Are you implying that every online community and service should be forced to accept absolute freedom of speech?
Porn is speech, should YT and Fb be forced to host porn?
Also, Google and GoDaddy sure forced Stormwhatever to not be accessible through their domain name. Again, using power given to them by the US government.
Do you believe you are actively fighting against the freedom of this group to speak? Do you see where some people would think you are? Do you think that will come back to bite you in the future?
With no requirements that they should not refuse service to anyone.
> Also, no one is saying "force."
Then what are you saying? Should Google be "xxxxx" to accept Stormwhatever? What is "xxxxx"? Honest question, what are you proposing?
> Again, using power given to them by the US government.
And doing so per the conditions specified by the US government.
First Amendment lawyer Ken White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/godaddy-blacklis...
So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it. The registrars were then privatized, which I don't particularly have a problem with, but since the internet was created with public funds, it should allow the freedoms the government gives us.
Like I said, I'm not suggesting Google be forced to do it, but the US government should run a "public option" registrar that protects the freedom of speech / expression that putting up a website provides. If the government feels like they should ban a website, allow it to go through the court system and see if they agree. With privatization, we don't have the court system to go through (well we do, but since it's a private company, courts probably won't hear it.) That would be a good solution for me. Let Google keep their censoring and data collection if they want.
Very little of the current infrastructure was built with public funds Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure around the world come from companies, some government owned, some private.
> The registrars were then privatized
Actually, they weren't. They never existed in a public fashion. You're mixing up registry and registrar.
Today, it isn't a monopoly, so anyone can create their own registrar if they want. So if they don't find a registrar wanting to do business with them, they can spend a few thousand $ and create their own.
On the "government-run neutral registrar", I'm not sure if that's a good solution. I've rarely ever seen a government keep something neutral...
Domain registration and DNS are [nearly] essential now, in the same way that street signs are essential for a road network. If your city council decides to rip out the street sign that labeled the street you live on, such that visitors could not easily locate your house, and mail would not be delivered in a timely or reliable fashion to your mailbox, do you think you might have grounds to complain?
Assigning a street name and postal address to your lot is not the same as building a house on it.
So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
If Cthulhu comes up to your desk chewing on half of a Dagonite cultist, you accept its business, and charge it exactly the same fee per month as you just charged smiling baby Jesus holding two cute kittens for his domain registration. The amount of editorial control you may exercise is inversely proportional to your power to influence the entire Internet. Since domain registration is right there at the center and has such great power, you do not get to color the whole Internet with your own personal values.
Google or GoDaddy aren't running the DNS system, or even street signs.
They are running a phone book service, which is also run by many other companies, each under their own ToS. They can reject service to anyone (well, except protected classes).
But there in lies the problem. Private companies don't want the stink of Stormwhatever associated with their name in the press and are more likely to banstick them because profit.
I think the best solution is a public option registrar.