So Apple censoring is the same as a mall refusing you to hold a protest there, which happens all the time.
A: None.
- Apple is a private entity.
- Verizon (and all other ISPs) is/are a private entity.
- Telecom equipment and communication hubs are private entities.
If they wish, they can make you a non-existent entity (on the Web). We have two options:
- regulate some companies as utilities
- build a public network (just like the roads).
Of course, I don't see such an opinion being particularly welcomed here.
A chunk of the basic infrastructure of the internet is free just out of sheer luck (good willed inventors and founders).
1. The tech giants use their influence to get enough Democrats elected in 2018 to keep crushing any political dissent on their platforms that reaches any kind of popularity. They are ostensibly pursuing this course today, and it's a little frightening. 2. Republicans keep the house and/or Senate, and Regulation or Anti-Trust suits ramp up since half the country has no voice online anymore. 3. SV returns to the first amendment, does a 180 degree turn, and only purges illegal speech like libel, slander, threats, etc.
This is a truth. The current laws haven't done a good job at modernising and adapting to the influence these tech giants have and how they operate.
> and are all extremely left-leaning
Here's the question worth considering: Are they extremely/abnormally left leaning, or is the world getting more left leaning? What makes them left leaning? Because they advocate for general social issues like treating humans as equals and with dignity and respect?
Banning Infowars isnt banning conservative views - its banning abhorrent hate speech. Calling Sandy Hook "completely fake" and "manufactured" and saying that the kids from Stoneman Douglas High School are crisis actors isn't "right wing" or conservative.
I see the world of information like an immune system. If your system is active and repelling threats, it gets stronger. If you are never allowed to see actual threats, your system atrophies and you become the intellectual equivalent of a native American when a European colonialist shows up at your door. Bad ideas from your own side will come some day, and if your big brother has been suppressing dissent enough, you'll accept those bad ideas like a lemming off a cliff.
Not necessarily. Apple is a non-monopoly making a judgement about their corner of a decentralised protocol. That’s quite different from an ISP, where many Americans have little or no choice. Particularly when said ISPs have often received lawful monopolies and government subsidies. Context matters. Finally, my ISP doesn’t have terms of use in respect of content; Apple does.
You cherry-picked one point. Taken together, Apple’s lack of monopoly status, terms of use and lack of an explicit history of subsidies and markets exclusively granted by fiat make the First Amendment less applicable to it than e.g. Verizon.
In the cases where customers dinged ISPs for throttling, it came down to the ISPs having marketed “Internet access,” not some convoluted expansion of the First Amendment to private actors.
I believe in encouraging a public forum for the exchange of ideas. But I also believe in private citizens’—including corporations’—rights to decide with what they’re associated. In this particular case, we have someone who serially relays emotionally-charged and unambiguously-false information to his viewers. Not going to defend him unless a government tries to shut him down.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/03/google-tesla-apple-fa...
The courts disagree. ISPs can be treated as public utilities by states, if they so choose. (New York's Public Service Commission just kicked an ISP out of the state [1].)
In any case, we are talking about specific products. Internet service with respect to ISPs; podcasting with respect to Apple. Apple does not have anything resembling a monopoly in podcasting.
[1] http://www.wktv.com/content/news/New-York-PSC-orders-Charter...
Really?
Verizon, AT&T et al according to the US Supreme Court have the right to freedom of speech just as much as you do. So yes they are free to block whatever content they want.
And you have the right to not support them, campaign against them or build your own ISP. But your right to freedom of speech shouldn't stop others right to their freedom of speech.
Also, just because one company offers a faster connection than another does not make it a monopoly. Whatever company that sells the fastest production car does not automatically have a monopoly on supplying automobiles. Choosing an ISP is more complex than simply finding the fastest speed. Price and customer service come to mind immediately as very important. And if all the ISPs offer speeds that are above your needs, speed might not even be a major factor in your decision.
So ISPs dictating what content is acceptable would be like your garbage collection company refusing to collect political flyers for an opposing party or something. Even though it’s not technically the government, I would see it as a government sponsored entity.
Now if you want something compariable, consider the bakery refusing to serve a gay couple. Even though I support gay rights, I agree there with the Supreme Court that a private entity should not be forced to endorse speech they do not agree with. And that would be what Apple is doing here.
Your summary of a natural monopoly is at odds with the definition in the wikipedia article you linked.
There is an expectation on everyone's part to uphold these values. To practice tolerance. To pull together.
By not upholding these values, Apple is stating that they disagree with free speech. They are exercising intolerance. They are saying it is better to create separate little bubbles to exist in.
Yes they're not the US government. But fortunately, the US government is the gold standard of free speech around the world.
If companies do not wish to uphold that standard, they'll probably suffer. Like FB and Twitter did in the stock market last week.
No they are emphatically not, because Jone's screeds are not intended to be free speech as cherished by society.
They are acknowledging that society's norms can be weaponized against itself by those bent on power and destruction, and that tolerance of intolerance is incompatible with continued existence of the norms of free speech and tolerance. [1]
When the First Amendment was written, ~240 years ago, the government was the only conceivable entity with enough power to censor (besides a state church, but the amendment also banned those).
Now there are private entities with comparable censorship power to governments (examples: Google, backbone providers, cell phone carriers). For the sake of the people's natural right of free expression, the interpretation that backs your "reminder" may be obsolete, and anti-censorship law may need to be made to apply to them.
Please interpret the word "Congress" to mean something other than the government. I'm not arguing what it should say, but what it does say. And what it does say is pretty clear.
That's neither here nor there. I wasn't making an originalist textual argument in my comment, but actually the opposite. The modern world, with such powerful "private" entities that can engage in censorship, doesn't map very well onto the world of the founders in many ways. Therefore, to preserve the original effect and intent of the First Amendment, the law perhaps needs to be modified.
Another case of terrible economic nomenclature. Apple is a public private sector company.
Apple is in the private sector [1] of the economy, i.e. it "is not controlled by the State." This distinction is important to Constitutional law, since the First Amendment does not restrict the private sector; it restricts the state (also known as the public sector [2]).
Apple is a publicly-held corporation, as opposed to a privately-held one like Uber, but that's less relevant to this discussion.