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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> In a statement, Google described the lawsuit as "baseless," and said it would defend its decision in court, if necessary. "In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people," Google said. "This developer is welcome to appeal the suspension if they've addressed the policy violations and are compliant with our Developer Program Policies."

This is going to be fun. I hope they're forced to clarify what exactly they mean by "sufficient level of moderation". If that's going to be their angle I have to say it sounds wobbly. I'd be more comfortable with a, "It's our platform, get bent!" approach.

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It would be trivial to establish strong countervailing precedent using the Twitter app. Specifically "including for content that encourages violence", as Twitter has been rife with completely unmoderated calls for violence against "Nazis" over the course of the last year.

Why condemn calls for violence against Nazis instead of mentioning the actual Nazis on the platform? Some even have checkmarks.

My point is that Gab will easily be able to demonstrate that Twitter is in violation of the Play Store's own policy - the very policy which is the ostensible cause of the Gab app's removal.

Not being a lawyer, I don't know what the legal consequences of proving capriciousness of policy enforcement would be. Maybe nothing. But IF it's legally consequential and actionable, then it would be easy to prove.

When you read contract language, you don't get to ignore words that you don't like. In this case, the key word is 'sufficient'. Google's position doesn't need to be that twitter is free from hate, but rather that it does enough to curtail it.

If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.

> If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing

It's not. They censor child porn and a few other things that are broadly illegal.

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/908786987049533440

Okay. Lets be more precise. Does 'Zero curtailing of hate speech' work for you?

"Hate speech" is not prohibited - nor is it even legally defined - in the United States, where Gab is based.

> If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.

This is the assertion I was challenging - Gab does not promise "zero curtailing" as they censor content that is illegal in the jurisdiction in which they reside.

For what it's worth, I think Google has every right to put in place whatever policies they want, so long as they are equally enforced. The complaint here seems to be that the rule that Google is accusing Gab of breaking is not enforced against other customers. I have no idea if that's legal or not.

A private contract does not attract protection from the first amendment, which is a bar upon the creation of laws, not a bar upon the contractual behavior of private parties.

I think you've skipped the key point here.

>Google's position doesn't need to be that twitter is free from hate, but rather that it does enough to curtail it.

The implicit premise of Gab and it's explicit stated position is that it will not curtail hate speech. Absent other indications, words in contracts are interpreted to have meaning. Accordingly, significant has a 'non-zero in some context' meaning.

Zero =/= Non-zero. Accordingly Gab is in breach.

Trying to compare them to twitter and other platforms that do moderation isn't a like-for-like comparison in the contractual framework this is being analyzed under.

tbf, the social media puts "hate speech" in quotes, implying that it disagrees with Google's definition (or rather, their perception of Google's definition).

I guess the important part is whether they, in their terms of service, police hatespeech in the legal sense. Which I'm unsure of.

Selective policy enforcement like this are exactly why being a common carrier makes more sense.

You think an app store should be a common carrier? Should WalMart also, then? Why wouldn't a store get to pick what they carry? Everything they carry affects their reputation and appearance, after all.

The difference is that many phones come with the the Google Play store on them, and "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" locked off. I don't know what the metaphor would be; if a good chunk of cars were somehow locked where you couldn't drive to other stores than WalMart, and WalMart were involved in the production of those cars?

This is a good point, but also suggestive of the needed remedy being something other than "force the play store open" more akin to "ensure the underlying platforms are more open."

I have much more problem with forcing someone to distribute things than I do with forcing them to allow other distribution methods.

To play Devil's Advocate, should a company be forced to bake a cake for gay people? Should they be forced to serve minorities?

I think we have decided the answer is yes.

There are interesting aspects there, but the idea of protected classes vs unprotected ones and restricting discrimination based on that isn't one I have a huge problem with. I don't believe that a cake store having to serve minorities needs to imply that they have to be willing, say, to create cakes with arbitrary recipes. Could be an issue that comes up in the future with food allergy stuff, though, but as it is today that's not protected, and I feel it would be ludicrous to force shops to be "common carriers" that have to cook whatever the customer wants—of course, there are significant level-of-market-control differences here too.

It's not just about protected classes, it's about equal service for all.

Buggered if I have a solution, I just know these sorts of things are problems.

>I think we have decided the answer is yes.

When did we decide this? To my knowledge it's still a debate.

And IMHO, we shouldn't force anyone to sell/buy anything from/to anyone.

We, as a society, decided you can't bar black people from eating at your diner - for example. We is a collective term.

> should a company be forced to bake a cake for gay people?

should a Muslim bakery be forced to bake a cake for a gay couple? genuine question.

We, as a society, have decided yes.

> and "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" locked off

Which phones are these?

as far as I know, every modern android phone. To enable sideloading involves going into your security settings and toggling the option to allow unknown sources. It'd likely be a legal viability if they didn't do this, as a consumer can complain about getting a virus and that they were not proper measure taken to ensure that they were protected against this.

