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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

> So, this is literally, "an allegation is enough" scenario.

If you're a private entity without the investigative powers of law enforcement, then public knowledge and your best judgement better be enough, because they're all you have.

> Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty" ?

That's a standard of the legal system. Private parties have lesser powers of punishment and investigation, so correspondingly a less strict standard of proof.

It would be an abridgement of a private party's freedom to decide, this person is sketchy I don't want to work with them. That's appropriate where protected statuses are involved, but by default there should be freedom.

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Of course the issue is that Google is not just a “private party” like you or I. It is a 190,000 person organization worth almost 2 trillion dollars. They have a huge market share for monetized video hosting.

If there were 100 nearly equally sized video platforms your argument would me much more persuasive, but at YouTube’s size, to me, they have an obligation to treat video creators with a greater degree of fairness and formal process.

If Google does not want to do this, perhaps they are simply too big and should be broken up.

> they have an obligation to treat video creators with a greater degree of fairness and formal process

There isn't really a way to enforce this that doesn't violate a private company's rights. Protected classes are the closest thing, but I think you'll have a tough time getting "person accused of being a jerk" to be declared a protected class.

> perhaps they are simply too big and should be broken up

This, however, there's tons of precedent for. It's the right solution, and we should absolutely be breaking all of the big tech companies up. The current FTC & DOJ are heading in that direction[1,2]. If you like that direction, it's something to consider when you're filling out the ballot each November.

[1] The first stab from the FTC is at Amazon: "if the FTC succeeds in court, it could result in a forced breakup or restructuring of Amazon" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/amazons-final-ta...

[2] And DOJ is taking a stab at Google: "[The DOJ] might even become emboldened to break up some of the biggest tech companies" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/heres-exactly-wh...

> There isn't really a way to enforce this that doesn't violate a private company's rights.

Should a private company have those rights? We meed corporate reform in America.

Should the people who work at & run companies have freedom of association? Yes, I think they should. There are narrow exceptions for things like utilities, where a monopoly is the only sane way to run the service (we can't have 12 separate gas/power/water/sewer/phone/internet lines run to every house), but that situation doesn't apply to an Internet video hosting company.

We already have a well-established mechanism for reigning in companies that are too powerful: anti-trust law. All we need to do is enforce it.

> There isn't really a way to enforce this that doesn't violate a private company's rights.

Google is a public company

It's a publicly-traded private company, not a government-owned public company.

The way to enforce it is with with monopoly or collusion rules. Google has 39% of all digital advertising worldwide according to a quick Google search. However, I think digital advertising is too broad to even be considered a single category - you should have digital advertising of images, text, video, sound, and so on. Television and radio are different categories, why would you not do the same online? They have the capability to be a monopoly or collude with enough companies to exert monopoly power that they can abuse in some of those categories. Combine this with the fact that they receive special legal protections from liability for user posted content. Their protections against user content should be less if they are editorializing or treating content differently the content. I don't think they should be liable for user posted content, but they should have a responsibility to treat content equally, subject to fines. If they are going to demonetize or ban Russell Brand for a unverified news story, then if their CEO or even the president of the US receive an unverified news story against them (as the president has), they should get the exact same treatment. This is because rules enforced unequally harm content creators and users. The harm comes by way of lying to people. If every person who likes the color blue is getting demonetized, without notifying users of the rule, but every person who likes the color red gets promoted up, a user would be tricked into thinking the whole world likes red. That harm is tangible enough when it comes to important or political topics to deserve fines. The harm coming from not explicitly saying your rules. We protect a consumer from tobacco by forcing them to tell the truth about the product. THe same goes for tech. I'm sure some will say well these kind of lies aren't that bad, but they are, these are peoples lives and for many their source of income and to get treated differently on a whim tricks the content creators (essentially employees) as well as the users.

There is tons of precedent for something like this. It's called Common Carrier law. This applies to phone networks, railroads, airlines, pipelines, electric, water, sewer, and trash utilities, internet service providers, etc.

The basic idea is that if a carrier is at least a quasi-monopoly, they have to provide service to anyone unless they have a "good reason." Of course what these reasons might be will vary depending on the business, but would generally not include being accused of a crime. The electric company is not allowed to cut off your power if you are accused (or even convicted) of sexual assault, as long as you pay your bill on time and don't vandalize their equipment etc.

No matter how much you want it to be, YouTube is not a utility. Antitrust law is the right remedy here. Solve this through market competition by breaking up the big companies, not speech stifling regulations.

