This is good news, but I suspect the "censorship cancel culture" crowd will be chiming in soon.
The same is true for online businesses.
Pay for hosting.
> that thing should not be controlled by a private company
How would this be possible in a capitalist country?
And what's to stop whichever company is hosting me from dropping hosting at the first whiff of a Twitter mob?
> How would this be possible in a capitalist country?
So you are saying free speech on the internet is incompatible with a capitalist economy?
Money that you pay them for the service. This is almost always enough since that's all any of these companies actually care about. There are very rare exceptions where high-profile nazi groups have had their service contracts rescinded, but this isn't a real problem in practice. Nobody is having their service contract rescinded because their website is made up of conservatives, which is usually the implied subtext in these discussions.
> So you are saying free speech on the internet is incompatible with a capitalist economy?
No. I'm asking you how you envision people owning their own websites without any private companies involved, in an economy built around the concepts of corporate ownership.
"almost always" is not a guarantee of free speech.
> There are very rare exceptions where high-profile nazi groups have had their service contracts rescinded, but this isn't a real problem in practice.
...yet. What is "very rare" today can become "more common" tomorrow if there aren't strong legal protections.
> No. I'm asking you how you envision people owning their own websites without any private companies involved, in an economy built around the concepts of corporate ownership.
IANAL, but clearly there needs to be stronger legal protections in this arena. My ISP should not be able to disconnect me from the internet on the basis of speech. They should be like a utility company. My power company can't disconnect my electricity if I use the electricity to charge batteries for a megaphone that I then use to spread hate speech. My ISP/server host should be the same. Charge me for the compute resources I use, do not attempt to disconnect my service on moral or ethical grounds. Leave that to a higher layer in the stack.
There is no such guarantee with respect to someone else's private property.
> What is "very rare" today can become "more common" tomorrow if there aren't strong legal protections.
Yes, that's the slippery slope fallacy. I could make a similarly flawed argument in reverse, e.g. allowing Nazi propaganda to flourish unchecked is what lead to the rise of Hitler, so we should make Nazi ideas illegal before the acceptance of nazi ideas in wider society becomes "more common". Just to be clear, I am not actually arguing this position, only demonstrating why this reasoning is fallacious. Simply pointing to the existence of a rare event is not evidence that it will become more common.
> My ISP should not be able to disconnect me from the internet on the basis of speech
I agree, but only because ISPs control a shared, finite, public resource (the physical ISP lines, paid for in large part by the tax-payer).
> server host should be the same
No they shouldn't because they're not at all the same.
Remember that only a handful of companies today have the infrastructure to handle large attacks.
AFAIK I don't know any instances of, say, car companies refusing to sell a car to the KKK or some other neo-Nazi group, and I think a lot of people would be very uneasy if all your purchases, even from private companies, were vetted based on your political ideology. To clarify, I don't think that's what's happening in this instance (as others have noted this looks like a set of pretty standard KYC questions), but I think it's very fair to ask why we think certain company behaviors that would be pretty unacceptable in the physical world should be acceptable in the online world.
Okay. Did you limit your research to car companies? Private businesses can and do deny service to the KKK.
Also let's not pretend that these people's rights are getting unfairly stripped from them - they are not entitled to accessing any of these services. Further, it's not like they are banned from all these things, it's more like not letting them on stage during an open mic night - they can still browse all aspects of the internet.
As I understand it, the reason a physical business would ban someone engaging in the behaviour you described is that it would create costly first-order work for the business (cleaning up) and result in a second-order loss of profits due to deterring other customers until the cleanup is complete. Does anything of the sort apply in the case of politically questionable entities using a near-monopolist payment processor to process payments?
Honestly, it's worrying I even have to say this. It's utterly nuts people here are defending this.
You can stop being a Proud Boy. If you look at what are deemed by law to be "protected classes", they are generally things that can't be readily changed - age, gender, disability, race.
Nice standard of intolerance we are building here.
But to play along with your logic here, what if someone was a member of a feminist organisation? Do you believe it would be acceptable for a company to refuse to do business with people who are members of feminist organisations?
And if your argument is that it's possible to pretend not to be a feminist, can the same not also be said for someones sexual orientation?
