Hacker News Reader

Comment by usr1987 | Hacker News Reader

usr1987

dont get it... people dont want censorship in china but they are fine with it here!

There is a difference between a newspaper making a decision about who to print on in the opinion pages and it presenting the edition to the government before printing to decide what is allowed.

Who's fine with it? Which of those actually understand the ramifications? Are any of them also in the group which opposes helping China censor the internet?

There has been a "deplatforming" wave in the US where large monopolistic (or oligopolistic) megacorps censor people from their platforms. And by-and-large this censorship seems to have been well received by the media.

You may not like Gavin Mcinnes or Milo Yiannopoulos or Alex Jones (I don't!) but I also don't think the tech monopolies should be allowed to erase them from the internet without losing their common carrier protections.

Being removed from a specific platform and being inaccessible on the internet are two different things.

Alex Jones could purchase IP space, peer with other IXs and theoretically get his own news site to rival any existing ones. This should always be allowed.

Individual services run by private entities should always be allowed to remove users from the service. xkcd 1357 is a good match here.

edit: there could also be an argument that IXs could remove his peering, but i think that's a separate discussion. Ideally IXs should peer regardless of content.

its a bit of a slippery slope though isnt it?

look at gab getting their domain and cloud hosting dropped... censorship is moving down the stack. why wouldn't it hit the IX's?

You have a right to free speech, not a right for other people to repeat it.

I mean, ok, just don't come crying to everyone else about "net neutrality" when large megacorps start censoring competing services and putting your streaming traffic in the internet slow lane.

I mean, it is their service,right?

That's the whole point behind Title II. No, it's not their service: it's a common carrier providing a public utility. With that comes responsibilities towards consistency and neutrality of service.

Once you hit the IX level you reach the ethical question of should the internet inherently be an equal platform regardless of content. this involves child pornography, terrorism, etc. very very bad things.

My personal stance (as I said above) is that an IX shouldn't discriminate traffic. An ISP downstream could block cp and terrorism and whatnot, by the law of the country they operate in, their own ethical beliefs, or whatever.

I would also argue that google shouldn't discriminate content, but that is its own slippery slope. Here in the US, Google blocks sites in DMCA disputes, sites in FBI takedown disputes, etc.

>but I also don't think the tech monopolies should be allowed to erase them from the internet without losing their common carrier protections.

This is the adult response. What strikes me as so interesting in the "debate" is that the people who defend google deplatforming/censoring is that they see so little past their own nose, they can't see how this could ever turn around on them.

I don't like monopolies, period. I don't think we had to wait for "deplatforming" to conclude that such monopolization is dangerous, and it's time to break them up in general. Basically, if someone has the power that they can abuse in this manner, they already have too much.

If you're referring to the removal of hate speech from online platforms, it's misleading to characterize that as censorship. I have every right to (and should) kick people out of my house for spewing vitriol, and companies have every right to (and should) do the same.

The Chinese government completely agrees with you.

Maybe so, but I don't agree with them. What they're doing is using their state monopoly on force to squash dissent. That's reprehensible, and entirely separate from companies deciding what content they want to endorse through re-broadcast.

I'd be genuinely curious to hear what people think is the difference between "deplatforming" a screaming racist in my living room by telling them to leave, and removing someone's account from a website I built. It seems to me like both are not only well within my rights, but the correct thing to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com