If both Apple and Google ban your app when the app is legal and useful, is it good for society that there is no way around this?
IMO its fair for the app store to remove whatever it wants but there needs to be an escape hatch where apps blocked by apple can be manually installed. Since the API apps have access to is secure, this should not be a significant issue.
Apps like Parlor may be full of ToS violating content but users should still be able to sideload the app and the government should be the one to shut them down if the content is illegal.
Coincidence? Probably not.
We can take this all the way to fabricating wires to build computers to make our own servers; at some point we have to discuss the actual issue: where to private and public rights intersect and what is the role of government in resolving the conflict.
Large part of the bill of rights exists to protect individuals from the majority.
Anti-discrimination, fair housing many other laws exist to protect against majority.
Democracy is not autocratic rule of the majority. It is rule by compromise.
Leaving B2B aside, for B2C it is basic consumer protection laws common in EU. If a service is offered to a general public, then provider may not arbitrarily exclude someone from using it. If a provider excludes someone for violating ToS, then the excluded one may dispute that at appropriate authority / state office.
I don’t see why a business that presents itself as a quasi-public space that is generally open to all at no cost should not have some duty to be faithful to the way it represents itself and to treat its users fairly.
A lot of people would argue that is the situation we have now.
The government wasn't against twitter because they were looking like they were going to remove right wing stuff, they were angry because they were being fact checked.
People can try to convince politicians that there is no risk and that only obvious bad people will be targeted.
All the leverage is in the margins. Are the people we're kicking off arguing for a change or are they supporting people arguing for violent change?
You want to make that call? Or more honestly would you like _me_ to make that call for you?
Tech benefited enormously from moving fast and being mostly unregulated as a result. Looking at the finance industry though, every new law was written in blood or tears over the course of centuries. Now blood has been spilled by social media in the US Capitol and the world has taken notice.
It's not going to be easy or fast, but good policy can help keep Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg from controlling the political outcomes of every democracy in the world.
You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.
This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.
There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.
You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.
The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.
You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.
We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible. Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.
If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.
add political views into the list of non-discrimination laws and let the courts decide, if it's important enough to have to be legislated, that's the closes framework upon which to model it.
That's what judges and courts are for. Neither government nor platforms should be able to make these decisions unilaterally.
This last year SHOULD be a warning on why government control is a bad plan, do you want each government just outright banning stuff from the other side?
Because that is the path which is before you.