It's increasingly uncomfortable to realize that a handful of tech companies are in many ways more powerful than the government. I don't like the direction anything is headed in.
However, when entities like Google, Apple, FB have such impact on the population and spread of information, they can become the "great firewall".
This is very dangerous and google should not be in the position to become the thought police.
I'm 99.99% certain if freedom of speech was formulated today, it would include private companies as well.
Freedom of speech already does. Unfortunately Americans tend to conflate the broad concept with the US First Amendment.
There were cases where people lost their jobs for their extracurricular legal activities that were hate speech according to someone. Like in US, private companies seem to give in much quicker than government that tries to follow the law to the letter.
Seriously, conservatives in America want to have their cake and eat it too. "We meant freedom for corporations-as-people but only when it helps us".
For the record, I'm not American. I grew up in ex-USSR country that was just recovering from total censorship. What is going on today in the world is sickening me. A lot of rhetoric in the West is too similar to USSR craziness. I'll be happy to be offended and keep my right to offend you. The other way ain't pretty.
Amazon blacklists people who abuse their service, like return policy. They are not breaking the laws, but blocking these bad customers is not only a moral choice but also a rational one, since it protects the sellers and other customers. Likewise, if you are making a scene in a private space, if it disturbs the usual operation, the owner should have the right to kick you out, because you are damaging their business.
So I say otherwise, any private business owner should have the right to refuse offering their service to people who they consider harmful to their interests.
Google could argue, hosting those hateful content draw negative attention from the media which tarnish their image thus hurt their business interests.
The one and only problem is, Google is too big and too powerful, their decision carries significant impact which should not be taken lightly.
I'm pretty sure abuse of return policy is covered by some kind of law. On the other hand, blacklisting customers who just use advertised return policy to it's full extent is not moral either. False advertisement is breaking of the law too.
More powerful companies (like Google) need to constrained in ways that less powerful companies (like Joe's Cake Shop) don't.
Citation? This seems like a clumsy attempt to bash the south. Considering that the two largest cases for violating public accommodation laws hail from Oregon (Sweet Cakes) and Colorado (Masterpiece), with other cases from Las Vegas (Walmart) and Ohio (Take the Cake), it seems ... off.
In the real world, freedom of speech is generally free enough as it is, and in the example above, is in tension with my right to freedom of association. Yes, the Nazis are allowed to yell at me, just as I'm allowed to distance myself from them. If I own property, I can go one step further by going home and locking the door.
I don't like Nazis, but Google's censorship here is giving me pause. Yes, of course they have every right to refuse to do business with whomever they like. Thankfully, so do I. If I don't care for Google's censorship, I'm free to use Spotify, or Pandora, or whatever other company (hopefully) makes a principled stand against censorship.
At the end of the day, it's their house, and if they want to lock the door to keep Nazis out, I can't imagine any fair world that would force them to open those doors.
If Nazis are such a big problem, secret service and whatnot should start looking into them. It's not a job of private company to enforce it's own point-of-view on the society. Wether it's correct not, but a private company cannot hold a a fair trial. And censorship without one is just wrong. I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
> I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
I'd rather have bigoted companies free to be bigots, so that at least I could know who they are, and to avoid patronizing their business at all costs. The alternative is that they are forced to pretend to be not-bigots, I give them my money, and then they donate it to bigoted charities.
I'm not talking about making everybody pretend to be not who they are. That's totally fine by me. If a bakery wants to fly a Nazi flag - so be it. But if gay couple wants a selfie drinking smoothies by said flag - that's fine.
So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move from the corporation's policy to decide to the customers'? At one end of the spectrum, we've got corner stores, where there are a million options, and policy is decided by whoever's working at the time; on the reverse side, there are governments, who must inherently be monopolies, with policy decided by the voters. Google, cloudflare, godaddy, all fall somewhere in between, with the concern being that they fall too close to government in terms of power, while decisions remain made by internal managers, without user accountability.
I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host their own site and individual nazis could provide storage and bandwith to keep it online.
