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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

Good.

If corporations are people then they absolutely should have the right to exercise whatever free speech they want to.

Nobody is preventing those deplorables to say whatever the hell they want, but also nobody is obliged to provide services and platform to those people to spread those toxic messages.

According to /r/conservative the entire tech industry is ran by leftists, and leftists are stupid, unemployed losers who live in their moms' basements. So it should be easy for them to recreate their entire own tech infrastructure to host whatever nuclear waste dumpster fire app they want, after all it should be very easy for "smart, hardworking real Americans" like them. Hey, capitalism is all about competitions right? Last time I checked there may even be some money involved in the tech industry so I'm actually a little puzzled why they haven't done so already.

If you think I sound like a smug douchebag in this comment that's because it's exactly how I feel from reading these news these past few days.

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I agree that Parler was deplorable and needed to go, but I keep seeing this "private companies can do whatever they want" argument, and it bothers me.

For the sake of discussion, would you feel the same way if the CEOs of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast woke up tomorrow and decided they want to unilaterally block all of their customers from accessing any news sites they deem to be against their political leanings (just for the sake of discussion, let's say they block all access to MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, HuffPo, and the like).

If that happened, it would effectively cut off most Americans from being able to access news unless it agreed with those CEOs' political agenda. Would we all still be saying "well it's totally fine because AT&T et al are private companies"?

It seems obvious to me that sometimes companies become so large and have so much influence that they should not be allowed to just ban/block whoever they want, even if they are private. I'm not sure if AWS in particular is at that point, but the App Store and Google Play Store certainly feel close.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think this "they're private so they have no obligations to serve you" is valid at the scale of the companies in question.

> block MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, HuffPo

I’ll be fine if these news sites were spewing hatred and fascism.

That's dodging the question. Let's say they weren't spewing hatred/fascism, and were reporting on critical information that Americans need to know. But AT&T blocks them. Is the response still going to be "AT&T is private, so it's okay because private companies can do whatever they want"?

>so it's okay because private companies can do whatever they want

The point is they can't do whatever they want, just like Google/FB/Amazon actually can't do whatever they want.

They can only do it if it's the will of the majority of their customers, employees and shareholders. Jack Dorsey or Jeff Bezos can't make decisions like this unilaterally without the support of all those parties.

The CEO of CloudFlare famously said that the reason he decided to deplatform Daily Stormer (after previously saying he would not deplatform them) was because one morning he woke up in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet. Literally all it took was one CEO waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. It seems entirely inaccurate to say that Dorsey or Bezos couldn't make a decision unilaterally like that if they really wanted.

I'm not sure about Twitter, but Bezos is the majority shareholder at Amazon and if he really wanted to, could make the decision to ban anyone he wants and nobody would legally be able to stop him, will of the employees/shareholders/public be damned.

I can almost guarantee you he wouldn’t have done it and got away with it if he didn’t know his decision was going to be popular among their employees and shareholders.

Of course he made a statement that made himself sound courageous, but it was the easiest decision ever and a PR move lol.

Yes of course it’s okay. Private companies can terminate services at will.

If AT&T terminates customers’ access to websites, customers will go to Verizon etc.

If all providers blocked access, they must have a good reason.

>If AT&T terminates customers’ access to websites, customers will go to Verizon etc.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the ISP market in the US, but the point here is that there are many areas in which customers cannot switch to another ISP. If AT&T were to block websites, those customers would have zero ability to access them. Hence the "some companies are too big and influential" bit.

I support net neutrality and think internet should be a utility and treats all websites the same.

But if a website is willingly violating terms of service defined by the provider (hosting child pornography, spreading racism etc), I support the IPS to block access or whatever.

The fact that some users have no alternative is another problem.

Also I sincerely ask you to check out WTF is being posted on Parker, if you haven’t.

For curiosity I registered and took a look, it’s disgusting and I absolutely support it being obliterated.

