Comment by frankfrankfrank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankfrankfrank | Hacker News Reader

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frankfrankfrank

I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic, but to your last point; I think it is overlooked (intentionally or not) that the Constitution is already a set of laws and the highest laws at that. The "Bill of Rights" is not what people have been misled to believe, a list of rights you have and are given by government. In fact, they are the bill of laws that restrain the government from infringing on the natural God given rights every American already has by birth.

Having a correct and accurate understanding of that carries a whole host of implications with it, e.g., it makes the tech companies' censorious autocratic behavior a violation of the natural God given human rights that the government is as prohibited from abridging as much as the tech companies that fall under it's jurisdiction.

What we are facing, just to continue the example to further illustrate the point, is the tech companies are violating human rights through their censorious ways and they are violating the Constitution, the highest law of the land. If the USA were still a functional and healthy society any court would issue an immediate order to require all tech companies to not violate the human rights that the Constitution prohibits any inferior jurisdiction (everything falling under the Constitution, i,e., everything) from violating. The US Code even provides penalties for the violation of the Constitutional laws that the Government and the tech companies are persistently and even maliciously violating on a regular basis.

It is rather clear that the far larger problem is the breakdown of fundamental rule of law (mutually agreed upon parameters for peace) and the replacement and encroachment of ever more rule of power (I will do whatever I want because I have the ability to make you). It will not end well one way or another if it is not fixed soon, and it does not look like those with the lust of power in their eyes have any intention of giving up anything.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t enumerate rights for Americans, it enumerates them for everyone (outside of specific voting rights).

And those rights are only to protect you from government actions because it’s the ultimate monopoly.

The first amendment does not give you the right to enter someone else’s house to spread your political opinions, just as the second doesn’t give you the right to walk in to their home with your loaded guns.

And stop trying to redefine the word monopoly. The internet is completely free and anyone can post whatever they want on their own web site.

Yes, to a point, the 'internet is free'. But you are sort of twisting the point a bit I think. Not only does it cost money to have a website in many cases, but to be close to 'free' in terms of what you can post the theoretical person you are referring to needs to run their own web server, and their own DNS server, and hopefully they don't expect to need a domain name...

Otherwise, it is not in fact free. Registrars can take your domain (look what is happening to eu domains owned by UK folx) and web hosts, are in part responsible for the content they host and can refuse to continue to do business with you.

Hell, even if you roll your own setup, the ISP you use can still choose not to do business with you, leaving your entire setup offline.

You seem to be working towards the core issue (eg. town square versus multiple substitute vendors) but you missed it while talking about cost and irrelevant details (eg. A website can be hosted without a DNS record).

As I see it, the core issue is that with enough substitutes denying business to a person/organization, the customer can effectively be denied access to “the town square”.

In the relevant case law, the “town square” is only applied when there was only a single meeting space in the town. In that case, it was a private mall. Twitter doesn’t apply as a town square on the internet because there are plenty other places to communicate on the internet, even if it is not as convenient or wide reaching. The problem lies in the case where all substitutes for a town square all block you.

The solution historically was to insist on a common carrier designation for certain utilities.

I'm sorry, is it an inalienable human right to use other people's property to spread speech now? When did that happen?

For the cynics like myself. The lack of action on the part of the government to restrict and hold corporations to the same level as the government is supposedly held by the constitution seems intentional.

Its a backdoor way around the constitutional restrictions. AKA the government can't restrict free speech or search your house everyday, but its going to allow everyone else to restrict and search your house for the same effect. Given the close ties between the leaders & .001%, the result is the same. It won't matter to you when you get charged with a crime you didn't commit whether the government was tracking your phone or the phone company reports your phone to the government. The result is the same.

No one is restricting anyone’s speech or searching their house. Sorry that you can’t force other people to host your thoughts tho, sounds so frustrating.

Really, where do you live?

Because where I live the government via corporations is scraping up "metadata" which includes people's web cams feeds, phone records, etc. AKA searching their house. And if you haven't been paying attention, as despicable as the speech is, political "speech" is being suppressed by large tech and media companies, and to a lesser extent what people actually say in public spaces, be that the library or the workplace.

The key point is that “government” is doing something you find despicable. Whether corporations cooperate is by far the lesser concern.

There is a reason Us corporations can’t disclose electronic search warrants to their owners, or why no one kicked Trump off their platform despite incessant rule violations until he was days from leaving, it’s called raw political power.

It is not a search of your house if you broadcast your web cam on the internet, just like it doesn’t violate the 4A if you house emanates a strong smell of drugs or has a massive heat bloom visible from IR cameras on a helicopter flying over the neighborhood. I wish we had stronger protections against these conditions but we don’t.

And when has ever had a legal right to political speech at their workplace? Unless you have an employment contract which explicitly guarantees (such as teacher tenure) your employer can fire you for tons of reasons. Some states have labor laws that require “for cause”, but if you are talking politics at a workplace where that is not the core business, it’s not hard for an employer to argue your discussion adversely affects business.

Wasn't that my point, that the effect is the same because it convenient to allow others to take away the rights the government isn't allowed too?

I mean your basically arguing my point.

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