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Comment by thatonechad | Hacker News Reader

When you can't defeat someone in a debate, silence them.

Is a company morally obligated to serve all customers, and not permitted to exercise discretion about who they provide services to?

Even if those people are using the company's services to break the laws of the country the company operates in?

Domain registrars are providing a utility service, they are essentially "common carriers". Imagine if your phone company revoked your phone number, or the postal service refused to send you any mail because of the content of your communications? What if the DMV revoked your license plate because of a bumper sticker on your car? Domains are (at present) a key linchpin of freedom on the internet. If ICANN allows registrars to terminate contracts for political reasons, that's a huge blow to freedom online.

It's really a judge's responsibility to decide if they're breaking the law in this case. DNS registries can't possibly decide if Gab.ai is actually guilty of what they claim given the incredibly vague wording of the requirements. Surely Twitter and the Guardian could be argued to also meet such a vague standard to be banned.

It's quite obvious what's going on here. There's an organised effort to erase people with right wing views off the internet by people with extremist left wing views, who simply describe anything they don't like as "hate speech".

You are spot on. They are trying to do it behind the scenes at this point, but as the culture war continues to shift to the right winning they will go full blown. My theory is it will start with google, facebook, and twitter. This is why its more important to get these alternative media up before its too late.

Im assuming you are an adult. And as adults we both know exactly what they are doing. Regardless gab should find somewhere else to host their registry and move on.

How on earth are you supposed to live on the internet then? Become a domain name registrar? You can't really avoid them, can you?

I became a registrar for .fi because I was tired of dealing with other registrars. I only provide domains for myself and my friends, but it's still easier, cheaper, and more secure than going through some third party.

That being said, I have no personal experience with other TLDs, but based on a bit of searching some do seem quite easy to become a registrar for.

That is very interesting, can you give an estimate how much (more) does it cost to you be a registrar and own domains? Compared to random ones. I guess .fi is a bit more expensive than .com anyway.

I should stop reading HN comments.

I would probably because this site isn't the safe space you were hoping for. People have differing opinions.

Or, you know, instead of re-litigating the Nuremberg Trials with every single idiot on the planet, use your agency not to participate in their propaganda efforts.

Im assuming you are ok with shutting down twitter, facebook, and other social media platforms for allowing far left and extreme islamic terrorist ideologies?

What's Gab's policy on advocating terrorism? Has this user been terminated?

https://archive.fo/D70Yr

Did twitter suggest that it wanted to host terrorist material due to an uncompromising commitment to free speech? I assume if you gave them a magic wand to wave that would remove all terrorist material then twitter would wave it. Could Gab say the same?

We're not talking about terrorist material. We're talking about speech. Holding and voicing controversial ideas is not terrorism.

Words have the power to terrorize people. They build fear. You have to really split hairs to not call that terrorism.

Equating speech with terrorism builds fear in me. According to your logic, your own comment is terrorism. Unless you really want to split hairs.

Not all speech is equal in building fear/stress/intimidation. Bomb/death/dismemberment threats are very different from the content of my comment.

While most of us feel like we can shrug off threats and "words can't hurt me", that isn't actually true [1], it is possible for a campaign of terrorism (in terms of "intimidation [through fear] for a political aim") to be enacted solely in words.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, and words have consequences in the way the brain processes them, even if we want to keep arguing whether or not it is valid for speech to also warrant consequences such as a private company (domain registrar) refusing to do business with another private company.

[1] It is something of a comfortable lie that we tell school children to avoid what actual science/psychology tells us is stressful/harmful to humans.

YC21 Ministry of Truth is hiring full stack engineers.

You realize that the offending post was making a remark about a fat person, not terrorism.

Has a specific post been named? source?

http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2017/09/05/gab-now-under-th...

According to this. Scroll down and you can see the post says INTERNET FATTIES something or other. Unless im missing the context it seems pretty ridiculous.

Ars Technica journalists say the problem posts in question were anti-Semitic.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/twitter-rival-ga...

I was unaware that the thread I was replying to was debating specifics rather than handwaving at generalities like freedom of speech.

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