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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message.

If you want the analogy to make sense, you'd have to use something that's more of a broadcasting platform, like TV or radio, or a magazine.

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Perhaps if it's presented this way:

Group X that we don't like gets its phone service from AT&T. We know they're conducting their hateful business, fundraising, and coordination over AT&T's service. We need to put pressure on AT&T to cut off their service, or we'll assume that AT&T endorses their message.

Which is absurd. Putting that kind of censorship control in the power of ATT is dangerous. That’s why we have laws and elected officials.

That's the point of the analogy. People keeep saying Twitter etc. are private companies and can do whatever they want apparently without realizing how ridiculous it all seems when applied to another business.

The analogy still doesn't work. AT&T phone service is not a broadcast platform, and phone service is usually a government-granted monopoly that's highly regulated.

There are very obviously plenty of businesses where we'd expect people to cut off hateful organizations from service. I imagine most party caterers wouldn't want to host the KKK, and nobody would think this unreasonable.

> If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company.

FB Messenger censors pornhub links or at least it did a few years ago.

The "we're not being political" approach also fails at an earlier hurdle; which is that the decision to not allow "political" discussion at work -and the decision to refuse to review taking business from hate groups are themselves inescapably political decisions.

I think you're correct -- a phone call is one-to-one and the internet is a broadcast medium.

I believe radio (as in ham radio) actually has FCC rules regarding identification and profanity.

It does, but as far as I understand that's only because EM spectrum is a very limited (as used in practice) public resource. The logic wasn't (many to one) -> (regulation), it was (limited resource) + (EM interference problems) -> (government controlled public space) -> (regulation). The US National Parks might be a good analogy here - very high traffic combined with limited space availability.

In particular, note that in the public resource analogy the regulation is quite neutral; legal censorship of profanity in the US is very narrow.

Disagree with this.

First off, in the world of VOIP and conference calls this isn't true anymore, and we still don't censor VOIP providers.

The point is you can choose to be a carrier or you can chose to be a service.

We don’t need analogies.

It’s fairly clear how these organisations and their internet powered machination work.

So let’s talk about them in that context.

The phone analogy is terrible because the vitriol doesn't prevail. You aren't bombarded with 100 people's bigotry every time you pick up the phone.

What about the postal service then? That is a common carrier. Never mind being bombarded with bigotry, people can bombard you with literal bombs using the postal service, but hey if some kids are shitposting memes on 8chan... well we have to shut down that service altogether.

Radio, TV, and newspaper are each a better analogy.

Postal service is more akin to the infrastructure of radio/TV/newspaper (which differs, and is rather not one but various, e.g. cable, FM, and paperboys).

The analogy with Internet would be transit providers. The undersea cables between US and EU, for example. These are heavily logged, e.g. by UK. Imagine all your post be scanned, that'd be GDR-esque.

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