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Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it's clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel/interfere with your service if they think you're too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.

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Quoted from the article:

> When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.

Although I see your point, the quote above made me switch to thinking it’s not okay.

If you lived next door to a house that had become a drug spot, would you find it acceptable to call the landlord, tell them what's happening, and then ask them to investigate and evict? I sure would.

The landlord, yes. The electric company directly, bypassing the landlord, probably not.

Why would you call the landlord instead of the police? I'll tell you why you needed to do it for this metaphor - because Kiwi Farms doesn't break any laws and "drug spots" do.

Now, we're deputizing landlords. If that isn't the perfect public-private partnership, I don't know what is.

Who is 'deputizing' a landlord? The police are going to be much slower and ineffective in dealing with the problem than the landlord is, and why shouldn't a landlord take into consideration the effect their renters have on the neighbors in deciding who to rent to.

And we also can't sue the electric company whenever someone uses the electricity they provide to post a scam on Craigslist, which is the sort of liability I'm saying the ISP should assume before they're allowed to start mucking about with their customers' traffic.

I think perhaps your comment was misunderstood (hence the downvotes), but I think it was a fair take. If a company wants to engage in arbitrary (and especially partisan) censorship then they should not be afforded safe harbor. Why should safe harbor be granted to a company which allows hate speech from one group, but actively censors identical speech from another group? By doing so they create an actively hostile atmosphere toward one group or another, and they are no longer "simple carriers", but active participants.

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