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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Just paying devil's advocate but it seems by your logic all the phone companies should be ok to monitor all conversations and ban anyone having a hate converations. All email providers should be ok to scan email and ban anyone for hate emails or any other topic they dislike. They're private companies right?

The phone companies may be regulated as public utilities but most of my friends don't use the phone company's voice services anymore. Instead they call on Facebook Messenger or Line or WhatsApp which are not regulated as public utilities.

I don't know where to draw the line. Kicking them off say youtube? Maybe. Kicking them off the entire internet? I'm not so sure. Allowing them to stay on the internet (if you agree banning them from the internet is going too far) requires some companies to carry their content.

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There is a way to carve out exceptions to corporations ability to limit free speech. The cost of laying phone lines or setting up a network of cell towers and buying bandwidth makes entering the phone market prohibitive. If even one company bans your speech from their phone network, you are likely to be unable to speak. Phone companies should be considered the infrastructure of speech, and thus not be allowed to limit the types of converstions you have.

Shopify is just one of many ecommerce platforms. There are simple roll-your-own ones as well. If they ban someone, there is no major impedements to getting their speech out still.

Right now all I see is shopify profiting from hate, not defending free speech. Brietbart can go set up opencart on a vps.

There's a difference between viewing their public pages and listening to private conversations, so your argument doesn't hold water.

If ISIS had a Verizon phone number that they publicized, I don't think it'd be stepping over a line for Verizon to shut that down. But if it was just a normal phone line, not advertised to the public, then Verizon has no way of knowing what it's used for.

Likewise if ISIS had an email address kill_them_all@gmail.com and advertised that this was the ISIS email address, yep. It's time for Google to revoke that. But if it's just disc_golf_playa_69@gmail.com and no one knows it's ISIS, then no one knows it's ISIS.

Breitbart isn't hiding its hatred, and it isn't hiding its store. Shopify doesn't have to infringe on anyone's privacy to realize they're running a store that lets people profit from hatred and racism.

There's no way to ban someone from the Internet. But they can be banned from various corporate sites if the corporation wants nothing to do with them. Which is what has been happening.

Monitoring phone calls seems like a big leap from where the conversation was it.

I think most people would agree that if you keep things private that even a private entity shouldn't expose that. But if you broadcast the information publicly, then you are now liable to be held to a different standard.

So if a group started holding advertising public WhatsApp calls where they'd discuss plans to exterminate minority groups then I think WhatsApp would be OK in canceling their account (assuming its consistent with their TOS).

I don't think messaging apps should be able to collude though. This should be at a case by case, company by company basis.

Is Breitbart's store a private communication or is it public communication?

Email and phone conversations are private communication. Breitbart is public communication. There is a difference.

Shopify is not a dumb pipe. Email services are not dumb pipes.

Even common carriers are not strictly dumb pipes.

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