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Comment by iNic | Hacker News Reader

> - Speech without a platform isn't speech at all

Could you clarify what you mean exactly with this. In my mind people should have a right to ignore speech they don't want to hear. Furthermore, the definition of a "platform" has become very diffuse with the advent of the internet. In the before times you were either in the newspaper most people read, or maybe on one of the handful of TV channels, or you basically did not have a platform beyond the people you could physically interact with. Whereas now you can have many options which all reach different kinds and amounts of people.

I have many vague feelings but maybe I can sum them up in the following, probably unhelpful, statement: people have a right to a platform that is equivalent to standing in a town square and yelling.

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It's hard to ignore Twitter and Facebook. They're mega-platforms with many uses beyond politics (business, hobbies, family, etc).

Whilst on there for non-political purposes, you can't in practice 'choose to ignore' the political speech you'd prefer to avoid, as it's made everybody an activist with a massive megaphone. Activism is shared and retweeted into your face relentlessly.

If Big Tech as a whole has decided to wage war on 'red team' ideas (or other competing ideas, such as Unity 2020, banned from Twitter), there's a risk that they could transform a bad 2-party political system into a single-party monopoly, where the voters have no power at all.

Things weren't good when old media (TV/newspapers) had all the power+influence. But at least there was some sort of balance. And if a new newspaper appeared, it couldn't be shut down entirely in <24hrs by the competition.

And if a new newspaper appeared, it couldn't be shut down entirely in <24hrs by the competition.

It could if it had used printing presses owned by the competition. I'm assuming these old newspapers used either their own printing presses, or presses owned by independent printing shops. They used a little common sense and concluded that using printing presses owned by the NY Times was probably not a good long term strategy for a newspaper that wanted to compete against the NY Times.

All I'm saying is, use your own printing presses, and you can't be shutdown. Run your own website, on your own server and no one will kick you off their servers. Nothing's really changed here, so I don't see a free speech issue.

Buying your own servers is no use if you can't get them connected to the Internet. Next step, build your own Internet?

I see your point, and this raises the question of internet being a basic universal right. I think it is and I think the ISPs should be treated as such and thus unable to pick and choose what content we are served so if Parler buys their own servers and connects then they should be fine.

I'm against the highest level of the stack so to speak having to be available to everyone such as Twitter, that would be us saying these companies are too critical to our way of life and forcing a private entity to do business with those it doesn't want to, which is not only dangerous but I believe simply not true if we foster the building of others and should be summarily changed or investigated as a new type of monopoly if we find (are finding?) that they are becoming too critical, centralizing is bad.

I am also against people not being able to connect their services at the lower level of the stack to then build out their offering on the higher level of the stack though and that's where I think we need to regulate.

How do you think Amazon connects to the internet?

They have their own network, own peering agreements, etc etc etc. They didn't build the internet, they built their own "platform" by building out their own little corner of the internet. You want to be a "platform" like Amazon, but you don't want to build everything necessary for a "platform" to be a platform. That is the crux of the problem. If what you really want is simply free speech, well that's free. If all you really want is a website, well that's pretty cheap too, but maybe not free. But when you start talking about platforms, you have to pay to build the platform you want. Even a soapbox is not free, someone somewhere had to pay for it.

You're complaining that building a platform is too expensive the same way someone a hundred years ago may have complained that buying the presses is too expensive. It makes no sense. If you want to print your own paper, you need the presses.

On the contrary, it's quite easy to ignore Twitter and Facebook. I do it all day, every day, and it takes zero effort.

People have a right to any platform they are able to create. The problem with centralized social media is that it is a monopoly with legal protections and is able to essentially exclude people from the de facto town square.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to force others to listen or post your recorded message. Everyone is free to speak out. Everyone is free to write letters.

Yes it sucks your audience is limited but you are correct, people have a right to any platform they are able to create.

Also monopolies and oligopolies are what happens in unregulated capitalism. If frustrates me that the many of folks today who take issue with the tech giants have been pro deregulation, pro capitalism, and screaming about how afraid we should be because a boring sleepy vanilla POTUS is going to usher in socialism and communism... WTF is your solution then? Everyone can point out problems and evoke FUD.

> people have a right to any platform they are able to create.

This argument is becoming increasingly disingenuous based on actions of just the last few days.

Didn’t Parler go ahead and do exactly what you recommended?

* cut off from Google Play and Apple Store. Most people don’t even have personal computers anymore, so their phone / IPad is the only way to access the platforms.

* Apple doesn’t allow side loading. Google makes it less and less viable and so many necessary APIs are moved out of the open Android Sdk and into the gated Play APIs.

* As if to demonstrate the absolute futility of your suggestion, AWS cut off Parler‘s servers.

