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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing illustrates the biggest issue with web hosting, domain registrars and the internet's infrastructure in general; everything is privately owned by companies who get unlimited rights to decide who and what they want to host.

The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP.

Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? The power company can't cut off your service because you offended someone online or what not.

If you want to argue the internet is a place for free speech, then it needs places you can host content/register domains/whatever that act like a public square, not a shopping centre.

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The phone company would be a better analogy, and they absolutely can cut off your service if you’re being a nuisance. The first ammendment says your government won’t pass laws against you saying stuff, it stops you from going to jail for the things you say, and it’s there to protect the people’s right to criticise the government.

It is not there to force companies to serve you if they don’t want to.

Okay, so sticking with that analogy, can your phone company cut off your service if you're making racist comments or discussing unpopular political ideas with your friends over the phone? Or, perhaps more importantly, _should_ they be able to?

Phone conversations are private.

And what if they weren't?

Would you have a problem with a phone company listening into your conversations and determining if you said something bad or not?

If you broke the law by saying something, yes. Incitement to violence is not protected free speech.

That's not quite the definition. But suppose some piece of speech is not protected: that doesn't necessarily make it illegal, just that it is legal for the state to censor you.

This isn't about illegal speech.

This is about perfectly legal speech that does not fall under the definition of incitement.

We have the police for handling illegal incitement to violence.

What makes them private? They're operated on the phone company's lines and by talking on their lines you're compelling them to carry certain speech. The logic that states private communication carriers have an unlimited right to ban what they want to on their networks leads to the conclusion that "private" phone calls can be censored.

> What makes them private?

The law. Wire-tapping isn't legal.

Yes it is.

I mean, there's a law against it. But there is a lot of known warrent-less wire-tapping, both by govt and industry, and everyone shrugs.

And it's not even a de jure vs de facto thing, since by now a lot of the ostensibly illegal stuff has been either defended successfully in courts or buttressed by the govt.

It isn't wire-tapping if they block you from accessing the wire to begin with. Forcing the phone companies to carry your speech over their wires is compelling speech across their property which should be against their 1A rights if you're correct. However, it clearly has been ruled not to violate their rights.

Please quit calling "exterminating the jews" an unpopular political opinion.

I think the term makes sense, because that's what it is, and that's the reason why people want to shut it down. It also brings into focus the main point of: where do you draw the line? When is a political opinion unpopular enough to warrant shutting it down?

The difference is incitement to violence.

But that's not really the difference, since there is plenty of incitement to violence that is politically palatable.

> The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP.

Exactly this. When the First Amendment was authored, I don't think it was even conceivable that any organization besides a government or state church could effectively censor speech at scale. Now that we have "private" organizations that effectively have that power, it's perhaps time that the law be updated to reflect that change in facts and preserve people's right to free expression.

The internet shouldn't be another Zuccotti Park.

When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and square and what not being the main platform for discussion. Reaching the crowd meant going out with a handbell or standing on a box passing out pamphlets. Stopping the government from arresting someone advertising in the town square was more important than stopping a shop from kicking out a customer they didn't like.

But that's not the case now. The platforms hosting your work are privately owned, the large community websites/social networks/whatever with millions or billions of users are privately owned, and a larger portion of real life locations people frequent are privately owned too.

The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.

>The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.

Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement.

The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.

Sorry, but you seem to be confusing "the right to speak" with "the right to be heard." Your right to speak freely is not lost simply because the town square is empty and everyone is inside private clubs that will not allow you in.

Some of the same people who voted for the First Amendment very shortly thereafter authored the Alien and Sedition Acts.

It was certainly much more expensive to distribute writing in 1800 than it is today. It would be much easier to stop a person from printing.

> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign?

Because ISPs are, because of infrastructure (access to and across property, or access to scarce spectrum) requirements, naturally sharply limited, but anyone who connects to an ISP can host content.

Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players?

One tactic for deplatforming undesirable sites is a DDoS -- if you put your home server online, what options do you have for DDoS mitigation if the big players in that space decide they're on the political side of those doing the DDoS?

> Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players?

For a wide reach via the press, you may need to either buy more (or higher capacity) presses or convince those who already have then of the value of devoting them to your ideas.

That's inherent in freedom of the press and the marketplace of ideas.

You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.

Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks.

By way of analogy, consider you are the owner of a small independent city paper -- the sort you see offered for free in boxes on streetcorners.

Now imagine a large corporate entity -- perhaps a competing paper or someone with a personal grudge or a political mission. Every day, they go to all the locations where the paper is offered, take every copy, and destroy them so that no one else can read them. You spend the money you have to put it on more streetcorners, but your rival has deeper pockets than you and can hire people to go to all the new locations and take and destroy those papers too.

Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?

> Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?

By the attacker? Sure, that's a straightforward violation of property rights.

By a private third party better able to afford to, say, hire guards to protect against that attack for not choosing to allow you to use their resources for that purpose? No.

The fact that people who might commit an attack exist does not give you a claim by right on other private party’s resources as an anticipatory defense.

You might have a policy argument that government should provide public, equal access, content neutral resources for that purpose, but that is a claim of on-balance public benefit, not one to which there is an inherent right by any common conception of which I am aware.

"Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks."

The right to speak is not the right to not be shouted down.

Are people still able to download a web server and host their own content? What does anyone need a host for? If a bunch of angry racists want to start their own social network, they could build it, if they really wanted a place to spew their hate. Is anyone really stopping them from connecting to the internet?

Is that the point?

