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> Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will. That seems like self-serving cherry-picking, when in other situations the same folks would be against granting freedom of association.

Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association. The more abusive the big players become, the more incentive there is for people to use alternatives. Getting the government involved will slow that process and, inevitably, have unforeseen negative consequences.

> And we should not patronize such businesses.

I agree, and that is the best solution.

> Spare me the tired arguments that these private companies have a right to not serve customers at will.

Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association.

There is a lawsuit where a mining company owned an entire town, including the roads. A Jehova's witness won a lawsuit allowing them to distribute pamphlets there on the basis of free speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc

In any case, freedom of association shouldn't apply to online platforms. The average person isn't possessed by the illusion that any YouTuber's opinion is necessarily ratified by YouTube. If you don't want to hear someone's opinion nor associate with them, then you unfriend/block/unsubscribe. On the other hand, freedom of speech is very relevant from a practical standpoint.

For pretty much every online community starting from the smallest web forums, you need an ability to remove unwanted content and people from that platform. Even platforms for very free, unrestricted discussion need to fight commercial spam and simple vandalism. The ability to have a community of group A for topics that interest group A requires effective moderation, i.e. the ability to remove unwanted topics and people from that forum, blocking them before the majority of the group have had to encounter that unwanted content, otherwise you have a very, very poor experience full of spam that kills the forum, and that is very relevant from a practical standpoint.

For some of that content the proper answer is "go have your community somewhere else"; for other content (e.g. penis enlargement spam and people who post it) there probably is no community that wants them, and for that freedom of speech consists of being able to freely speak on a soapbox somewhere where all the 0 people who want to hear you can do it.

If I start a company that allows users to upload content over the internet, is it your contention that I should not be within my rights to control what is stored and who is allowed to use my services?

> Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society, especially when so much power is accumulated in a few platforms

I disagree here. Communities like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc, have grown to such enormous scales, that their eventual fracture is inevitable. Whether it takes the form of griefers getting the boot, or communities leaving on their own accord, the root problem is the same. You simply can't put a billion people together in a box without any stronger identity or culture tying them together.

Think of how things work in the natural world. We have universities, libraries, coffee shops, pubs, clubs, offices, stores, restaurants, museums, parks, playgrounds, fairs, festivals. Each social setting has its own culture, its own rules, its own priorities.

If you take the riffraff from the pub and inject them into the library, you're going to have a bad time. If you start club dancing on the HR lady at the office, you're going to have a bad time.

The problem with the current crop of social media is that they are meant to be everything for everyone. We mash hundreds of different communities that have nothing to do with each other into the same platforms like square pegs into round holes. Engagement and user count are the ONLY thing the companies care about - but those KPIs aren't what drive healthy communities.

The future of the web is going to be fractured and federated. The pains being experienced by the big players right now are the obvious outcome of trying to apply the same set of standards and rules to thousands of different sets of people. If there is no set of rules you can make to please everyone, the answer is simple: it is time to split.

If you take the riffraff from the pub and inject them into the library, you're going to have a bad time.

According to Kevin Creehan, his grandson, Irish fiddler Junior Creehan was always amazed that Irish Traditional music became a thing for pubs. To him, it had started out as thoughtful people gathered around in their kitchens playing music together. I can attest that a trad session can be a contemplative and even a bit trance-like.

> has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law

We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army. That said, pure scale does matter. There will debate over whether powerful organisations are currently benign or hostile, but there is no doubt whatsoever that they are a mighty force.

If Google or Facebook ever decides to seriously wake up politically, China's internet strategies will start looking very sensible. I don't agree with them either though.

> We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army.

While I disagree that the firms in question have government-like comprehensive power, even without their own army, a monopoly or coordinating oligopoly able to lock out new participants on essential communication services would have such power, and be a de facto part of the government, even if they lacked formal command relationship over the armed forces of the host state.

>We can't really compare them to the government until they have a standing army.

In Soviet Union families of political prisoners and people who publicly defended the repressed often found themselves unemployable because of blacklisting. That did not involve any use of military or police force. Does it make it okay?

To put it more directly: if a sufficiently large entity can create effects comparable to government repression, why should we reason about those effects as fundamentally different from ones created by the government?

The US does that too; it's called sanctions, and secondary sanctions.

> Deplatforming is a dangerous step for a free society,

Deplatforming is simply the a natural consequence of the operation of the marketplace of ideas, a central necessity for a free society. If ideas don't have to compete for the privilege of access to resource to relay them, there is no marketplace of ideas, and society drowns in noise.

> The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts and risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law.

It's arguable that the concentration of these organizations is too great as private businesses and they should either be broken up or regulated as monopolies with common carrier style neutrality and government price, access, and service regulations. But unless you are going to advocate that—and strangely those who selectively dislike deplatforming when it targets right-wing extremists never do, and in fact often oppose sich government intervention universally and support explicit legal protection for denial of generally-offered services based on religious disagreement, especially when the actor so doing is a member of the dominant religious community—the idea that businesses cannot exercise their right to free speech, free press, and free association to choose not to participate in relaying certain views is incoherent.