* Any site need some sort of financial API. How many times have we seen companies like Stripe, GoFundMe, Visa and MasterCard, and even large banks give in to the mob.

* every other required piece of the puzzle will do the same: DNS providers, CDNs, and even the large backbone ISPs. Sorry, bigot, but we’ve decided we won’t be routing your traffic through our exchange.

* Even power companies are privatized in the US. Sorry, just go make your own power grid, right?

This argument is becoming increasingly disingenuous based on actions of just the last few days. Didn’t Parler go ahead and do exactly what you recommended?

Parler only went halfway there. They created a app/website. But, that's not an entire platform (as we see today). An entire platform in this context includes servers, fiber optic networks, routers, etc. If Parler wants to speak on the scale they envision, they can build their own infrastructure to do so. Yes, that's expensive, but it's also no different than the pre-internet era, where similar speech would be relegated to self-published fliers, because no newspaper or TV would carry the message.

'Ok, you've obtained a printing press and related supplies and are printing your own newspapers. But to distribute them, you first need to build your own road network, you're banned from our roads. And you'll need a power station, as you're about to get cut off the grid!'

Social media created a new type of platform. But people are forgetting that it also created a new and more vicious type of activism, too.

Roads and power grid are utilities managed by the government. If we want Twitter to be managed the same, we are free to do so. That may be the ultimate solution, but I'm not yet convinced.

It's more about Internet infrastructure itself.

Maybe you could compare AWS to a haulage company, the equivalent of trucks distributing the newspapers. If Parler were to buy their own 'trucks' (servers), would they be able to drive freely on the 'roads' of the Internet? Or would nobody be willing to provide them a connection?

The solution isn’t to nationalize social media, it’s to legislate that they be interoperable with other platforms. If you have an account on Facebook and Twitter you should be able to publish and read from both via an API. They can still ban people but you should be able to take your data seamlessly to another competing platform that is interoperable with a number of clients both official and independent. Utilities work because they follow common protocols, e.g. utility companies don’t require you to rewire your house and use a different voltage.

> But to distribute them, you first need to build your own road network, you're banned from our roads.

This argument is absurd and I feel in bad faith. We have public roads and you are free to travel on them to distribute your flyers. You still need permission to enter the premises of private owners though if you want to solicit or leave your property (flyer) on their property.

That's the point. Kicking Parler off AWS is not like Penguin refusing to publish your book, it's like MAN forbidding people to deliver your self-printed books in one of their vans. Well if MAN had a monopoly on delivery vans.

Didn’t Parler go ahead and do exactly what you recommended?

No, they didn't.

Parler set up a web site on AMAZON's platform, and it was subsequently shut down. If they had created their own platform with their own servers, they would still be running today.

But that requires an ISP and DNS (which are also often censorious).

So Parlar can bifurcate and build their own ISP/DNS.

That technology is not secret, they are “free” to build their own. Like every other company that builds broadcast platforms, if they want to play, they’ve got to pay.

With net neutrality, they would not need to own an ISP. They might need to find a friendly place to host their servers though.

But Parler won't need to do this - there are plenty of hosts who aren't going to join in with the coordinated effort to silence the speech of those who aren't on the 'correct' side. Info Wars and OAN are still on the internet.

Surely, if they wanted to, they could buy cloud compute resources from a company based outside the US. Why must they be on Amazon just for access to its web services platform?

Can you not see you’re suggesting segregation of the entire Internet?

What happens when registrars cut them off? No DNS routing for them until they build their own registrar? Will the point at which the segregated internet’s join become a DMZ guarded by both factions?

This entire app, and business, was shut down for a few bad actors. Traditionally you subpoena for info, but cancel culture stepped in again.

> Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to force others to listen or post your recorded message.

I don't think anyone, from Trump to Alex Jones, is asking to be able to force people to follow them on Twitter or youtube. But they should have a right to be there, and talk to people that have chosen to follow them, that's quite a different thing.

This has been the balancing act for centuries (since the printing press). The scale/speed has changed over time, but newspapers and TV stations can and have "de-platformed" people in the past.

At the end of the day, I'm a strong supporter of free speech. But, it's up to the speaker to provide their own platform. If all they can manage is a literal soapbox in the town square, so be it. There is no fundamental right for a person's speech to be easily broadcast, nor is there a right for that speech to be heard or acknowledged.

As long as Twitter, Facebook, the NYT, and the WSJ are private entities, they also have their own rights. If we really want to prevent de-platforming, the solution seems to be categorizing media companies as some sort of utility. But, I don't really know what they would look like.

I just mean that having some kind of platform is important to the definition of speech, since it involves communicating over some medium. I don't necessarily mean platforms as in Twitter or Facebook or what-have-you. And I would agree about the town square analogy - my concern is that it falls apart at the Internet since it's all privately owned.

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