I also think that the real world isn’t that hypothetical and there are a lot of rights and wrongs. You shouldn’t give these racists the same freedom.

You fundamentally misunderstand the political divide, if you think that HuffPo is not viewed as "spewing hatred and fascism".

It's not hatred towards things you like, or what you view as fascism, but I can assure you that the viewpoints it espouses are seen as fascist and oppressive to those who disagree.

Oh, I disagree a lot of these Leftist websites.

Especially the NYT, they have so much BS and I can almost agree that they are fake news.

But there is a huge difference between BSing and inciting violence.

That's a good point, but what you are describing would only happen if the vast majority of shareholders, employees, customers and owners of key telecom companies all have the opposite political/world value of the general public, so I think it's highly unlikely.

If it does somehow happen, then yes, we should look at how come all the employees, customers, shareholders and owners of the key telecom companies all happen to hold the opposite value of the general public, that would be the bigger failure.

>It seems obvious to me that sometimes companies become so large and have so much influence that they should not be allowed to just ban/block whoever they want, even if they are private.

I disagree, there is a nuanced, but big difference in government allowing free speech and government guaranteeing free speech. I'm mostly for the former and mostly against the latter.

Private companies still have to follow the law. What you mention would be anti-net neutrality and thus illegal.

The US does not have any net neutrality laws that would make the posed scenario illegal.

But! That brings up a great point, because I certainly am a proponent of net neutrality laws: would/should such laws not also apply to major internet infrastructure providers such as AWS, thus making it illegal for them to block/ban sites at their leisure?

> The US does not have any net neutrality laws that would make the posed scenario illegal.

It effectively does, since revocation of Obama-era net neutrality rules is still being litigated in courts and all providers are still following them while they wait for a decision. Now that the Democrats control the Senate, the House's net neutrality bill which passed in 2019 and was blocked in the senate by Republicans will likely become law.

> would/should such laws not also apply to major internet infrastructure providers such as AWS

Net neutrality applies in the other direction. Comcast can absolutely ban you, the consumer, from using its service if you run afoul of their terms of service, as can AWS.

Net neutrality is a principle that applies in both directions. One of the main ideals of the NN that was being pushed for in the early 2010s in the US was for "dumb pipes" where Comcast would not be able to ban you just because you used their "pipes" in a way that they didn't like.

That is definitely not the agreed upon definition of net neutrality today. Comcast is allowed to offer different classes of service (e.g. speeds) to different people. It is allowed to ban you for violations of terms of service (e.g. illegal downloads). It is allowed to impose data caps. None of these are against Obama-era net neutrality rules. It can't do any of these, however, to the websites it serves you.

>That is definitely not the agreed upon definition of net neutrality today. Comcast is allowed to offer different classes of service (e.g. speeds) to different people. It is allowed to ban you for violations of terms of service (e.g. illegal downloads).

That's because net neutrality does not exist today. Like I mentioned in my first comment, there are no NN laws in the US.

NN has long stood for the principle of dumb pipes, regardless of you being the sender or receiver.

You edited one of your earlier comments to mention the 2019 NN law that passed in the House; I encourage you to go read that law, as it specifically strengthens consumer protections in regards to ISPs and makes it so that Comcast could not refuse to serve you based on whatever arbitrary restrictions they want. If you are downloading torrents illegally, they could ban you. But under NN, they could not ban you because you were, for example, sharing legal content that Comcast employees have political disagreements with.

> I agree that Parler was deplorable and needed to go, but I keep seeing this "private companies can do whatever they want" argument, and it bothers me.

It bothers me too.

But I'm fine with supporting this temporarily, at least through the inauguration which is likely the highest-risk target.

For the near future, the benefits of disrupting the rioters outweigh any of my other concerns. A month or two of emergency measures isn't a big deal.

When I feel like America is peaceful again, then I'm willing to let my guard down. For now, this clear radicalization needs to stop at any costs.

