Ebay is a private merchant. They can choose what to list too. Maybe this presents a copyright problem with clones, we don't know.
I found the books by googling the title and PDF because I was curious about why they were removed. Curiosity satisifed and I still love Dr. Seuss.
Someone (probably), in 1934 Hacker News: "BASF, Deutsche Bank, Hugo Boss, Bayer, BMW, and Siemens are private merchants. They can choose what to sell, and to whom. Maybe this presents a survival problem for the Jews, we don't know."
I guess it's ok since the public-private authoritarianism and book-burning is left-leaning this time?
So make a company yourself that specializes in trading items banned from other shops. It wouldn't be the first and it's completely legal. I bet someone is already capitalizing on the outrage over this news. I don't know how exactly and I don't mean the media.
About the companies you list, we study them to look at the rise of Hitler, and we have put anti-discrimination laws in place to hopefully stop someone from abusing their positions like that again.
This isn't the state entering your home and burning books. Wrong hill.
If you make a social media site that organizes domestic terror and your bank cancels you then that's your problem.
You do realise that most of the organisation of the "domestic terror" was done on Facebook right ?
The same is true for content platforms like Reddit or Facebook. They were pro-free speech until they started to get bad publicity from it.
That doesn't mean their choices are somehow immune from public criticism.
I realize that clarity is in short supply in online discussions, but mostly I think people that are reacting negatively are just asserting that they disagree with the decision and not that a law has been broken or that the government should step in and force the decision to be reversed.
From first principles, the public vs private division is about preserving freedom. When a private company can exercise its freedom to infringe on the freedom of others to such an extent, we act. Private businesses can’t do a lot of things because they harm freedoms (civil rights act and its additions among others).
Colorado Power is a private company, they can choose who to sell power to. Maybe this is a problem with that data center.
Guess what? It's totally fine and valid to criticize private entities even when their conduct is perfectly lawful.
Thought experiment: imagine eBay and Amazon started to promote Neo-Nazi literature on their home pages in the same way that they now promote anti-racist books and such. What would be the appropriate response: outrage, or "bUt iTs a pRiVaTe cOmPaNy!!!"?
I don't expect eBay to cater to my banned Dr Seuss book needs.
Are you saying they don't want freedom of religion because they are happy with no religion or are happy with theirs? That may be true for folks who've never experienced anything different from the way they were raised. I think the majority would like the freedom to choose something different when one thing is not working for them.
At what point to we step up and say, these megacorps have as much power over our lives as the government. And in some cases more. The US government would struggle to ban a book world wide but ebay and amazon can do it pretty easily.
Back in the 1950s, Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, decided that he wasn't going to buy any more screenplays from communists, or anybody who had communist friends, or even anybody who'd been accused of having communist friends.
MGM was a private company, so that was perfectly okay.
Right?
Right?
It's also a suggestion that perhaps one might want to think about what could happen should the "cancellation" shoe suddenly be on the other foot, as it well might. These things can change, sometimes faster than people expect them to.
Robespierre was pretty surprised when the mob showed up at his door, you can bet.
Personally, I think the cancel culture stuff will hit a tipping point and go the other way toward some mean. That sort of pendulum swing happens with culture all the time. Just like our society and laws survived the Hollywood Blacklist (and many worse societal upheavals), it'll survive this.