The "private company can do whatever it wants" crowd will not show up for this one because it doesn't suit their politics
I understand that the media coverage of Parler's ban in particular was huge and that's why so many people suddenly give a damn, but it's honestly more than a little frustrating to see people talk and act as though it's the first thing that's ever been cracked down on for moral reasons.
The difference with the things you're likely defending is that this app does no harm and is only being blocked for puritanical reasons. Ethically they are similar but not the same.
Then maybe it's time to make laws that prohibit Google and Apple from wielding this power.
We're letting the majority of customers that are okay with these decisions punish the minority.
Platforms already wield undue economic power and impose stresses on small players that the utopia of pre-smartphone web didn't have. Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke. Natural technology by itself imposes no such limits. They've enshrined themselves in market position and laws, and they're printing monkey without adding benefit or developing the features app developers are driving.
It's time Apple and Google stopped being marketplaces.
> Dealing with these fat clowns is a joke
Could you clarify this? I'm not following this sentence.
Platforms can't deny service. Freedom depends on individual choice.
The ACLU defended Parler. Most of the Capitol Hill planning happened on Facebook, anyway.
I'm a Democrat and voted for Biden/Ossoff/Warnock, but we can't censor Republican and conservative websites. That's letting power get to our heads, and baking in this sort of status quo will bite us down the road when other entities want to censor us.
Speak ill of foreign governments? I could see a world where that's prohibited. Let's not let it happen.
Freedom of speech, freedom to run your software on your own device, and rules for the platforms that enhance both of these liberties.
Both the right and left get targeted by abuse of corporate/monopoly power. Both Democrat and Republican state Attorney Generals have filed antitrust lawsuits against Google.
It's their constitutional right, and it's a responsibility that comes with having the power they do.
it still can happen, but it is illegal for good reasons
You have 2 choices:
1) Decline to recognize thst Google is in any way a special case, and so treat Google like any other private business, like your brother-in-laws little one-man coffee shop.
2) Recognize that Google is in any way special and different from some other random small private business.
Let's say you subscribe to 1) :
On the surface level, being denied service in the app store because your app caters to people who are poly, is like being denied service in the general store because you're black, or Chinese, Or Jewish.
Your freedom as a business operator is that you are free not to operate a business if you can't stomach the thought of having to sell flour to black people.
So, if you think Google is just a private business like any other and with the same rights as any other, then they must offer flour to the black people too. They can't mysteriously be out of flour just for some people based on race, religion, sex, etc.
But of course, whether anyone subscribes to it or not, 2) is in effect. Google is not just a private business like a motorcycle repair shop or a hair salon.
A marketplace owner doesn't just own a business that must service everyone equally, they actually own the street that all possible businesses and all possible customers must use. That makes the marketplace owner an order of magnitude more liable for their actions, in the way that the state is for the ordinary phyical street.
Now their decisions not only abuse an individual customer (an app developer) but exert control over entire populations.
It is ENTIRELY reasonable and rational and fair to have strict limits, high standards, and onerous even draconian oversight on anyone in any such position.
The state weilds that same sort of control over ordinary streets and businesses and customers, and because of that, the state is actually very limited in what it can do, and must always be able to justify why it does anything. (in theory anyway, on paper anyway). If the state wants to say that some business can't operate, it has to be prepared to defend that decision legally.
Google and other large operations have set up environments where they have state-level control over state-level populations with corner coffee shop-level autonomy.
No it's not! Your race is innate, sexuality is innate, that isn't.
Your argument is so transparently ridiculous that I highly doubt you're operating in good faith.
You want to rent a new appartment. You have your money and job and credit score and reputation as a good tennant all good to go. But the owner needs to know what color your toothbrush is, and apparently yours is the wrong color.
I wonder what whether you consider religion innate or a choice? I somehow just magically predict that you currently benefit from the fact that other people allow you something you don't allow other people.