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Over the long term: it is clear that both the left and the right are moving to break up the big internet companies with regards to antitrust, which is probably a stronger long-term solution to this situation.

These companies never should have gotten this powerful in the first place, but here we are. Might as well take advantage of it while we're dealing with insurrectionists.

> But I'm fine with supporting this temporarily, at least through the inauguration

sounds like 'just a little bit of fascism, it won't even hurt'.

Was it fascism when Wikipedia banned the Church of Scientology from their website?

Or is it recognition that in discussion-based platforms, the only move you have is banning and de-platforming to various extents (from shadow-banning, to individual moderation of comments, to deletion of spam accounts). Literally the only actions you can do as an administrator to moderate discussions is cutting out speech in some way.

That's a tough job to be a mod, for sure, but there is also a thing called free speech which grants even lunatics like the scientologists, freedom of, you know, speech. And it doesn't mean 'free speech you agree with'.

What happens now is that Capitol protest is used as an excuse to exclude half of the country in the conversation before the inauguration (and most likely after), silence their voice, the voice of opposition.

And that doesn't smell kosher to me, to 75M people who voted with me, and thankfully many on the left, the classic liberals.

I don't think it's good for the country to derail to this level of totalitarian censorship, even temporary, no matter what yours or mine political beliefs are.

> That's a tough job to be a mod, for sure, but there is also a thing called free speech which grants even lunatics like the scientologists, freedom of, you know, speech. And it doesn't mean 'free speech you agree with'.

And yet, Wikipedia was allowed to ban them when they started to wreak havoc on the site in 2009. And I don't believe it was very controversial, but my memory may be a bit foggy from the years. (Also, being caught up as part of the Anon-mob at the time probably warps my understanding of the events).

> I don't think it's good for the country to derail to this level of totalitarian censorship, even temporary, no matter what yours or mine political beliefs are.

As far as I'm concerned, this is not much different from Hay's Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

Hollywood in the 1930s conspired to censor movies that didn't follow the code. Today, we're seeing that websites that don't follow a code (ie: don't insight violent rhetoric) are open to censorship.

Now I love myself a good pre-code Hollywood flick, and even may find myself oogling at a bit of pornography every now and then. And obviously, the rule against interracial marriage was not very kosher. So I'm certainly happy to be living today rather than in the code-days. But I think you're over-exaggerating for how bad things will be if we go down this path.

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Up till now, we lived in the glorious "pre code" days of the Internet. Alas, as we move forward, we understand the power that this new medium holds. And like Hay's of the 1927, we're realizing that we must hold websites accountable.

You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that because it destroys what this site is for (intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation).

I'm not going to ban you right now because it's not that long ago that you were using the site as intended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362757), but please review the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward.

Just because everywhere else is bursting into flames and descending into the hell realms is no reason to destroy this place. Every community member here should be protecting HN for its intended purpose, and we'll ban as many accounts as we have to to get it back on course.

I'm reading HN for quite some time now and there is no a day go by that I would not see a political post.

I'm not American so I don't really follow facts of your political leaders or your racial/gender problems that your government is trying to address. I consider myself neutral and I would love to see no political posts on HN. They tend to spread into flame wars and as far as I can see bring no real value apart from people venting here..

And I think for that reason you should ban everyone who does politics, either if they hate or love one side or another. Strictly no politics. I love HN for its tech stuff, not political.

Technology is politics. Politics is technology. You can't wholly separate them.

I have read that there was a week or so in 2016 when HN tried banning all political stories, and it was decided that it didn't work.

I humbly don't agree with the statement that technology is politics - it does not make me a better software developer if somebody or somebody else will be a president.

Even though there is an overlap (i.e. taxation, regulations and policies) and we could talk about this since these are the things that impact revenue. But discussion about politics outside of those things that affect us directly is leading to flame wars and unnecessary arguments that bring us nowhere.