I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.
I’ve heard “freedom of speech” defined as a natural right, but this idea is the most unnatural way for people to act.
Point in case - people bringing up the gay cake in mentioning of google memogate.
Is a bus company right to refuse service to protesters going to a protest? Can a train company cancel trains specifically on a day of event they don't like for some reason? Can cellphone carrier shut down service for people they don't like for some reason? Can gas station refuse selling gas to skinheads on a roadtrip? What if they're just going to work on a regular workday?
1. Protected classes are defined by a history of prejudicial treatment and blocked access to essential services, and they exist as a class of people defined by biological markers. So you can control being black or being gay, and you can’t access any bus service or use the same water fountain anywhere. This is very different than holding an opinion, and not being serviced by an add-on provider. 2. There are great differences between being denied a voice and being denied an amplification platform for that voice. We never mandated that newspapers print every letter to the editor, or even provide equal time to classes of opinions (although that did happen in a natural way).
If you tried to get a cake plastered with swastikas, that would not be protected free speech and could be denied service. You have to go find a Nazi baker or append the speech yourself. This is very different from being black and you can not get any cake from any baker, and they’ll know too, because you can’t exactly hide the fact that you’re black.
No, that's totally wrong. Religion is a protected class in many cases.
Christians have enough of hard time for their believes in quite a few places. Why are they less protected than gays? Why is their freedom of speech is worth less than gays?
One could argue that gay cake is not biologically defined marker. For example, by christian believe, marriage is to make babies. Gays can't make babies. Thus gay marriage is not biologically even possible.
Then we step into another issue. Frequently "protected class" is taken as free pass to do anything rather than being protected for their specific attribute. For example, people being called racists for rightfully calling out black person for his bad behaviour.
We see this in the offline world, ADA compliance can be expensive, but is a cost of doing business. Providing services to someone you find morally repugnant can be emotionally expensive, but you may not be able to legally refuse them service, while servicing others. It's not clear to me why it's ok to pick and choose customers because of their (terrible) political beliefs, offline or online. If their content is illegal, let a court decide that and issue an order requiring it to be taken down. The domain registration, and associated NS records are unlikely to be illegal.
Self determination is a very core part of what I, an outsider, see as American-ism. But self determination only seems to apply to government interference, not private.
For example, in the US organisations like HOAs (Homeowners Associations) and employers are allowed to encroach on what from my perspective I consider personal freedoms, but people accept it in the US because they're non-governmental in origin.
Here in Europe, freedom is freedom. It is irrelevant who is telling you you cannot paint your home orange be it local government, a private entity, or your next door neighbour. But in the US freedom only applies to government, private entities are allowed to violate people however they want under the guise of "choice."
What I've found in my life is that choice is a perk of the wealthy. The poor often lack choice.
I'm a pro-government liberal who is extremely wary of the power of global corporations, but I still take some solace in what this says about our system.
But since we've basically given up on stopping monopolies and mega-mergers the companies and now so big and control so many things they have power without competition to keep it in check.
That's been the case before, it's not a great thing. In the late 18th and early 19th century, a few magnates were arguably more powerful than the US government. They certainly ran the US government. A lot of the protections we have today are a response to that time period
United Fruit Company in Guatemala, Shell Oil in Nigeria, BP in Iran... there are countless examples of corporations paying off people to do their dirty work for them
A democracy is structured to be open and conflict is embedded to force decision-making by consensus and compromise.
Corporations are structured to be closed, authoritarian structures.
We're lucky there isn't much history of corporations having state-like scale + monopoly on legitimate violence. Super lucky.
If it has the latter, it is, by definition, the State. Irrespective of scale (and state-like scale is meaningless.)
The East India Company, Pinkerton Investigations...
What did you think my point was, I'm interested to see how I could be more clear in the future.
Like the right of free speech? Or free initiative, by blocking money transfer?
The difference isn't that big anymore, and that is the problem.
As strange as it is, who else but a huge powerful tech company could do that?
[0] https://ipfs.io/