Using your clearly not ridiculous and clearly good faith argument, I should be free to, say, run a motor vehicles office in your city, and deny you a drivers license because I consider any sincere belief in any religion to be evidense of mental incapacity, and for everyone's safety we can not have irrational people operating vehicles around other people. They might decide that God told them to run someone over, or they might not value life properly because they don't think dying is really dying.
I suspect you don't think I should be allowed to make that kind of call over other people.
Tell me more about ridiculous arguments. It's truly fascinating.
They've knowingly entered other markets and if they fail to follow the law there, they're on the hook for it - even if they decide to leave after the fact
I understand you support Google's right to choose where they do their business - I support that as well. Do you also support sovereign states to pursue legal action against a corporate entity, that willfully breaks their laws?
If Google would rather leave than uphold my rights, then I'll be happy to see them leave
1990-2010's Internet didn't have this problem.
Nobody cares if Xbox bans your game. There are a dozen plus other platforms. But if Apple or Google say no, you're toast.
We need a bill of rights to protect us against megaplatforms.
Neither has a monopoly, or anything close to a monopoly. Duopolies are legal.
> Web isn't first class, and there's no open standard or easy way to distribute native apps.
This isn't a bad thing. People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them: Cydia's existed longer than the App Store has, and Google makes it easy to sideload anything.
The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
This shit we have to put up with shouldn't be legal! I dream for the day that the DOJ forces Apple and Google to make an interoperable native platform. Or when it forces both to spin off their app marketplaces. Or requires them to allow easy installs from the web.
> People who want native apps from a source other than Apple or Google can pretty easily get them
That's not at all correct. You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
You're begging for a way to enforce capitalism while taking away Apple and Google's right to practice capitalism. You're not promoting this altruistically, you're promoting it because you want to make money. Why should anyone support your right to make money over Apple's or Google's?
> You can count the percentage of people that can do this on one hand.
Anyone can do it, so long as they have access to a search engine.
> The world doesn't owe you clean air, either. But thankfully we've decided to artificially limit business to make the world a better place.
You're arguing for this as a way to limit businesses in favor of your businesses, though. You're just passing the buck! What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
I don't like using Google or Apple products, so I don't. Vote with your wallet, don't vote for taking away rights.
Capitalism and it's benefits isn't necessarily self-sustaining and enforcing in the same way that total democracy can still have a party participating democratically to end it.
If you allow every anticompetitive market practice depending on the sector you quickly loose the benefit of open competition that one might expect from capitalism.
> What you're advocating for helps no one aside from you (and people in your profession) and hurts consumers.
If people in his profession include the countless companies developing stuff for these platforms then obviously yeah and that's not a bad thing. If Google and apple can kill competition if they enter a market on their platform then that reduces competition. If they can use their platform to prevent competition in a segment of it where they are established then that stops competition. Competition serves the consumer but is not inherent. The high fees that google can ask due to their market dominance get passed on to the consumer and thus do not benefit the consumer. The market dominance is something they can retain and enforce with minimal competition due to a mix of their clout and anticompetitive practices.
Maybe even the full "The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell" even though that invites unproductive sidetracking about to what extent a free market is a right.
We force companies with dominant market power to do all kinds of things that normal people and even normal companies aren't forced to do.
And it's not "you must host this" but "if you want to keep the overwhelming level of power you have then you must host this"
It might be easy for tech-savvy people but not for the average customer. Installing Cydia on an iPhone requires jailbreaking, I think. Sideloading is easier but you have to jump through a few hoops to be able to install apps.
> The world doesn't owe you a business model, and you can't take away people's rights because you want a better way to sell your wares.
I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
Having domain knowledge is pretty helpful in everything. People who don't know what they're doing shouldn't play with explosives, for example. Plenty of ten year olds have jailbroken their devices, just check the jailbreak reddit. If they can do it, anyone can. Just read about it first. Epic Games got hundreds of thousands of little kids to sideload their app on Google's operating system.
> I may be misunderstanding this but how does this take away people's rights?
Forcing someone to host something takes away their right to free speech.