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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

Or people should stop using their product until they fix this.

There isn't always a good alternative for a service that arbitrarily denied you access. Facebook Marketplace has replaced classifieds in many places, and being denied access to the service can negatively impact people's lives.

Craigslist is still thriving and is a very viable alternative.

Is Craigslist a universal service available around the world? I'm welcomed by this message when visiting the site:

> Your request has been blocked.

> If you have questions, please contact us.

Though I think that private companies can choose who they do business with, I also think that these companies are an exception.

They are so huge they should probably be classified as a public utility of sorts. This is a tough pill to swallow for this site since it could possibly derail the tech gravy train.

Rather than regulate the company it feels like the more common solution is to force companies to split up any vertical integrations in order to reduce the barrier to compete with them.

Private companies SHOULD be able to choose who they do business with. They should also be subject to the rules everyone else is. As soon as they start getting preferential treatment through regulation, they should absolutely expect restrictions upon those rights as the cost of that preferential treatment. And of course, Section 230 provisions are absolutely preferential treatment.

their services are subsidized by other parts of the business / venture capital in a way that make normal market economics of "go to the competitor" not possible.

This is a problem with most of mega tech right now. Nobody can spin up a fair competitor to Youtube because Google can throw money from other parts of the business to keep it dominant. How are you supposed to compete fairly with Amazon when they can reinforce with AWS money?

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