GoDaddy has shut down Richard Spencer’s white supremacist site | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy has shut down Richard Spencer’s white supremacist site

arstechnica.com

27 pointsMBCook48 comments

If free speech is only for people we like, it's not worth much.

GoDaddy took the site down because of posts explicitly calling for violence against migrants - to the extent of "a massacre or two" - which violated its ToS.

It's kind of hard to take complaints about free speech being infringed seriously when the complainants (qua the website operators, not the commenters here on HN) are proposing to limit not only the speech of others, but their freedom of movement and indeed their freedom to go on living. While this particular episode is a commercial rather than a constitutional question, I'm inclined to agree with Justice Robert H Jackson's well-known dictum that 'the Constitution is not a suicide pact.'

You seem to be saying that the principle of free speech should not include being able to say that some speech of others should be limited. I suspect GoDaddy would disagree.

He's free to speak as much as he wants and private companies are free to not to business with people whom they believe violate their ToS.

If GoDaddy had some sort of government monopoly on domain names and having your domain registered with GoDaddy was necessary to publish on the internet, you might have point. But it isn't.

Private companies are not subject to freedom of speech. Something they do not like can go as long as not a protected class.

Your conflating the principle of "freedom of speech" with the implementation in law. The social expectation of neutral service providers has been seriously eroded over the last 2 decades. We never had laws in this space because we never needed them (we do for telephones).

I'm of similar mind on this. Free speech is a concept that transcends law, and while you absolutely don't have to agree with it I expect service providers to. The second they willingly remove content that is not illegal, I cannot trust they will treat my content fairly should it come under scrutiny. Should I find myself under the scorn of an internet lynchmob, I could very well find my content removed.

So if someone said that they wanted to kill the President (not being political this is true no matter who is President) how fast do you think you would see government agents knocking on their door?

Why should a private citizen get any less protection?

> how fast do you think you would see government agents knocking on their door?

Couldn't tell you, I don't exactly research SS response times.

> Why should a private citizen get any less protection?

Because our elected representatives determined the President needs additional protection.

How do you feel about the freedom to go on living? It seems like that is a prerequisite for exercising freedom of speech, no?

What kind of question is this?

A request for a comparison. The removed content involves incitement to various violent acts, which is carried out would not only impact the victims' free speech, but other liberties too. I think this ought to have been pretty obvious given the context provided in the article.

When someone has time to consider their actions the blame has to be put on the person carrying out the action - not the one who gave them the idea. This is for a multitude of reasons:

1) People are not automatons and they don't carry out orders exactly as given. At best you can say speech confirms their pre-existing convictions.

2) Not all forms of violence are considered morally reprehensible and this definition changes over time. For example most Americans don't consider the revolutionary war to be unjust - despite its proponents calling for the death of British soldiers.

The decision of what is just violence needs to be subject to the market place of ideas. If it were not we'd still be in a feudal system - most regime changes come about with violence. This is also why speech advocating the abolition of free speech must also be tolerated.

3) Speech about taboo subjects is necessary to explore the hypothetical. Current ideas of human rights were in the past taboo.

1) People aren't automatons but there's abundant empirical evidence of their suggestibility, which is why we have the concept of incitement to begin with. I'd argue that we have yet to fully understand the dynamics of this in dynamic communications media.

2) Comparing violence instigated against an oppressive government (perceived or actual) with that instigated against generic vulnerable individuals seems sort of specious. Arguing for a marketplace of ideas while opposing GoDaddy's decision to cease carrying on business with a particular purveyor of ideas seems contradictory.

3) I really can't get with your idea of comparing past struggles for human rights (which expand liberty in the aggregate) with exhortations to rape and murder, which severely abridge it. That's not merely absurd, but obnoxious.

Its not contradictory. If Go-Daddy is correct and I'm wrong then I'd like that to become evident. Stifling ideas does not lead us to the most optimal solution. Much of human history can be described as a breadth first search and a series of local optima - to get to a higher level we've had to undergo some regression. Perhaps its possible to have our cake and eat it too but I fear we won't get there by shutting down discussion regardless of its content.

Idea purchased in blood and pain are not worth the asking price. This conceit of an optimal ordering is nothing more than utilitarian teleology. I fail to see what good your propose to discover by being an accessory in the subjugation of more than half of humanity and wish no further part of this conversation.

> Idea purchased in blood and pain are not worth the asking price

By this logic democracy isn't worth it. Should we succumb instead to the wishes of strongmen willing to use violence in the name of pacifism? It is not by accident that one of the first things to go when a totalitarian regime takes power is freedom of speech.