All of the entities you mentioned exclusive of internet platforms have in common that they transport goods or passengers for a fee and are open to the public. Internet platforms are not common carriers despite how badly some want to thwart private property rights.

Telephone services and internet services in some states are considered common carriers (net neutrality). In the case of an oligopoly like the streaming video market, it makes sense to force large players to make their platforms available on a non-discriminatory basis. I agree that breaking up YouTube would also solve the problem though.

Right, because telcos and isps carry passengers or goods for a fee and they are open to the public. That’s why they are common carriers.

Where you miss the mark is that it does not, in fact, make any sense whatsoever and indeed would be illegal to commandeer someone’s computer and force it to do things the owner does not want it to do. This is quite foundational to our private property regime.

Telcos and ISPs carry packets from place to place. YouTube carries videos from place to place. That's a fairly fine distinction. The ISPs computers are being "commandeered" in exactly the same way.

Telcos and isps have terms of service and contractual provisions that allow for common carriage. They clearly and intentionally seek this status to protect themselves from liability rooted in the carriage. (Edit: in exchange for additional duties based on the special relationship formed, if I recall correctly).

Purveyors of coherent speech products derive similar but different immunity from cda section 230, with terms of service that define the relationship as distinctly not content neutral.

Accordingly there is a very differentiated line: the common carriage of goods. Common carriers do it but internet platforms do not.

Stepping back a moment, I stated before that the fee element of common carriage was not present in internet platforms but of course you can buy movies on YouTube so this is not as universally true as I said. On the other hand, try posting a snuff video to YouTube and you will see exactly why it is not a common carrier.

As I understand it, the argument is that if a web site gets to be sufficiently systemically critical to (society? Democracy?) that it should not be allowed to control its speech product. This would go a long way toward making every website 4chan, which is not an optimal outcome.

However I’m curious if I’m missing something. Is the goal here to deny, for example, LinkedIn the ability to constrain you from posting pornography? Or to constrain stack overflow from allowing you to post poor quality answers?

Companies don't choose to be common carriers if they can still be a monopoly/oligopoly without it. The reason common carrier regulations were adopted was because companies that had monopolies (some natural, some not), would use those monopolies in ways that were seen to be unfair competition.

All else equal, any company would rather pick and choose their customers rather than be forced to serve customers that they'd rather not for one reason or another.

All else is not equal.

If the customers they don’t want to serve are unwanted because their contribution doesn’t fit the market the company is seeking with its coherent speech product than its first amendment rights are being infringed when you force the carriage of the unwanted content.

Furthermore, forcing every social media platform to carry everything is just a questionable idea, regardless. I’m sure you have seen unmoderated internet. It’s not surprising that the common carrier model doesn’t fit social media platforms given that it would lead to perverse results.

If Google was compelled to keep arbitrary content monetized, the first thing they'd do is improve the tooling for advertisers to opt out of objectionable content in a more automated way.

You're just pushing the problem to a different level. It's easy to make a case that Google has to carry content, but forcing advertisers to spend money sponsoring it?

Yes but I'm pushing the problem to a level where there is competition. There are many advertisers. If even a large group of advertisers doesn't want to advertise on Russell Brand's videos, fine. Probably he would get significantly lower ad rates than other more widely acceptable content, but that's between him and the advertisers -- there's no middleman that refuses to let him make any money at all.

Frankly, I think supporting content through advertising stinks, but that's another matter.

Have you ever had your phone call interrupted because the phone company didn't like what you were talking about?

Have you ever had your TV get disabled because your cable company didn't like the content you were watching?

140 years ago in the age of telegram, I suspect they weren't censoring messages they didn't like either.

This is such a disingenuous argument, it's painful.

Did someone's internet connection get disabled?

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/09/archives/nixon-critics-co...

I was able to read at least part of the article without a subscription. Folks wanted to send Nixon some pointed complaints (go figure, who could have imagined) and telegraph operators weren’t letting them. Seems telegraph companies left matters of decency up to the discretion of the operator, at least by 1970 (and I bet you’d get a lot of “you may take your business elsewhere” for various sorts of messages you tried to send, before that, to the point that much speech was de-facto banned)

> If Google does not want to do this, perhaps they are simply too big and should be broken up.

If the people or the state want google to do this the should make a law to require it to do so.

If they don’t comply then, please break them up, sue them, fine them.

That seems to be what the person you're responding to is proposing. I think they realize this is not currently the law...

> then public knowledge and your best judgement better be enough, because they're all you have

In that case, this should be made clear in their terms of service, that in case they come to a conclusion based on "public knowledge" and their own "judgement", the user can be de-platformed without recourse to any appeal.

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