Okay.
Then hosting providers refuse to host.
Payment processors refuse to process your payments for web services.
Your domains are revoked.
Your SSL certs are revoked.
Where does this end? If they have the power to, and they've justified it this far, why wouldn't they keep going?
If a business closes because nobody is interested in buying their products, or a club disbands because nobody is interested in joining, or a pub bars a patron who’s starting fights and nobody blinks an eye. The same thing happens on the internet and suddenly it’s the end of the world.
What about the hosting company’s freedom of speech rights? If a hosting company doesn’t want to host your site, that’s their decision. If they don’t want to be associated with a site or app or spend their resources, that’s their decision.
These aren’t regulated monopolies that have to serve all customers.
Now, if you want to claim that they should be a regulated market — that’s a whole other discussion.
Do you feel the same way about a company refusing to serve Jews or Blacks? Is it their right?
Of-course this can be challenged in the courts. Well, unless, it's protected by 230.
Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0].
California[1], for example, also prohibits discrimination on gender identity, ancestry, sexual orientation, AIDS/HIV status, medical condition, political activities or affiliation, veteran status, or status as a stalking victim.
[0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin...
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
Trying to conflate 230 here is disingenuous and has no role in a strictly business decision about whether of not a business has to accept a customer.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
I did some further searches; Madison, Wisconsin[0] and DC[1] forbid discrimination on political affiliation in public accommodations.
[0] https://library.municode.com/wi/madison/codes/code_of_ordina...
Great, I cannot wait!
For business discrimination in general, maybe.
For specifically constraining the expressive freedom of media (including social media) businesses, quite plausibly not, because a statute designating a protected class can't negate other people’s First Amendment rights, since the Constitution is superior to statute law.
Surely, this should all be just OK by your logic ?
The answer is relying on corporate sponsored freedoms is not enough. Open source tools and communication technologies need to be available.
Rather, we're talking about whether or not the government should forcibly allow/deny corporations from supporting extremists. This has nothing to do with government control, imo.
Yet you seem to advocate more government control. You see the dichotomy in your thoughts?
Yes, there are cryptocurrencies available, so if we can fully legalize it and promise that we don't touch anyone's private transactions (as well as businesses officially accepting crypto) - that would be an argument.
For better understanding how bad it is: it's non trivial to even accept worldwide payments for small business/individual in the internet if you are, say, from Ukraine, Russia, China or lots of other countries not processed by stripe/paypal for some political or legal reasons. Apart from that, there is a "free" market of two payment processors in the internet and two card processors =)
It's perfectly normal in Europe to pay for your ecommerce purchases with a bank transfer directly to the merchants account. There are thousands of banks out there, there's no monopoly or oligopoly at play.
However, there clearly is a small number of players in mobile platforms, cloud, and payment, and they act in a unified way. It has been sufficient.
Sure, there are in fact only a small number of players in this space.
>cloud
There are vast amounts of hosting providers. A quick google suggests over 300k, but that sounds somewhat unlikely.
>payment
There are a thousands of banks in the world, most of Europe manages just fine using bank transfers for payments without involving external payment processors.
>It's sufficient to push undesirables to services which are more expensive, more inconvenient, unreliable, and so on. Relegate them to their internet ghetto.
Is this really a problem? That's just the inherent nature of being undesirable.