Hacker News Reader

Comment by WClayFerguson | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Should privately owned sites be allowed to control what content they display or should they be forced to accept whatever their users post? And we're talking about endpoints, not the carriers represented by ISPs and phone companies.

It's funny to me when conservatives talk about the sanctity of private property, and then want to force the owners and publishers of certain sites to have zero control over their own property. You can't have it both ways.

Also funny to me that conservatives censor like mad in their own properties. Parler, /r/conservative, RedState, and too many others to count, would delete posts from people like me on sight. Do you consider that censorship too, or is that acceptable?

It's the scale that matters. Once a company starts serving many millions of people, and becomes a nationwide backbone for some type of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon services, email providers, telephone companies, etc. then it needs to be illegal for them to engage in discrimination and censorship based on political ideology.

Nobody's saying you can't run a small Federated server on Mastodon, for example, and "play god" with your users, but if you do that on a national level you need to be made to stop.

Lumping in the phone companies with social media companies is fallacious. The phone companies and ISPs control a finite resource in the physical environment to the exclusion of other companies. Websites are not like this, they are decentralized nodes on a virtual network, the popularity of one node does not impact the capabilities or accessibility of other nodes. Arbitrary standards of popularity aren't a good metric for applying regulations, individual users make their own choices to visit various sites based on their own capricious preferences, nothing is forcing an individual to use a particular site except for their own perceptions on what they site might have to offer them.

Right, that's the obvious argument against gov't regulations, that applies to all monopolies and is exactly what you'd expect their lawyers will say. My counter to your argument is that Twitter is "effectively" a monopoly, even though smaller competitors exist.

Any monopoly can claim that since were all in a free market system, it's merely customers making free choices that's causing an incorrect "appearance" of a monopoly to exist. But you can ask any journalist, legislator, or other public figure if there's another 'competitor' that can provide what Twitter provides, and the answer is simply "no".

If we were talking about gaming consoles or some other type company the monopoly perhaps wouldn't matter, but we're talking about communications infrastructure for the entire nation, and frankly world. We simply cannot let a handful of unelected overlords censor the world.

Someone is always going to be the biggest, you can't just label something popular as a monopoly and then say "the smaller competitors don't count", of course they count, the entire problem with a monopoly is that competitors can't survive because the monopoly has exclusive control of the market, but this isn't the case with websties, if my site has 10 million users it isn't in any way impacted by the fact that another site has 100m users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com