording you put on the decision maker's badge. It's about who's interests they represent and the structure of their incentives.

Government-drivern censorship is bad, because their incentive would become to stay in power no matter what. Monopolies act the same way.

> China could technically spin off their censorship functions to a privately owned company that would wholly depend on the state-issued license to operate and would keep doing exactly the same thing.

I think that's exactly what's happening for certain online services eg iCloud[1], AWS China[2]

[1]https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/28/technology/apple-icloud-dat... [2]https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/13/aws-exits-china/

Perhaps the greatest difference is that the US government and large corporations don't even need to employ a lot of violent repression to get the media to jump through hoops and do parlor tricks; their ideological control is deeper and more effective than that of the Chinese state.

Remember when the American government got all the payment processors to blockade WikiLeaks because of political speech? Don't pretend that the American government doesn't suppress speech.

This article's about Zoom. Which, ironically, has a lot better case for "hold your video call elsewhere" than Twitter does for "engage with the American political class elsewhere".

The sad fact is, nobody's principled and everybody's just reaching for arguments based on which "side" is being gored.

It's a theoretical distinction much more than a practical one.

So there is a difference, but I don't think it's 'vast'.

> and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America.

Considering that private companies are now becoming more powerful than many governments/countries, maybe this is something we should take another look at.

> When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere.

Can't you argue that you can always move to another country, just like you can use another company?

> When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.

Depends on the private company and its scale/monopolistic position.

Lol, no; it is exactly the same thing.

Anyhow, this is about a private company suppressing speech, so I guess you are OK with that?

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