You persist in equating violence against oppression with oppressive violence and making excuses for incitements to rape, enslavement and murder. No liberty or social good has ever been raped into existence.

A comparison to what? I stated an opinion on the role service providers should take in regards to content, that is, neutrality.

Should no opinions on border policy or policing be allowed because the "end-user" would be harmed? Or only specific ones? What if I think we should assassinate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for leading ISIS? Am I not being valid, or is it fine because he's a "bad guy?"

If there is genuine incitement, let there be a court order.

Businesses should not be arbiters of acceptable speech. This is bad territory.

I think you know perfectly well what I meant.

I know exactly what you mean, destruction of free speech because you find certain speech intolerable despite it being nothing more than speech.

You want thought-crime.

I think you know how insane a view this is, which is why you cannot simply come out in favor of it but must beat around the bush and ask vague questions trying to entice someone else to say it.

At least Richard Spencer is willing to publicly stand behind his words. You would rather hide.

I've made it abundantly clear, in this thread and going back years, that I consider free speech to have limits. Speech acts have consequences both in law and everyday life, and to pretend otherwise is facile. Incitement to violence against the innocent is one of those. It is you who has kept ducking plain questions and pretending not to understand them.

Just so there isn't any ambiguity, I find your excuse-making on behalf of incitements to engage in rape, enslavement, and massacre contemptible.

> I've made it abundantly clear, in this thread and going back years, that I consider free speech to have limits. Speech acts have consequences both in law and everyday life, and to pretend otherwise is facile. Incitement to violence against the innocent is one of those.

There is a clear legal line between genuine incitement and protected speech. This is my point of contention. If it is illegal, let the authorities require its removal.

> It is you who has kept ducking plain questions and pretending not to understand them.

Because you are using rhetorical questions to attempt to paint me as some type of monster who supports horrific crime because I want due process of law.

> Just so there isn't any ambiguity, I find your excuse-making on behalf of incitements to engage in rape, enslavement, and massacre contemptible.

I am not making excuses for crimes. I am suggesting we follow the due process of law before silencing speech.

I find your attempts to silence speech you disagree with a horrific path to fascism.

Now let us agree to disagree.

If he wrote a book with similar content, would you have the social expectation that book stores would sell it or a publishing house would publish it?

Book publishing has a long tradition of publishing "inappropriate" content, and has never needed regulation. By contrast internet infrastructure is much more an oligopoly by nature of the technology. Much like the telephone has regulation so that someone cannot be cut off by what they say over it - so too should the internet.

For a long time the internet has followed the book publishing model. If one website won't publish your works go to another or start your own. However this model fails if upstream providers refuse to provide you the means to do this. The further upstream you go the fewer entities there are as alternatives.

While the First Amendment (in the US) doesn't apply to private companies, which is what you're thinking of, this doesn't mean GoDaddy isn't restricting free speech, in a general concept manner.

GoDaddy is legally able to do what they're doing, but people can still find what they're doing detestable, and there's an argument to be made that while the First Amendment doesn't currently protect people from actions like this, that our laws really should.

The street corner is no longer the place speech is conveyed. Speech is now conveyed primarily via online platforms, which are pretty much all corporate owned. The First Amendment is no longer significantly empowered to do its job.

people can still find what they're doing detestable

Please explain to me the vital public interest at stake in protecting explicit calls for the abandonment of due process and participation in atrocities by law enforcement, and incitements to rape, murder, and other crimes with emphasis on particular ethnic groups as detailed in the mentioned letter (https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Clar...).

I find it odd that the idea of terminating an automated publication service is considered a greater moral ill than the idea of committing the egregious human rights violations which would have a far greater impact on the liberty of the target populations. Perhaps we could establish a calculus of social ills? I'm really anxious to know how many rapes, enslavements, and murders it takes to outweigh the injustice of someone suffering an impediment to publication of content inciting such acts.

I don't think you can weigh "incitement" nearly as severely as an act curtailing rights to speak their mind. You are trying to equate the horrific acts of rape, enslavement, and murder, with the act of writing text on a website about such, and I do not believe those two things are equal.

There is only so far I believe you can place blame on someone. While it is obvious that you can blame someone who commits a murder for that murder, there's an increasingly tenuous attempt to blame someone who told them they should commit a murder that I do not buy into. It seems to remove the agency of the murderer to try and cast the blame onto someone else.

You are trying to equate the horrific acts of rape, enslavement, and murder, with the act of writing text on a website about such

Writing about a behavior and encouraging people to engage in said behavior are distinctly different sorts of speech acts. I don't know what you find 'increasingly tenuous' about the very detailed and specific exhortations identified here. Writing such is of course not the same as committing it, but I don't agree with your position tha it's free of any culpability. Again, it seems like you're more troubled by people exhorting such behaviors being thrown off the platform than by the impact upon those targeted by such statements.