On a legal level, yes. I would avoid doing business with that company as a result, but they'd be well within their rights to do it. I'd be well within my rights to boycott and tell my friends about it.
> And if your argument is that it's possible to pretend not to be a feminist, can the same not also be said for someones sexual orientation?
My employer's health insurance would allow me to add a same-gender spouse, but doesn't ask if they're a feminist.
You say "unpopular political belief", I say "DDoS target, litigation risk, potential product boycott".
no one is going to stop using those platforms...
Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a proper opinion on which statute should protect money as speech transmittal (IANAL, would like to hear a JD's legal opinion).
Proud Boys are not a protected class.
OP mentioned "if you're not breaking the law".
[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.” -- Justice Samuel Alito [1] [2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1293_1o13.pdf (Matal v. Tam)
What you are arguing here is that free speech is unlimited because the things you don't like aren't actually speech.
Just to make sure I've covered all my bases here: If this was about denying services to a protected class, then you'd have a different response for a different reason -- businesses cannot discriminate on the basis of a protected class. But political beliefs are not a protected class.
As for changing Section 230. The Senate could certainly do all sorts of things to change the way this works. It's clearly an interstate commerce issue, so the federal government could pass all sorts of laws. I don't have an opinion one way or another about how they'd do it, since that's more policy than law.
-JD's opinion.
Kaepernick would beg to differ, I suspect.
Before the narrative drumbeat of snowflake libs and cancel culture started, conservatives were stereotypically pearl-clutching and easily offended.
As a free speech absolutist, I'm always a little optimistic when I see this sort of thing happen, because it always has the opposite effect than its intent: the censors expect that the things they don't like to disappear completely as if they had never existed, but what ends up happening is that censorship drives further decentralization, which is even harder to censor. This event exposed another single point of failure - its up to the infrastructure to fix that.
The "it could happen to you argument" is really tiring. Gab is abusing your idealism. If you spent any amount of time on Gab you'd know it was a deeply right wing bubble full of hate, with a lot of harassment coordination happening. I say has because it has gone a bit out of fashion and these people moved on to Parlor now. This is not merely a place where people have opinions (that someone thinks are bad). That exists on YouTube. If the bar really was "the consensus thinks you're wrong, filled with bias and not interested in productive exchange", Stephen Crowder, Dennis Prager and Tim Pool would not be on YouTube. James Damore would not have been on every conservative program in existence. Society has drawn a line, and you can argue if it's too strict or leniant, but to say we could never draw one without the possibility of false positives is defeatist idealism.
Sites like Gab or, let me dare mention their name, Kiwi Farms, are different. They facilitate material harm in a very tangible clear-cut way. They are very definitely beyond the point where tolerance does not actively work to destroy itself.
But they aren't public infrastructure. Twitter isn't. Cloudflare isn't. CC companies aren't.
They are private companies, and as as these people were fine with private companies denying services to left-leaning individuals in the past, they don't have much of a leg to stand on now that they are on the receiving end of it.
paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks.
My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2].
I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much.
[0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen...
[1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way.
[2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund.
[3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.
What you're advocating for is extremely dangerous and shortsighted.
The publicly stated motivations behind terminating dailystormer are that dailystormer allegedly suggested that Cloudflare supported them. The content wasn’t the issue, the suggested endorsement was:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
EDIT: this doesn’t gel with my memory of the events at the time, which were that the site got terminated because the CEO or CTO was in a bad mood, mind. It may be some post-hoc rationalisation to make it more palatable and give them cover against the things you’re saying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” Prince wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by Gizmodo and published on Wednesday. “No one should have that power.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-says-removing...
I mean, he doesn't. Cloudflare isn't the Internet. HN itself is an example.
Are you conflating 1st amendment protections with "censorship"? Definition of censorship:
>The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated.
(emphasis mine)
However, I did say in the past, that in certain circumstances I do think the right response is laws. There are laws e.g. prohibiting utility companies from refusing customers they do not like like people who criticize the company or nazis and "nazis".
I do think that common infrastructure companies (analog to the utilities companies, just essential digital services) such as cloudflare, dns registrars, hosting and cloud providers shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the "wrong" opinions.