Personally I feel even talking about taxes/regulations brings us nowhere as we have no way to influence them.

If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

> If you run a social network, you need to decide what posts to allow on your platform. Every platform needs some moderation, lest they be overrun with spam and porn and scams.

Agree, spam/porn/scams are problem on this kind of platforms. But social media is only tiny part of tech in general, and also spam/porn/scams is not really political. And I guess, if in example somebody posted hateful content or content that is bringing damage then this is what our juridical system should handle?

> If you develop artificial intelligence, you need to determine what applications of the technology are ethical. Is it okay to sell to authoritarian governments? What about the US military? What about individual police departments?

Most of the times I - as an engineer - have no say when it comes to those issues - from my experience these are business issues, not technical. And I guess these issues are probably influenced by politics, to some degree.

> If you develop hardware, or run servers, you need to consider your impact on the planet.

I'd say same as above - it's business to decide what to do about those issues. We as engineers think about efficiency - and had been thinking for decades, as far as my experience goes. I was always taught to build things that consume least amount of electricity, things that get from A to B with least effort. And Mr X or Mr Y being a president had no influence at those principles.

You can't outsource your ethics to 'business'. Is it ethical to build UAVs for the military? If you feel the answer is yes, no problem. But if for your the answer is no, but the company you work for is selling just that, then you have a problem - you can try to address it by lobbying your company, by ignoring it, or by quitting. But it is your problem.

I'm not trying to say that you should believe one way or another, I just take issue with the idea that, as an engineer, one should feel no responsibility even in principle for the way the product they create will be used.

I've explained this many times. The answers are laid out repeatedly in comments you can find here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.

If anyone truly has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. But first make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the previous explanations and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.

Given that stories with political overlap are inevitably going to appear here, that the site has rules for discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that the rules don't stop applying just because a topic is politicized, if users break the rules repeatedly and ignore our requests to stop, we ban them. What else would we do?

Don’t allow ideological posts then alltogether, otherwise you can only expect flame wars, endless flagging, and more work for you.

I’d be happy not to see politics on HN, but I’m not going to remain quiet when I see one-sided political argument here just like on Reddit.

That's not the way this site works. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723581 for more explanation, and links to tons more explanation.

The way this site works is that you (not you personally, but all of us) need to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing. Right now you're flagrantly breaking them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ATT and Verizon are consumer service providers. If they block parler that will be unacceptable. AWS is just a cloud vendor. Parler can choose to work with any number of other vendors or run their own servers. It's not the same comparison.

First off, we've gone over this many times before in net neutrality arguments, but ISPs are quite different from websites. Most americans only have access to 1 or 2 ISP, but anyone can create and host their own website.

Next up, look at the other side of the equation. Are you ok with websites banning child pornography? What about ISIS recruitment videos? Now, what about doxxing people or posts from QAnon recruiting people to raid the Capitol? Clearly you accept a line somewhere, you wouldn't want to live in a completely lawless internet where AWS hosts child pornography, you just don't agree with the exact position of the line then?

Yes they have power, but they're not stupid, they'll never ban half the internet, it just doesn't make sense, either monetarily, morally or from a popularity point of view. I personally don't buy any of the slippery slope arguments, they seem to be thrown there by people who just want the line to be in a slightly different position.

It an an interesting thing to ponder, but I don’t think it’s analogous.

This has nothing to do with corporations being people. This and citizens united have nothing to do with each other.

Businesses do not need to give you a platform just because. They reserve the right to do business, or not do business, with whomever they choose.

Don't conflate that with "being people."

I think op is highlighting the double-standard of conservative principles.

"We want to have free enterprise and no government intervention except when free enterprise decides to ban them for being assholes."

The conservatives aren't the ones flipping here though. They're complaining, not suing.

The flip is coming from people who opposed "private companies owe no one their services" when it was Masterpiece Cake Shop, but now love it.

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