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Comment by gt_ | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen it but even if it's as despicable as I imagine or worse, it's covered under the concept of the first amendment. I support the first amendment as a virtue of integrity.

If you're an American who didn't think about the scope of the first amendment until now, well, that's gotta be embarrassing.

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Why do you think this is related to the First Amendment?

Free speech is not just the right to speak unimpeded by the government, but the right to speak so that you can be heard. (You don't have to be listened to. But people must have the option.) Systematically coordinating to keep speech off the internet is a violation of their moral right to speak, even if it is technically legal.

Yes, Namecheap choosing not to collaborate in spreading this speech is absolutely covered under the “concept of the first amendment”.

I am an American who thinks a lot about the entire scope of the First Amendment. Of course the First Amendment is not just, as written, an injunction on Congress, but also a statement of the ideals of a free society. It includes the right to freedom of assembly (by name) and association (not by name, but by clear caselaw), and Namecheap, as a private business, has the right to associate or not associate with whomever they want. A society that obligates a private business to provide business to everyone, whether by cultural norm or by Congressional law, is not a free society.

There are a couple of protected categories, as stated both by the Constitution and by society's norms. Being a neo-Nazi is not one of them.

The site's perfectly available. There are multiple links to it in the thread. No one's right to speech is being infringed.

This does make me wonder if it makes it impossible for those companies to be considered "common carriers" or able to enjoy "safe harbor" laws. By acting to censor legal (however distasteful) content, they could be considered to be policing what their customers do (asserting a custodial role) or refusing based on moral grounds (c.f., Indianapolis "111 Cakery") and subject to a discrimination suit.

Yeah, the 111 Cakery case I'm kind of personally conflicted about. On the one hand, I hope it's clear that refusing service to people because of their race is clearly not okay, and I (personally) think it's good that our society treats sexual orientation the same way. On the other, I know that our society didn't treat sexual orientation the same way until recently, and that a lot of politically-powerful groups would probably add some strange protected classes if they could (cf. my home state of Louisiana's "Blue Lives Matter" law). So the power to create protected classes is not one I really think should be used lightly.

There may be no good answer other than to keep fighting for what's right and against what's wrong and hope that the arc of the universe is bent in the correct direction.

>A society that obligates a private business to provide business to everyone, whether by cultural norm or by Congressional law, is not a free society.

You're probably the 5th person who has said this. Why do you think that's the only other option? Why give such an important issue so little consideration to alternatives?

Because the viewpoint I'm replying to seems to be the sort of First Amendment absolutism that worries that anyone being in any way inconvenienced from speaking in the time, place, forum, and manner of their choice is an immediate threat to a free society. If we're going to be absolutist about the First Amendment like that, it's illogical to be absolutist about free speech and not free assembly or association.

I am personally, as you might guess, not a First Amendment absolutist, and I don't actually think that reasonable inconveniences on free speech cause us to lose the ideal of free speech, nor that reasonable inconveniences on free assembly cause us to lose the ideal of free assembly. I agree that there's room between the two extremes for free assembly - but I believe that because I also believe there's room between the two extremes for free speech.

That's reasonable, thanks for explaining your position better. I read it as, "since you would be inconveniencing businesses, free speech doesn't matter." I'm pretty close to an absolutist, but I'm a near absolutist on all our rights. I'm also wearied by all the rights we've given away in just my lifetime.

I said once on here and got down voted that, "I wish we had someone like the NRA to fight for all our other rights." It's discouraging that people didn't seem to appreciate that.

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