There are a lot of people here completely in support of this, and it's not hard to trace an IP address to an ISP. When brigades start calling for ISPs to stop serving these sites, do you really think that's when they'll stand up for free speech?

Keep in mind in the span of just a few days, we've seen the jump from application platforms (Facebook, Google) to now infrastructure providers. The leap to ISPs is not that far, and something tells me when it happens, supporters will simply move the bar again.

Historically if you have your own AS number it's very very hard to get kicked off the Internet. But maybe Nazis are revolting enough to make it happen.

That misses the point.

As long as there is an ISP that can be publicly pressured to block the source of content, and the source of that content can be easily differentiated (to avoid blocking other content), we're one Twitter mob away from "existing on the Internet" not being enough to avoid censorship.

And it doesn't even need to be their ISP. It could be yours or mine.

We already have organized brigades demanding ISPs stop providing service to certain people. That is to say, people who spam on an industrial scale.

Do you think ISPs should instead be required to host spammers? Perhaps even to provide them extra resources to help them overcome the unfair way people's spam filters censor their valuable free speech?

I'm open to simply acknowledging the Internet is no place for free speech. My point is that ISPs are just as vulnerable to brigading as Facebook or Microsoft, so arguing that it's not a big problem because they're still free to host content on their own hardware is missing the point.

It just seems odd how rabidly pro-Net Neutrality places like this were only to make cases like yours a few months later when free speech on the net actually arrives on the chopping block. How long will it take before my ISP blocks Netflix ostensibly because of complaints of offensive content?

But besides that, it's easy to draw a pretty clear distinction between allowing someone's web site to be accessible as compared to being actively compelled to send whatever outgoing transmissions a group likes. Packets are packets, but just as we don't allow screaming "fire" in a crowded theatre, freedom of speech is still incredibly important even if not absolute.

I'd argue that the pipe -- that is, the entity which owns and controls the physical fiber/wires/etc. through which the packets flow -- should operate under a certain level of enforced neutrality, in the sense that if A and B each are customers of C paying for access to the pipe, C shouldn't decide to disallow, filter, or throttle traffic between them. C (the ISP) should only be able to choose whether or not to take on or keep a particular customer, and to charge fees according to usage. The net neutrality debate is basically over whether to allow C to double dip by refusing to provide the paid-for service unless it's paid for again (and again, and again...).

But that says nothing about whether an ISP should be forced to accept any and all people as paying customers. And it's very far from saying that particular web sites should be forced to accept any and all users and any and all behaviors from those users.

Which means you've basically failed in your quest to label people as hypocrites. Would you like to try again?

(also, you may want to learn a bit more about First Amendment jurisprudence if your go-to is "fire in a crowded theater" -- it makes you look about as well-informed as someone who genuinely insists "the internet is a series of tubes")

That you can selectively interpret net neutrality to justify ISPs arbitrarily blocking access to content is unsurprising, but nonetheless irrelevant.

Unless/until you're a customer of an ISP and hosting something on the connection they provide, there's no content.

Now, think through the logical consequences of your argument for a moment, and ask whether you really want to legally require every ISP and every hosting service and every website everywhere to be legally required to accept absolutely anyone, absolutely any behavior and absolutely any content, without exception. Do you really want to live in that world? Or are you just grasping at straws to try to maintain an argument you made in bad faith from the beginning?

(hint: it's the second one)

I have no interest in defending your straw man. I didn’t propose legislation, and the idea that net neutrality wasn’t intended to keep ISPs from arbitrarily blocking content is ridiculous.

If it helps, though, my comments are still there unedited. Maybe you’re mixing up my comments with someone else’s.

Could they? Couldn't an ISP decide they don't want to serve that hateful content over their pipes and disconnect them? Or what if the domain name registrar decides they don't want to do business with an angry racist? Or what if an upstream backbone provider decides they could get some good PR by blackholing their IP?

These days, private companies have a _lot_ of power over what speech is allowed to be heard. Perhaps even more so than the government.

The solution is not to create more laws which will give the real danger (governments) more power to use their violence.

The solution is to simply have everyone host themselves. Even a moderate home broadband connection is more than enough to serve up your personal website.

Once you start relying on third parties you've lost. That's their property, not yours. When you claim it is yours and use government violence to enforce your wishes you are doing more damage to society than what you're trying to stop.

It’s impossible to avoid relying on third parties. Somebody has to lease you the DNS name; we’ve already seen that used to punish sites. Somebody has to host your server or sell you an internet connection. Moving to Tor is the only way to protect yourself from those means of punishment, at which point you’ve lost 99.99% of any audience you might’ve had. You might as well just go to a physical newsletter.

Your ISP is also a private third party. If Microsoft rejects you why wouldn't Comcast? The 70 dollars you pay for a home connection isn't worth dealing with a twitter mob, so they'll gladly boot you.

Some might. But that's where this fight should be fought: keeping internet access as dumb pipe infrastructure. The solid base on which the internet rests.

As long as that's true people can always route around censorship in services provided remotely.

In terms of implementation notabug.io is a pretty cool (and simple for the user) way to do p2p + federated node discussion boards on the web. It's not perfect but this kind of thing paired with tor for domain resolution and transport could provide a communications platform as long as internet access is still uncensored.

I am of the assumption that in the US ISPs no longer have to deal with net neutrality. So why would large hosting companies have to?

Hosting companies never had to, because net neutrality is only about the Internet itself, not the edge services that host websites and whatnot.

One bit of hilarious irony is that the only reason people in the US can access the Daily Stormer is net neutrality (now just de facto), yet the Daily Stormer was full of people calling for the end of net neutrality.

> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign?

*free rein

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