And even "social media" companies of a certain size/marketshare/market power should be severely limited in what they can censor (e.g. banning nudity and porn and gore etc is OK in my opinion, banning speech inciting violence is too, if narrowly defined, banning people because they belong to a certain political party or stream is not). Yeah, here be dragons; it would be hard to find a good balance, but given the alternative of a few (social) media companies right now growing ever more powerful it still would be the right thing to do.
I don't think that's a good analog. In your area there's only one electric/water/gas company, and 2-3 wired telecoms (eg. phone, cable, maybe fiber). You don't really have much of a choice there. However, there are dozens of CDNs, domain name registrars/dns providers, and hosting providers.
There is a handful of CC companies and payment processors. Look at what happened to adult performers and sex workers (even the ones operating completely within the law): they cannot even get a bank account once they are found out to be in those businesses.
Want to run a legal dispensary selling legal weed? Though luck, no banking for you either, and even finding a datacenter that will take your servers will be tough.
The market position of the big players, network effects and also often the regulatory capture makes sure you cannot just "build your own" in a lot of areas. And even if there is competition - like there is with hosting - you'd be hard pressed to find a hoster that will have you. And even once you found such a hoster, it probably will not last because angry mobs start to write emails to that hoster, or DDoS it.
My claim isn't that they didn't face any censorship, but that the scenario is not analogous to utilities, like you proposed earlier. Furthermore, if we're talking about dozens of market players, how is this any different than ye olden days where there's only a few dozen print shops within 1 day horse ride, and all of them refusing to print your pamphlets? It seems like your position is "no businesses shouldn't be able to discriminate on ideology", not just "common infrastructure companies [...] shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the 'wrong' opinions"
>There is a handful of CC companies and payment processors. Look at what happened to adult performers and sex workers (even the ones operating completely within the law): they cannot even get a bank account once they are found out to be in those businesses.
Many payment processors don't want to deal with adult/sex content not because they're puritans, but because it's associated with high rates of fraud. I don't see anything wrong with dropping clients that turn out to be more trouble than they're worth. Furthermore, the problem you describe doesn't really exist. There are processors dedicated to processing adult content however, as evidenced by sites like onlyfans.
They always claim that, and yet they make billions from it, also by extorting huge premiums (something like 1K upfront + 30%-40% of the revenue as fees and a minimum of fees you have to pay regardless even if your revenue is below that).
But I wasn't even talking about people selling adult content. I was talking about people appearing in adult content, aka "porn stars". Even if you're solely a contract porn star working for studios instead of selling your own content directly, you'll be hard pressed to find personal banking once you're discovered to have a job like this (in the US).
If we're talking about the U.S., Federal law still maintains that marijuana is a Schedule I drug. It is hardly surprising that banks and other service providers are hesitant to form relationships with customers whose primary business is "illegal drug trafficking" from a U.S. government perspective.
It’s very frustrating how many people here are falling into the trap of fighting out this culture war issue when it doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts in the article.
I was already suspicious why a hosting company needs a relationship with Paypal.
Both sides are not the same.
If tomorrow Facebook, Twitter and Google decide to ban all criticism, of Zuckeberg,Dorsey or Brin calling it "hate speech", the problem will be EXACTLY the same: corporations censoring things, nothing else. I do not like when they do it to Alex Jones not because I like him but because I dont like the precedent to be set for other more valuable sources in the future. But the mechanism is exactly the same, if you dont defend "the untouchables" now, dont expect people to defend "your team" in the future.
The premise of money laundering is that you're a criminal engaged in some kind of profitable criminal enterprise and it should be illegal for you to hide the source of your ill-gotten gains. But nothing about the laws against money laundering require them to apply only to someone engaged in underlying criminal activity, so people who are doing nothing wrong regularly end up ensnared in them regardless.
And they're a massive invasion of privacy, because they in practice require you to have all of your purchases tracked. As if it's Mastercard's business whether you buy birth control, or what books you read, or who you split your restaurant bill with.
Meanwhile anyone engaged in the actually-bad money laundering is doing so because of some criminal activity that they were already subject to prosecution for. You don't need laws against money laundering to go after a drug dealer because you can already charge them with drug dealing.
So in practice what they actually get used for is things like this -- oppression of political undesirables, who need privacy because they're politically vulnerable and then get booted out of the financial system over it, even if they're breaking no other laws.