Anyone remembers how the internet was going to liberate the expression, instead we got two, three bottlenecks manned (or is it personed?) by censors actively supported by the MSM and virtually the entire university system.
Some people willingly put themselves into buckets, yes. It's always been that, it will always be that way. But don't pretend for a second that this is the death of the Internet or a lack of free expression or censorship or any of that nonsense until you can't buy an IP address and host a web server on your own hardware. The web is free and open, and the existence of non-free and non-open parts of the Internet does not negate that in any way.
Domain providers are beginning to police content they deem as unacceptable speech or ideas. Are you going to remember IP addresses when the DNS system itself polices thought?
The problem is, tech companies are beginning to behave like a cartel when it comes to free expression. We don’t just see it in Facebook, we see it across all facets of the digital economy, from payment providers to hosting providers to DNS services themselves.
If your solution for someone getting the scarlet letter is to say they are free to build their own network, then we are approaching a major problem.
But beyond that absolutely ridiculous argument, yes. The Internet is free-as-in-freedom as long as you have an IP address. If you want to start your own competitor to the World Wide Web because a few private companies exercise their right to not to business with you, you can do that. The Web and the Internet work without domain names, and if you really need your message out there and your followers really need to hear it, is typing in an IP address too much work? If it is, then your message might not be as convincing as you think it is. But even still, you can host your own website or Internet service regardless. And you can start your own registrar and host your own servers and make your own payment processor. That is entirely possible and at that point only the government can stop you (and even then, you can choose your own government like The Pirate Bay did). If your movement is stopped by a lack of convenience, that's not Facebook's problem.
Saying "but Facebook banned me" as if Facebook was the entire Internet or even the entire Web doesn't fly. Only you can give them that power, and you can take that power from them whenever you want to. Being banned from Twitter/Facebook/YouTube is only a problem if you honestly believe that Twitter/Facebook/YouTube owns the entire Internet. But they don't. You're free to start a competitor any time you want.
Are tech companies across the board allowed to shut down, disenfranchise, silence, and marginalize people and businesses because they simply disagree with their lawful politics and ideas?
In the US, no. Title III of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race (among other things).
>Are tech companies allowed ban users because they disagree with their politics?
Yes. Political ideology is not a protected class the US. The government can't tell you what you can and can't say, but private businesses are completely free to moderate content hosted on their platforms.
But again, if you don't like the rules of Facebook/GoDaddy/Twitter/etc, of these private non-governmental for-profit businesses, you're free to start your own. You're making it sound like a global conspiracy when in reality it's more likely that Daily Stormer's talk of white supremacy and genocide is so distasteful across the board that major tech companies independently and simultaneously decided that these people were not welcome.
What if those politics and incitements aren't legal (or ethical) because, at a general level, they violate the law specifically but the harm principle more generally?
Would you be okay with taking action then?
While it may be tempting to reach for the most extreme label one can think of to try and inspire others to reject something that seriously distresses you, when it goes into the realm of hyperbole it mostly functions to decrease the crediblility of the point you're making and lessens the significance of the label you're using.
I am not referring to Britain First at all, and there is no hyperbole or reaching for extreme labels involved with my comment.
Gab was deplatformed amongst others in the same manner.
Facebook executives are disrespectful and duplicitous but this is hardly an existential contradiction of the concept of the free and open web. If people choose a corporate platform with corporate censorship then the real problem is that no one is offering a better alternative.
“Staffed”