Your comment is misguided. When private actors behave badly, you can opt out and go for competiting services. When the state mandates something your options run out. It is a pure attack on Freedom.
Except when they're a quasi-monopoly, then people find it more difficult to opt out. Hence anti-trust laws, and more recently, GDPR.
> It is a pure attack on Freedom.
By definition, all laws are exactly that. The question is never "does this law restrict my freedom?" but always "on balance, am I happy with the way this law restricts my/others freedom, and what might be the (un)intended consequences?".
So while it's a dumb proposal, it's hardly more stifling to creativity than 70+ years of draconian copyright protection.
GitHub is also quite like this.
This is not just about popularity. On the internet, winner takes all. The monopoly is extreme in every type of website/service. If you can't use Youtube, you effectively cannot watch videos on the web. If you are banned by github, you cannot participate in the global open source community.
There are 2 solutions:
1. Break the monopolies.
2. Force them to respect my rights, similar to the government.
Youtube is no monopoly. You have hundreds of sites offering video streaming services and you can broadcast your own as well using other services not affiliated to youtube. The fact that almost everyone uses Youtube does not make it a monopoly.
Can you explain what makes Youtube and Github monopolies when both have competitors in the market?
> Force them to respect my rights, similar to the government.
What rights do you think you have that they are violating?
> You aren't entitled to viable alternatives.
????
If you were entitled to alternatives, that means the tax payer has to reasonably fund every possible alternative that could exist, or at a minimum a vast array of them, and most likely at perpetual losses. It'd be extraordinarily dumb and would become an epic cost for the government and would breed corruption (failed businesses, bleeding vast red ink, perpetually subsidized no matter what they do).
E.g., I personally don't see why it's bad when an elected government passes legislation but totally fine when Apple uniterally updates the App Store ToS or Google excludes certain things from Search. In both cases, participants of the respective markets won't have any choice than to comply.
I believe YouTube is comparable. Yes, there are alternatives. However, YouTube's popularity is important for content producers. If you make your own video content and are banned from YouTube, you'll likely have a significantly harder time to be discovered.
I agree with you that this woudn't really be an issue for GitHub, since there is neither a market nor any lock-in effects or monopoly.
You want to participate in web standards groups? You have to use github to do so in any sort of effective fashion.
Same thing for various open-source projects.
The _owner_ of a project has a bit more say in things, though I've heard some people claim that in order to attract contributors a project must be on GitHub nowadays, because many people will fail (or refuse) to participate in any way other than GitHub pull requests.
So I agree with you about Apple and YouTube; I just think GitHub is closer to them than you think it is...
When Google decides you're not gonna show up in the search results, as much as 90% of your traffic could be gone. A business can (and have) go belly up for not showing up in page 1 of the search results.
IMO if a service crosses a certain threshold of networking and marketshare they should be regarded as a public utility rather than a private business. The other option is to give such corporations an incredibly amount of power over what the population thinks, sees or, in github's case, codes.
Even for public utility you have a choice. It's not a good choice, which is what matters.
Facebook and Google have definitely reached a state where not being part of their business (by being on Page 1 of the Results or having a Facebook Page) will actively harm your business. If either denies you service they also deny a lot of customers access to your service just like you'd get people denied service to a business when that business isn't connected to the power grid.
And if you think that isn't true I urge you to talk to a PR department of a bigger corporation or a startup. Placement on Google and Facebook is very very important.
Are you "entitled" to a job in your field? Plenty of employers now require you to work on GitHub.
> both of these liberties will be infringed by most governments if you attempt to remove yourself from their jurisdiction
What? If I attempt to move out of a city, the city government is not going to arrest me, in most countries. (There are some exceptions like China, but even there it's not the town government that does the arresing if someone tries to move.)
Seriously, not interacting with GitHub is a larger imposition for many people than not living in some particular city.
No.
> If I attempt to move out of a city, the city government is not going to arrest me, in most countries.
I was obviously referring to national governments—the original subject of this thread—and disavowing citizenship. Individual cities (usually) don't have the same power, if only because of their smaller size. However, just try opting out of city services (and taxes) while retaining all your private property, particularly land located within the city's borders. The city's influence may be less, but the principle remains the same.
Universal declaration of human rights article 23 may disagree, fwiw. Assuming you accept that declaration at all, of course. But the point is that there is, shall we say, a wide spectrum of views on this topic.
> I was obviously referring to national governments
That wasn't obvious at all, since you were commenting in a subthread that was specifically about how city governments are subject to many of the same restrictions even though leaving cities is "easy" (certainly comparable to leaving github).
> However, just try opting out of city services (and taxes) while retaining all your private property
The context here, just to remind you, is whether "just don't interact with entity X" is a reasonable response to complaints about entity X doing certain things like censorship. It's a well-established principle at least in the US that a city government cannot infringe your free speech rights. It's likewise a well-established principle that a corporation effectively can. This is largely due to accidents of history and somewhat due to differences in enforcement mechanisms (in that a city government could try to get you jailed with more success than a corporation).
But the "if you don't like it, just don't deal with them" response doesn't address any of that, and is in fact particularly weak because for many people it is _easier_ to not deal with a particular city government (i.e. move to a different city) than to not deal with GitHub.