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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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".

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.)

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