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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Your freedom of speech does not require me or Mailchimp to carry, propagate, or amplify your speech, whether for free or for pay.

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But it does when an entity becomes a common carrier.

Mailchimp doesn't have that status. Perhaps it should. Perhaps all companies listed on the stockmarket should fall under this status. It would have pitfalls but overall it might strike the right balance.

With a key difference:

"Your freedom of speech does not require me or your ISP to carry, propagate, or amplify your speech, whether for free or for pay."

Start to see the problem here, yet?

No problem. ISPs have as much of a right to voluntary association as you, me, or Mailchimp.

They actually don't. They are forbidden from acting with other ips in regards to aliging prices/services.

Plus they have common carrier status meaning they cannot offer/not offer service based on the content they carry for you. They must remain neutral.

You don't have to be. Neither does mailchimp.

> They actually don't. They are forbidden from acting with other ips in regards to aliging prices/services.

I am certainly also subject to anti-collusion legislation.

> Plus they have common carrier status meaning they cannot offer/not offer service based on the content they carry for you.

Not since 2017.

I would agree normally, but what ISP is not taking public money to hopefully expand their network.

I am interested in your thoughts on, say, Google refusing to send an email because the content is deemed objectionable by Alphabet Inc.

There’s a distinction between one-to-one messaging and one-to-many messaging that needs to be considered. But in general, Google doesn’t control the email protocol so I don’t see a problem with them refusing to send an email they deem objectionable.

This is why private email services and roll your own exist.

Not sokoloff, but that would be a reason to move to another mail provider. If Twitter is censoring speech then the correct option is to move to another service or host your own speech. People talk about social media monopolizing the discourse but the only barriers here are network effects, and people can move to other forums (I, for example, do not use Twitter or Facebook and still manage to have online discourse). This is different than if it were censorship at the ISP level, where there are physical and legal barriers of entry which make switching a difficult or impossible option.

Separate, but equal?

This is all fine until that is what the "Postal Service" starts saying ..

But you are right. Mailchimp and all these corporations which have clearly shown they have no regard for the civil liberties that are fundamental to the American Social Contract need to find robust competitors, post haste.

The USPS is an agency of the federal government and is subject to constitutional law.

Likewise, if we want to talk about social norms -- private publishers have long enjoyed editorial authority in the US. Only in very few specific instances have we forced private publishers to publish against their will.

Perhaps the government should start building digital infrastructure. As they did with roads, telecoms, etc.

What is the difference between a "private publisher" and a "common carrier?" Is Mailchimp guaranteeing the accuracy of everything they choose to send rather than block?

I haven't bothered to read up on the origin history of this company, but would not be a surprise if they started out as spammers.

> guaranteeing the accuracy

The entire construct of "disinformation" is a strawman. There is ample historic evidence that the populations of societies subject to lying government organs (c.f Pravda in USSR) learn to discern deception.

If "disinformation" was so potent and deadly, none of the authoritarian societies that heavily relied on disinformation and lies would have needed to apply secret police tactics to control the population. They had both and they all still collapsed.

"We need to control disinformation" is double speak for "we control what you are permitted to know".

"Propaganda doesn't work, so we should let the government spread propaganda and not worry about it" is certainly a new one.

cute.

Propaganda is not a recent phenomena and we went through an entire Cold War with a noted power with excellent propaganda techniques (soviets) without censoring at this level.

Ah yes, the US government in the '50s was known for its cool headedness around soviet propoganda. The government certainly never did anything objectionable or concerning when given the ability to coerce those with suspected antigovernment sentiment.

The red scares and blacklistings and HUAC were just my imaginings.

Please cite examples of American press censoring content of other American journals and institutions based on a threat of “misinformation”.

Just one will do.

At this point I'm confused. I don't think that private companies censored other conpanies at all, even today, hence there is no need for the government to intervene. Further, government intervention in the media does end badly, so should be avoided.

If your asking if a news group has ever refused to run a story due to dubious sources, yes. That happens all the time and has happened as long as there has been journalism.

Nice that you had to parenthesize it, because both major parties involved in the Cold War were "noted power(s) with excellent propaganda techniques".

No one ever jammed Radio Moscow.

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