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Comment by zkms | Hacker News Reader

> Well you can host your own website on your own server.

Sure, then the people who drove you off Facebook/Amazon/Apple iTunes/Youtube/Azure/EC2/Digitalocean/Cloudflare will go after your DNS registrar and the ISP/CDN/colocation-facility you're using. They won't give up and they'll ruthlessly go after every single commercial entity you do business with. After all, if it's not the government punishing you for speech, it's not censorship and it's fine!

That's the trick of this kind of lawfare -- having any kind of internet presence inherently involves relationships with private, non-governmental entities, and it's disturbingly easy to suborn them and shame them into refusing to do business with unsavoury people.

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Yeah, I don't buy that. If Stormfront and Daily Stormer can still be up, then there can't really be any credibility to that argument.

The DS's original domain and another subsequent one, was deleted or taken over by the registrar, I thought?

Did you read any headlines in the last couple days?

> Yeah, I don't buy that. If Stormfront and Daily Stormer can still be up, then there can't really be any credibility to that argument.

That those two loathsome websites are still up doesn't mean that the technique I described is invalid; it just means it doesn't have a 100% kill rate, and it certainly works on less resourced and less indefatigable targets.

I'm not worried about those specific websites -- I'm worried about the increased spread and normalisation of the "contact everyone %s has a business relationship with, and shame them until they drop them as a customer" tactic. Where does it end? We've established that pressuring domain registrars and hosts is fine; what's fair game after that?

Is it fine for me to pressure and suborn an electric company into cutting off service to someone I don't like (after all, without electricity, they can't make those bad internet posts!). If I can rile up enough of an internet mob, can I get them evicted from their residence, simply by annoying their landlord until the trouble's not worth the monthly rent cheque? I've seen firsthand these tactics used by internet mobs and it's a very ugly process, and it's not something whose prevalence I'm happy to see expand.

Just because in these cases the targets are generally disgusting doesn't mean it's something that should be tolerated (if only because those who you hate will positively relish a chance to use that against your side of things).

Can you tell the story about the eviction which took place because of internet trolls?

"Is it fine for me to pressure and suborn an electric company into cutting off service to someone I don't like (after all, without electricity, they can't make those bad internet posts!). If I can rile up enough of an internet mob, can I get them evicted from their residence, simply by annoying their landlord until the trouble's not worth the monthly rent cheque?"

The really funny, and by funny I mean sad, thing about your argument, is that you're all upset about this happening to racists and bigots, but you completely ignore that this was a fact of life for many of the marginalized communities that they terrorize.

"I've seen firsthand these tactics used by internet mobs and it's a very ugly process, and it's not something whose prevalence I'm happy to see expand."

You know what's even uglier? The tactics used by white supremacists to terrorize marginalized communities.

> The really funny, and by funny I mean sad, thing about your argument, is that you're all upset about this happening to racists and bigots, but you completely ignore that this was a fact of life for many of the marginalized communities that they terrorize.

No. This is frankly wrong. In my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730702) that you replied to, I described the websites in question as "loathsome" and "generally disgusting". If that wasn't enough, I will say it explicitly: I do not endorse/support racists or bigots or white supremacists or white nationalists or Nazis or Neo-Nazis or the alt-right or other flavours of fascism.

I find this incident mildly troubling not because of the targets in question (I don't give a solitary fuck about Gab or the Daily Stormer or their users/admins/owners), but because of the precedent it sets -- and specifically that this precedent will be exploited by these racists, against marginalised communities.

> Is it fine for me to pressure and suborn an electric company

By using this analogy, you are implicitly arguing that Azure (and presumably cloud hosting generally) is a public utility and ought to be regulated like one, with tariff controls, neutrality requirements, universal service subsidies, etc.

If that's the argument you wish to make, fine, lets have that discussion.

> Just because in these cases the targets are generally disgusting doesn't mean it's something that should be tolerated

No, it should be tolerated because the nature of the service is not one which has been established to warrant utility-like treatment.

It should be cheered, given that it is already within the class that should be tolerated, because the targets are despicable. But, were the type of service outside the kind that would warrant tolerating this independently of the targeting (presuming its not against a generally protected class for a service offered publicly), then it wouldn't be acceptable even with this target group.

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