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Comment by csa | Hacker News Reader

> I vaguely recall from reading from the federalist papers way back in high school that free expression without fear of reprisal

... from government.

I will add that even with regards to the government, there are limits to free speech — falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is the archetypal example.

Some people seem to think that freedom of speech is something that can be broadly forced upon private organizations, and that’s simply not true.

If folks don’t like companies that, in their opinion, unreasonably restrict speech, then I suggest they vote with their dollars, their attention, and maybe their work (e.g., via competitors).

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> If folks don’t like companies that, in their opinion, unreasonably restrict speech, then I suggest they vote with their dollars, their attention, and maybe their work (via competitors).

Like Gab and Parler! Oh wait...

I generally agree private businesses shouldn’t be forced to do business with anyone they don’t want to, but we’re talking about near monopolies that in many ways wield more power than governments.

Apple and Google each have a monopoly on app distribution on their platforms. Facebook and Twitter combined effectively have a monopoly on social networks.

Gab and Parler are free to run their own datacenters. It has nothing to do with “monopolies”, which come and go.

I didn’t mention AWS.

Then those datacentres would be deplatformed from the Internet.

At this point, their only option to survive would be to build their own new internet. And that would need power/spectrum/land or other things that could be taken away from them by determined enough activism.

Maybe they could survive for a while by moving to a decentralised P2P/blockchain system of some kind. But that could potentially be blocked at an ISP level.

> Then those datacentres would be deplatformed from the Internet.

A few years ago I heard some people say we needed net neutrality. Republicans were against it.

AWS isn’t anywhere close to a monopoly and has one of the most lax AUPs in the game. These services can also self-host like the olden days.

As for Apple, yes. They do have a monopoly over their app platforms. Either a more robust PWA support framework or side loading needs to be a priority on iOS. I wouldn’t consider Google as having a monopoly over app distribution as you can sideload apps on Android and Android has (from what I’ve heard) well-rounded PWA support.

Well, wait and see. The free market doesn't move in 24 hours. There is moderation that is clearly a good idea, moderation that is sketchy and moderation that is overdone. I may be behind the times, but I really don't think an app in the app store is that important. They still have a web site. The AWS ban is more concerning but if they have to they can move to foreign hosting - maybe this will be the push to finally get the Europeans to build up some tech companies.

Big tech have basically declared that 30% of America is unwelcome on their platform. That is overbearing moderation that is likely to provoke a market response. I'd give it 6-12 months to see if they can hold on to a monopoly even leaving that massive slice of the market in play.

I think to some degree Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter being as successful they are in their verticals and also being fairly progressive is not a coincidence. They have to attract the best talent in the world, which will not only be people that come from different races, but also sexual orientations, religions, genders, and more. You take the beliefs generally being espoused on Parler and some of that is fundamentally antithetical to the progressive ideologies that even allow these companies to be leading players in their fields. Describing these companies as monopolies is unfair because most of them are simply doing work miles ahead of competitors (Apple for example). Choosing to be tolerant isn't an arbitrary choice. It's probably at the core of their success. So even if a conservative ecosystem pops up to support Parler I believe the reason it doesn't exist already is because of the lack of talent. Same reason why so many smart Jewish scientists left Nazi Germany—intolerance leaves a lot of value and talent on the table, which is what you will need to outcompete others.

> I will add that even with regards to the government, there are limits to free speech — falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is the archetypal example.

Note that when this phrase was originally used, it was to justify imprisoning people who distributed flyers opposing the draft in WW1, and the supreme court later partially overturned it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

> Some people seem to think that freedom of speech is something that can be broadly forced upon private organizations, and that’s simply not true.

Why not? Private companies must respect your rights, like your right not to be discriminated against, so why can‘t they be forced to respect your right to free speech? Just because the status quo of the legal ecosystem is not ready to handle this edge-cases doesn‘t mean it can‘t be made to do it with some adjustments.

Because your rights do not override my rights, and if I run an Internet forum, chat service, etc you can’t force me to publish or distribute material I don’t want to. We are all autonomous citizens, including people who own or run communications services.

There's a difference between you running "a" forum and controlling 99% of the internet. It's good to break up huge monopolies.

Amazon Web Services does not control 99% of the internet.

They control ~32% of cloud services (https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...), and I assume if Parler moved to GCP they would be also blocked. Question what would MS Azure do?

