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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.

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A popular argument for Net Neutrality posited that allowing non-government monopolies to exercise free-reign over what they've built will result in free speech being infringed. Here is an article and call-to-action from the EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...

While I agree that Net Neutrality is necessary, the argument given in this EFF article seems to contradict itself with regard to FB, Twitter, et al. The article notes that social networking sites have been used by people to coordinate in order to get their viewpoints heard. But then it says:

"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."

But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.

If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.

There's a fundamental difference between an ISP and an edge provider. The service provider is like a system of roads whereas the edge providers are destinations.

As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.

Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.

So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.

Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.

Like a newspaper deciding what to publish?

There was a time in history where everyone could start a newspaper. Pre civil war in the US, the modern day price of a printing press was $10k and almost everyone in a town would buy papers and take them on a journey across America. That's how information spread back then.

By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.

If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).

I've written about this before:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

What? The reason starting a newspaper became so expensive is because of a much larger, national distribution model. You're still free to buy a $10k printer and sell newspapers in your hometown. If it doesn't contain hateful, violent rhetoric, you can even advertise it on Facebook!

If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.

Your example of the Daily Stormer is interesting, because it illustrates two ways in which the Internet as it is set up today allows corporate censorship. The first is the one you describe: hosting companies and domain registrars can refuse to do business with you based on content. The second is one you don't mention: ISPs can (and virtually all of them do) prevent you from hosting content on your own servers at your own IP address. This wasn't the case in the early days of the web: most early websites were hosted on personal machines in people's homes or offices, connected to the Internet with their own personal or small business connections.

A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)

You can make your own website, though.

But Google and Facebok can ban your website and you would not receive any visitors. And you probably would lose old visitors who don't use bookmarks and type your site's name into an address bar.

I must have missed the part where Google and Facebook are obligated to ensure people can find your site via their services...

All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".

By all means Facebook can decide to be a publisher if they wish. That does mean though that they shouldn't be able to hide behind DMCA safeharbor. If they want to prioritize content they need to accept the responsibility that comes along with it.

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