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Comment by byset | Hacker News Reader

No one fails to make this "hey, it's a private company" point in these discussions. It's always brought up when someone is criticizing a tech behemoth for censorship of some kind, and it's nearly always a non-sequitur.

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!!!"?

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Insert that picture of a person being stepped on with the text "At least its not the government"

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.

I agree there are monopolies that need antitrust attention. Wish we'd focus on the ISP infrastructure. Regional broadband ISP monopolies are the problem underlying the big tech social media and advertising companies. Yelling at eBay for banning Dr Seuss books is a distraction from that and I believe that may be the intent. We haven't been able to discuss net neutrality for a few years because of this tabloid style of news. Let's get back to business.

These companies don't have the legal means to put your body in a cage, end your life or take you into custody by force until you answer to their accusations like a government does. That's why comparing this to government jackboots is a very weak argument.

They also don’t have the legal means to bar black people from service - because we changed the laws to prevent them from acting evily. “At least they can’t kill you” isn’t a good argument.

It does feel a bit analogous to criticizing religion, as though somehow a group of people or set of ideas can be exempt from disagreement.

More analogous to saying if you don't like one religion you're free to try another.

I don't expect eBay to cater to my banned Dr Seuss book needs.

I guess, maybe, but that's untrue for a tremendous amount of people, and is that a sentiment that you'd expect me to get behind?

You think it's untrue that a lot of people want freedom of religion? I don't follow.

I feel like we're both reading each other's comments in a completely different way than intended. I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that many people globally don't want freedom of religion, but I was saying that many people currently don't have the freedom to leave theirs, whether legally or for other reasons.

> many people globally don't want freedom of religion

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.