I definitely am more troubled by actions against people than words against people.

I'd point out that the altright.com website violated GoDaddy's ToS first, rather than their website being pulled for something one of them said or associated themselves with in another context. This is a peculiar hill to die on.

Again, I'm not saying GoDaddy didn't have a legal right to do it.

I'd be happy to die on the same hill as the guy who wrote "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist."

Who's closer to the 'they' in this example - is it GoDaddy declining to provide hosting services to website operators, or the people using that website to propose massacre, re-education by rape, and murder of people because they Jewish?

Depends on what thing we are talking about. Take YouTube. I think no advertisers you boot the content and problem solved.

YT keeping the content on the site means YT is subsidizing.

Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. In this case, a private entity stopped serving a customer.

I'm almost kinda slightly entirely with you on this.

I believe in freedom of speech, and genuinely believe that even positions I consider utterly reprehensible deserve the same liberties as everybody else, but I try to avoid helping those people with it.

It's why I won't use Tor, I couldn't offer a node knowing what could potentially be going through it, so I don't.

Even as a big ole' corporation GoDaddy are absolutely entitled to hold some beliefs (regardless of why, for the cynics)

Thank you for your support. :-)

It's not obvious in my original comment, but I was speaking somewhat wistfully about the philosophical concept of free speech. As a practical matter, I believe humans will generally continue spitting in the food of people whose ideas they don't like, or whose looks they don't like, or who even just happen to remind them of their asshole exes. Those who will actually live in a principled fashion are rare enough that we note them in history books.

They took it down for essentially advocating killing people, which is more than them just not liking the site. Also, I'm sure they still have plenty of sites that they personally disagree and to my knowledge they have tens of millions of domains and they've only taken down a few (I'm only aware of two domains they've taken down like this)

What about GoDaddy's free speech of them writing their own ToS? It's not like they have a monopoly or anything. Easy to go somewhere else if you don't like it.

I think I can live with that if the tradeoff means I don't have to deal with literal nazis on the internet.

GoDaddy also has a right to free expression, which they exercised. Forcing them to broadcast Spencer isn’t compatible with freedom of expression either. At some point absolutes fail and you have to accept the individual’s/entity’s right to choose.

Okay, sounds like the site definitely is pushing things too far.

However, it kinda makes me nervous that this happening at the DNS level. I understand go daddy is a private entity, but I think the DNS records should be held to a higher standard.

While I agree with the sentiment here of free speech, GoDaddy shouldn't be forced to participate in something they don't want to. He's free to try another provider or setup his own BGP rules etc.

The dillema I see with this argument in regards to the Internet is that it's exceedingly cost-prohibitive to publish content on the internet without the discretion of an entity like GoDaddy. What's more, even if you have the monetary means to buy an ASN and IPv4 space (which has a market value of about $4,000 for the smallest block you can announce), nobody is legally obligated to provide transit to you (which itself typically costs somewhere in the ballpark of $300/month).

I don't believe resilience to censorship on the internet should be a right reserved for the wealthy (or even reserved for networking experts who could build their own AS), but I have yet to reconcile that with the right that private service providers have to turn down customers (and it goes without saying that this particular website will not be missed). I wonder if a non-profit hosting provider that was bound by its constitution to host any legal content for anyone that could pay could be successful.

> without the discretion of an entity like GoDaddy

There are lots of other domain registers, some in specific that specialize in free speech rights.

> What's more, even if you have the monetary means to buy an ASN and IPv4 space (which has a market value of about $4,000 for the smallest block you can announce)

Realistically someone could publish to IPFS and do CNAME redirects without a server.

> I wonder if a non-profit hosting provider that was bound by its constitution to host any legal content for anyone that could pay could be successful.

Reminds me of riseup, but that has a littered history as well.

Also there is Namecoin and .bit addresses. Not saying they work flawlessly, but the concept does solve this problem.

Still we are talking about the underlining infrastructure here. While not versed in all the details of ICANN's policies I am actual surprised there no policy stopping a registrar from doing this.

I can understand hosting, but I think DNS records should held to higher standards. People don't like governments messing with the DNS system why should we give a private company a pass?

GoDaddy has no obligation to protect free speech, only the (US) government does (supposedly). I see no problem with a private company selecting who can/cannot use their service. If the US government had ordered GoDaddy to remove the site, then that would be another thing entirely...

For those that support net neutrality though, the whole point is to keep private companies from being able to control which sites have access to the internet. Shouldn't it apply as much to DNS companies as it does to ISPs?

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