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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

I'm not crazy about all the copyright enforcement hijinx, but I'm having a hard time seeing anything wrong with this particular plan.

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Should a neo-Nazi have phone service? Would it be acceptable for Verizon to cut off someone's FiOS based on the Anti-Defamation League's say-so? For Internet-based businesses, the ability to display ads and process credit card payments is nothing more or less than the ability to exist. It scares me that these decisions will be made by trade groups and multinational corporations, largely or entirely free of judicial review.

We're talking about people having their work destroyed and possibly seeing their livelihoods ruined because they harmed a company's profits. I'm not comfortable with that, and I'm sure as hell not comfortable with it being done as easily as the article suggests.

Should a _____ have phone service?

Here in Canada, telecommunications is a regulated industry and payment processing is an unregulated industry. That makes all the difference. In Canadian terms, you are asking whether payment processing should become a regulated industry with formal rules about who providers must serve and under what circumstances they can decline to provide service.

As a footnote, we Canadians have laws about the particular example you gave that don't translate well in the USA.

This is a perfect example of how the negative liberties implied in "free markets" can destroy our actually experienced liberties (particularly in the case of free speech), and thus underscore the importance of positive liberties (i.e., one's ability to influence the world around him/her).

http://science.jrank.org/pages/9967/Liberty-Contemporary-Con...

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