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Comment by bitstan | Hacker News Reader

As I stated, the horseshoe is going to come full circle. Commence the sequence where burning books is a virtue.

This isn’t burning books. This is getting banned by the local Starbucks for shouting slurs at the barista. It’s incredibly disingenuous to call this “burning books”.

And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.

It's also incredibly disingenious to equate the App Store with the local Starbucks.

Starbucks probably has a larger share of the coffee market than Apple does of the computing market.

Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.

If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.

> If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.

I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.

But here's the rub. You don't have an affirmative right to either Apple or Starbucks. If your behavior gets you kicked out of either, that's on you. Companies have the right of free association too, and while you can complain when you're on the short end of that stick, your rights have not been violated.

Pretending that anyone has a right to either is not only entitled nonsense, it's downright authoritarian. What is being advocated here is that the government should come in and force Apple to do business with fascists and terrorists against their will. Even if you imagine that this will encourage "free speech", and I promise you it will not, this is a power that will come to haunt us all if you give it to the government.

Compared to the power that the ability to arbitrarily deplatform people is giving to effective monopolies like Twitter, I'd definitely rather have the government be able to force companies to do business with anyone. There's clearly less potential for abuse in the latter.

This isn't analogous to burning books, it's analogous to individual bookstore chains choosing not to stock your book. Or to individual publishers choosing not to publish your book.

No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.

Or literally, in Josh Hawley’s case.

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