The GP said "locked off", not just default off, and the Walmart analogy implies they meant permanently locked off as it sounded.

You jest about WalMart but actually if they are a monopoly then yes they could be though of as common carrier. A much better solution is to break them into pieces.

"Could be" is not "should be." I would argue that neither should be thought of as a common carrier. There's no natural barrier preventing you from distributing code through other means to run on Android devices, or from setting up your own store to compete with Walmart (probably Amazon is the better parallel here). I don't think "remove any editorial discretion" is a useful answer to any of these scenarios. Decentralization and lack of control is not the panacea that the the-internet-should-be-radically-open crowd thinks, for reasons that a brief history of (mis)use and tragedy-of-the-commons type scenarios illustrate.

But maybe I should hedge this position by learning to write malware so I can have a leg up when the floodgates open. :)

EDIT: Animats makes a great point above in his comparison to railroads. Very apt-sounding comparison. Slides my thoughts around to consider that the difference today is how low the stakes are for would-be content creators - in the past you were much more likely to need a business case to justify, today things are so cheap you might just write an app to troll. If there are policy changes needed, seems like that shift is where they would come from, and that we haven't really talked about it from that side much.

The difference is that by default, Google's app store is the only option on Android devices and Apple's one is the only option on iOS devices. This means being banned from one basically means your app or service can't become popular on those platforms, especially with the mainstream user (who doesn't root their devices).

Walmart and other large retailers have alternatives available in most areas, and it's incredibly easy to choose to shop in one of these alternatives as well.

Anyone can sideload apps on Android. iOS is a different story.

"Anyone" can sideload applications on Android in the same way as "anyone" can change the drive belt on their own car. Your statement may be true in the literal sense of the word, but that that is not the standard by which antitrust is decided.

Microsoft was convicted on an antitrust charge, while "anyone" still could install Linux on their computer, or buy a Mac.

Android doesn't control 96% of the desktop market. You can thank the even-more-locked-down iOS for Android not being a monopoly.

Yes. Tech VCs hate to hear it, but things like Facebook are really pieces of telecommunication infrastructure, and they have a moral duty to carry their users' communications reliably and without interference, regardless of their opinion of those communications. Google's Android store is slightly different, but this applies equally to many of Google's enterprises too.

Something has to give. Ideally it would be the CFAA and copyright synergy that makes online incumbents virtually impossible to beat (right now, the oft-cited "network effect" has little to do with the difficulty of competing with a major player, as there are much more significant legal barriers at play).

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Reply to sibling comment from majormajor which I typed up but am not allowed to post:

"Because Walmart isn't sitting in your pantry and throwing non-Walmart items off your shelves. Google is doing the digital equivalent of this on Android devices."

Posting this here because HN classifies content critical of running database clusters on Kubernetes as a "flame war". Correspondingly, they throttled my account for holding a professional, calm, and even-handed discussion on that subject, and I can't post replies any more for some hours.

The thread that got me throttled can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 ; judge for yourselves whether this constitutes a "flame war".

Really kind of appropriate to hit this issue in a thread about lumbering tech monoliths abusing their control over user attention.

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Triple-edit: it's interesting that comments that point out HN's censorship tank so quickly. Is the intent to get the score so low that they can "flag" it off the page and keep it safe from other readers' attention? You wouldn't think HN would do that, but then, you wouldn't think they'd limit an account for expressing skepticism over Kubernetes either...

1-on-1 or group messaging is close to telecom infrastructure.

Facebook posts are not. They're much closer to print or broadcast media, which has long been regulated differently and not in an "anything goes regardless of the publisher's thoughts" style. And same with digital stores corresponding much more to physical stores than telecom infrastructure.

If you have a counterexample of a business being forced to act as a public distributor of any anonymous person's content, I would appreciate it, because I can't think of one. Having the right to share your opinion is not the same as others having to help you propagate it. EDIT: see above updated comment referencing railroads link from Animats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

I consider that more the reverse - do you think Gab would be seen as something to force Google to include because it would make things more "honest, equitable, and balanced"? Requiring a "sufficient level of moderation" seems reasonably aligned to following the spirit of that.

While I agree that Google has too much of a monopoly over Android apps to be able to make the "It's our platform, get bent" argument, they also have a lot of products or services where they should be able to regulate the content. In my opinion, it would be a shame if we applied the same rule to all of their services.

EDIT: Could the downvoters please explain what they disagree with or why this post is low quality, if only for my edification? Is it controversial to think Google's control over the Android app store constitutes a monopoly, deserving special regulation? Or maybe that we should be nuanced about which services should be regulated as a utility? I'm open to persuasion here.

They need to be careful.. strong winds of antitrust are blowing around Washington.

Yeah I saw this being peddled by FOX looks like people are repeating it over and over...

If we can ban ISIS we should be able to ban NAZIS.

You can counter by asking when was the last time they pulled their YouTube application from the store.

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