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Comment by orbat | Hacker News Reader

People seem to have the laughable idea that somehow only government censorship is bad, or that corporations aren't capable of censorship in the first place because they're private entities. I mean, yes, the world will look like that if you reduce everything to contractual relationships like libertarians seem to do, but personally I hope we could hold corporations accountable for actions like these. Like it or not, we've become extremely reliant on cloud services; Google closing someone's account without the possibility of appeal may not be politically motivated censorship, but it's still arbitrary censorship (even if you did click on the "agree" button on the EULA nobody ever reads).

Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments? If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?

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> If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?

Because the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any of several thousand tools.

Corporate censorship is entirely under your control. You can always stop the censorship by simply not saying it using that corporation's tools. Corporations can control how you say something, but not what you say. Governments can control the act of saying it. One is far worse than the other.

Until all the big corps start censoring the same kinds of contents and behaviour by an unspoken consensus. At that point it becomes effectively as easy to live without all the major online services as it would be to live as an outlaw.

Easier or more difficult to get by without shouldn't distract us from the core point GP made, that corporate (arbitrary) censorship, with no redress, should be taken as seriously as govt censorship. These days they are just two arms on the same chimera.

Consider this: imagine the guy sat next to you at work starts yelling at you with a loudhailer all day. Every day. And he never ever shuts up. (Alternatively, imagine that he just whispers "fuck santosh" all day.) Would you expect him to be free to continue doing it? Would you expect the government to stop him? Or would you expect your employer to stop him?

The answer is: groups of people (and corporations are groups of people) are free to limit speech according to whatever rules the group decides upon. What you're proposing is that certain large corporations be treated as quasi-governmental entities. Which is a _free-speech restriction_.

Not saying it's a bad idea, necessarily. But I'd rather my freedom to say that certain types of speech are unacceptable was guaranteed.

In which case there needs to be easy to employ mechanisms to redress grievances, which tech corps currently don't have. For example, account lockouts and DMCA takedowns (when done by error or if the user thinks is unfair) are pretty much permanent. Your best option is to accept the data loss, move on and create another account.

My point is censorship is a huge responsibility and power, especially when it is done at the scale govts and multi-national corps do, and therefore it needs serious transparency and checks and balances, in both cases.

I don't see this happening to satisfaction. Instances of regrettable censorship stay regrettable, and keep recurring.

I'm with you for almost all of that journey. Companies should be held accountable for their actions. There are consumer protection laws, and I think it's reasonable for those laws to include protection against things like automated takedowns with no appeal process.

I just can't quite go as far as to say that Google or Facebook should be treated as governmental entities. The bill of rights restricts what government can do. It has never been interpreted as restricting what an individual person can do, even if that person heads a giant corporation.

Solve these problems another way, not by literally nationalizing social media.

Telling companies that they can't terminate user accounts without a redress or data recovery mechanism (which is what my original point was) isn't a restriction on free speech any more than us telling corporations they can't sell you poisonous food is. This sort of American "reductio ad free speachum" is really peculiar, especially when it's stretched to fit corporate actions like this that aren't even remotely related to anything anybody would classify as speech

This argument doesn't apply if you are suddenly locked out of your account. Then your option to switch still incurs the tremendous costs of the loss of possibly years of work. The original provider must still be accountable.

I'm sorry but in most areas of online life the system monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are crushing our freedom and choice in tons of ways. You DO have to use Google Docs(for your PTA, your kids soccer team, your communication with your accountant or your church), because everyone else does. Most people won't be running their own mail server or Diaspora. There are many many examples of this by now, and this technolibertarian babble among many of my colleagues in Tech is getting pretty old.

I'm no libertarian; I'm just pointing out the difference between legal force and social pressure. You do not have to use Google Docs. You may really really need to, but there's no literal threat of imprisonment hanging over your head if you don't.

Again, by all means, protest Google/Amazon/Facebook. I'd love to see the state of affairs change too. Just don't pretend like missing your church bulletin is equivalent to actual imprisonment.

There used to be phonebooks on the Internet where you could put in your personal information and if everyone else did so too then you had this giant database of contact info where you could look people up. These of course had to make money somehow, but when you're sitting on a giant pile of personal information that's quite valuable in itself. It's a pity most uses of personal information for financial gain is morally dubious, but as long as you stay cash flow positive you don't have to turn evil.

Everybody understood implicitly that you only put in your own information. Giving away other people's personal information to a some company for which it is clearly valuable is not considered nice. It's simply not yours to give away. For the few who didn't understand this most companies had this in their terms of service anyway, as there could be legal risks involved.

All those companies are gone now. They are out-competed by a select few very large companies who did everything possible to make it very easy for people to input everyone else's contact information in their database, including making that behaviour default in the software that ships with your phone. In the beginning you could ask people nicely not to input all your personal info in third party phone book services. That's not really possible anymore.

The days when you could practically opt out of these companies are long gone.

> Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments?

Because one of these organizations can throw you into a cage to be raped and tortured for the rest of your life, and the other can deny you access to some fairly useful web apps.

Denying someone's access to his own email inbox can have dramatic consequences on his life. Not as dramatic as being detained and tortured obviously, but still pretty serious.

There is already a case where private companies can't shut down their service to you as they wish, it's utilities (water, electricity, gas). I hope we can recognize at some point that Internet access should count as a utility too, and some core services like email service too.

So if that risk is so scary, build an e-mail service that protects someone's access to their inbox by contractual or technical means, and try to convince them to switch.

Any power that you take away from (comparatively weak, subject to competition) Google by giving it to (already terrifyingly powerful and monopolistic) USG is not a move in the right direction.

I think you're getting downvoted mostly because of calling Google "comparatively weak", but I think your point and your comparison is correct. Google is weak in comparison to the U.S. Government and, importantly, is subject to competition.

There are other email services which offer what people want. Want people are proposing is imposing their will on Google and the people that run it, even though there is competition out there that people could use instead and get what they want. Gmail and Google Apps are far from the only options people have, and far from the only free options people have. But if it is so important that people have an email address, then the USG could actually offer that (I've long thought the USPS should offer verified email addresses with strict spam protection by aggressively pursuing violators). Otherwise, let people pay what they want for the level of assurance they want.

The other side of this argument is that there are some things we do want to enforce companies do, such as offer a base level of health care in a package. I support this as well, because that solves an endemic problem where people have restricted choice and it also hurts society as a whole. That is, I think Hobby Lobby should have to provide birth control in their health plans because of the reasons outlined above, but I don't think any non governmental service provider that isn't a monopoly (and Google isn't a monopoly in cloud apps, even if there is an argument that can be made about them being one in search) should have to adhere to dictates about what what content they must allow on their service. That's a pretty slippery slope in my view.

> Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments?

Because you have choice of what to use. You don't always (or even often) have choice of what country to live in, and there's not a lot of unclaimed land that's hospitable. Some people may want a service they know the operators of will be proactive about keeping certain content off. Others will want a service that makes it their goal to not do that and protect everything on it. Choice is key here, and the government stipulating what needs to be done is actually restrictive, not freeing (you're just imposing your own views on others systematically). When there isn't a choice of what service/product to use, that's when other laws may come into effect. Anti-trust laws.

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