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Comment by bdhajaona | Hacker News Reader

> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations

Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here. And like any business, they choose to deny service to some users (and not all users agree on this). Also, there are multiple such private spaces.

Maybe the real solution is just like in the physical world, there should be state owned online spaces that are real "public spaces" and denying service here would be the govt denying rights.

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See, I think you got into the area that I am troubled by.

I will state two things I consider to be true that are mutually exclusive:

* Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity. * Online spaces owned by a private corporation is for their benefit, not humanities, and forcing them to keep others on them is an infringement of property rights.

... I am a human and I can simultaneously hold views that exclude each other. I wish I knew a way to make these consistent.

The law deals with this all the time, but it becomes complex when you cross jurisdiction boundaries. If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a common area within a company town, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them. What do you do?

Corporations often operate public squares to their benefit, so I have no problem with them having to follow local laws on what needs to happen in that public square. Google already personalizes your search results, and Facebook personalizes your feed. They can add local laws into that personalization algorithm.

Edit: Updated the example to be correct.

> If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a square with a fountain outside an office building, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them.

This is not correct. [0]

> Private property owners can set rules for speech on their property. The government may not restrict your speech if it is taking place on your own property or with the consent of the property owner.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights

Part of the issue here is that we regard (not just legally, but even in how we talk) corporations as people. Or perhaps that we try to use the same rules for small-scale "ownership" as for vast almost monopolistic levels of control.

I think we should not regard property as a concept so highly. We don't need to paint this as a black/white nihilistic capitalism vs. naive communism issue either. But it sure would help if we'd be a little less fundamentalist when it came to corporations. And also if we didn't try to stretch the metaphor of "this is my pair of shoes!" all the way to "I get to own a significant chunk of everybody's communication!"

Corporations as entities should shield their owners and employees less absolutely, and have more restrictions on rights that are entirely divorced from those of their members than humans have. And we shouldn't assume ownership in-the-large needs to work _exactly_ the same as in the small.

> Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity.

Sure we can treat online spaces like utilities e.g. I dont know what the law is but something like denying water is not legal or you got to have good reason to do so.). And like content, water quality should be maintained to a standard (e.g. moderating scammers, bots, illegal/objectionable content etc.). But the big difference, the govt can set water quality standards but is very reluctant to set content moderation standards (for good reasons). So we end up with a situation, we want content moderation but its not a govt approved standard and so we end up with moderation that not everyone agrees with.

> private property that allows people to congregate for free

People keep implying (and maybe you aren't and I am associating you with them unfairly) that we should be willing to deal with these issues because giving up our privacy/rights is a fair exchange for access to a platform. If people didn't give Facebook access to store and share content that they create, it wouldn't exist.

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