That mostly leaves Alibaba Cloud (I have no idea if it is available outside China) and "Others" - so a 43%. Not much to choose from considering that the big players have the best prices.

This may be slightly off topic... are hosting providers subject to Sec. 230 protections? That is, if they don’t make a good-faith effort to remove illegal content (i.e. incitement of violence, bonus points for elected officials) they can be legally held responsible?

You can’t sell food without compelled speech (nutrition labels). You can’t sell medicine without compelled speech (side effect warnings).

There’s plenty of existing examples of compelled speech. We could simply say, “you cannot run a public/large forum without allowing mostly free speech”.

Who gets to define “mostly”? Every public Internet forum censors, whether they say they do or not. Even the *chan sites filter out and delete spam, griefing, child porn, etc. They have to or they would be overwhelmed and useless. The spammers have been advocating for maximalist free speech forever.

I think the compelled speech argument is extremely weak, we have very narrowly defined and specific cases in strictly defined circumstances. This would make it the default for vast swathes of common communications and as I pointed out introduce huge problems with noise, spam and griefing.

I see what you mean with giving equal weight to all rights, but there are implementation differences. To not discriminate, you’re restricting an action that might be taken. That does not incur cost or new effort. To facilitate speech, you’re compelling an action to happen that someone may not want to do, especially one that doesn’t provide any benefit to them and may incur additional costs.

The right of free expression is guaranteed by the first amendment by restricting the government from infringing upon your right. It doesn’t say the government or anyone else has to give you a microphone.

What about compelling a company to respect a citizen‘s rights? Do you find that fair? Companies are already compelled to do all sorts of things for the government or customers.

In order to ban me from a platform you have to take (negative) action towards me. My content is already on that network. Compelling to respect my rights means compelling a company to not negatively act against me.

They are not compelled to do anything for general citizens. They are in some cases compelled to treat certain classes of people the same way they treat other classes. That doesn’t compel them to do something they never would do, it compels them to do the things they already do for some, for all.

Those businesses are also free to close up shop if they can’t handle it. If they are dumb enough to explicitly say they don’t want to do something for a certain legally protected class of individual solely due to their belonging to that class, then IMO they deserve to lose their shirt.

>Why not?

That would amount to involuntary servitude, which is not permitted by the 13th Amendment.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

>I will add that even with regards to the government, there are limits to free speech — falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is the archetypal example.

Also see the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v Ohio (1969), which excluded from protection speech "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

The whole "if you don't like it, vote with your dollars" angle doesn't really work when a handful of companies own, control and host 99.999% of social media. The power that these private companies wield is greater than the power of any government. They're not democratic. They are driven by the unending pursuit of growth. They have no moral compass, so their rules are in their own private interest. They dodge taxes, support populist movements to virtue signal, and they quietly collude with governments that wish to spy on their journalists and citizens so they can "disappear" them for wrongthink. Their rules are "whatever is best for us".

I don't know what the answer is, but having seen these large private companies censor rational discussion of scientific fact, this scares me.

> The whole "if you don't like it, vote with your dollars" angle doesn't really work when a handful of companies own, control and host 99.999% of social media.

"Voting with your dollars" means taking your dollars and giving them to the 0.001% that agree with you. Then this will strengthen them a little so they may become 0.0011% or whatever.

Any large social movement should be able to support a share of the economy commensurate to its size, complete with their own journalists, printing presses, leaflet distributors, radio stations, TV shows, phone factories, app stores and social media apps, or whatever communication infrastructure they want to use.

Of course that requires lots of work, but if that work is divided by the number of people involved, it becomes manageable again (after all, the whole rest of society manages just fine).

If people want to skip that work and instead rely on others to provide them with everything, they shouldn't be surprised if they don't get exactly what they want.

Well, but remember what happened when they voted with their "dollars", Parler was blocked.

This looks like a internet version of witch hunt.

Voting for Parler is not enough if you don't also vote for an app store that will offer Parler for download and a hosting provider that will allow them to use their infrastructure etc.

To use an analogy closer to the founding of the United States: if you want to publish a radical new newspaper, you need to be prepared to buy your own printing press and build up your own network of stores, because the existing printers and sellers may not want to support you.

Analogy with printing press would have been: There are just 3 printing presses and all of them are controlled by people that are democrats.

You are a republican, how do you publish your political pieces?

You have to create a 4th printing press from ground up (because people that have printing press parts are refusing to work with you).

Distribution is a more appropriate in this case.

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