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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

> Companies aren't the only entities allowed to publish content on the World Wide Web

Actually, the only entities with any capacity of publishing content on the WWW are a few tier 1 ISPs.

If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers, and their ISP, and their ISP's ISP.

If the end-state of that evolution is every entity being completely free to decide what gets published on their private platform, that's a huge problem.

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> If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers

Fair enough.

My original parent comment asked where you can speak freely online, which for the purposes of my argument I'm equating to US law regarding free speech. (This may not be the angle you're coming from.)

Most hosts will allow you to publish things that fit that description. To take the examples given in this thread: if you want to publish an image of the Confederate flag, or publish something and not have Twitter or Facebook placing ropes around your content, publishing your own website is going to solve that problem for you.

Now, you're not wrong, there are limits to that, but I'm struggling to find out how those limits apply to this conversation in any realistic way.

The US laws about free speech are greatly liberal (if extended to protect non-citizens). Even something more restrictive like outlawing hate-speech is still a complete no-issue.

But privatizing those laws on the hands of a few companies only work as long as (besides other constraints) there isn't a mob pushing those few companies around. So, I'm completely in favor of letting MS police their platform, but the universal ones ought to be declared public services and there should be guarantees of universalization there.

1 - Not only ISPs, as for example an app store on a locked phone is universal to that phone's userbase.

> your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers, and their ISP, and their ISP's ISP.

this is obvious and anyone still unironically pushing the "just make your own" narrative is aware of it but has no other comeback

Hi, it's me, unironically pushing the "just make your own" narrative.

I posted a comment similar to this, but let me just lay cards on the table: if you want to publish child abuse images, or sell controlled substances, you're probably going to have a hard time finding hosting for that. Same if you want to publish content that violates US copyright law, which I agree with less but still applies.

The original question was "where can I speak 'in the public domain' online," and I'm fairly sure my answer holds.

Unless you were just trying to make some juvenile "any limits placed on my conduct online are invalid because Internet" argument, which I mean good luck with.

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