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Comment by leoh | Hacker News Reader

What? By this logic, the government should have funded printing presses. Gab.com is going to find another provider. They are unhinged and no private entity is required to serve them.

Also, this XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1357/

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Isn't that the OP's point? What if no accredited .com registrar wants to serve them for fear of being criticized in the media?

Gab would be SOL and lose the ability to meaningfully exist on the internet. Why are private companies the gatekeepers to being able to express yourself online, all of a sudden?

Domain registration that is immune to knee-jerk responses like GoDaddy's would be nice. I am reminded of the time that GoDaddy revoked that "fake" Stripe EV cert (https://stripe.ian.sh/) because of media reporting, even though it was acceptable under the CABF EV guidelines. In other words, arbitrary.

At some point we have to consider that internet exists because of the government. Where that is can be debated, but without government enforcing certain regulations and restrictions, the internet wouldn't exist. The companies that benefit directly from those regulations and restrictions should have the First Amendment apply to them, or else the regulations and restrictions should be removed.

Take the physical wires. They only exist spread everywhere because the government forced people to accept them and allowed companies to run wires over or under public land. At that point, the companies not benefiting from those wires are no longer fully private institutes.

No, you are missing my point. The government doesn't need to fund printing presses or domain registrars because (a) there are tons of providers for these services (b) in general it is really cheap (c) you can find providers in nearly all cases. In some cases, a particular registrar won't support you (Go Daddy in this case). But that's their right. And Go Daddy would have continued to support them if Gab.com weren't engaging in particularly harmful activity.

And when Verisign (the registry operator for .com) decide that they no longer want [some undesirable domain] registered at all, where then? Go hopping between TLDs/ccTLDs? What about when ICANN gets dragged into the politics of all of this? Or recursive DNS resolvers like 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8?

I'm not saying I agree exactly with the OP's solution, but domain registration in many ways has the characteristics of a public utility, and I share their concern about it being subject to arbitrary value judgements.

I've been using the internet since 1200bps modems and private companies have always dictated what gets shown on the internet.

I have never been free to put child pornography or guides on how to make bombs anywhere I liked.

That is because those things are illegal. Until saying Nazi ideology becomes illegal there should be a place for them in order to ensure free speech.

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