Hmm, when did they do this?
I actually think Germany has it backwards here. If the German government wants to provide a free-speech "safe zone", they should provide it themselves.
You're encouraging government coercion of action.
I actually think Germany has it backwards here. If the German government wants to provide a free-speech "safe zone", they should provide it themselves.
You're encouraging government coercion of action.
Of course now you might say, if such a phone company existed, those people who were denied service could just choose another one. But if this company would be the one dominating the market, this would mean they couldn't reach all the people they would want to anymore. This is the analogy with Facebook.
Now someone walks in and starts offering Corona. It's not everyone's favorite, but still decently popular, and the owner has no problem with that.
Until a few hours later, when a new line is added to the list of rules on the door: "no Corona". Then the owner tells the person handing out free Corona that they're breaking the rules and kicks them out.
Is that fair? Not in this case, says the court. Everyone agrees to the rules when they walk through the door, but the owner can't just willy-nilly change them after the fact.
(If you want to really understand the decision, you'll have to read the original instead of relying on analogies.)
Then, on YouTube (or woke mailing lists) there are mostly two sides, only one of which gets censored: The one that opposes the dominant clique.
YouTube is full of filth that is kept up because it is non-political and makes money for Google. If Google were really woke, it would take down all videos that are demeaning to women (according to their ideology). They don't, because these videos are a cash cow.
And you're advocating for foreign private companies to have more rights than the democratically elected governments of the countries they operate in.
Last time I checked laws still come from countries, not from Google. The world isn't America's private companies playground
The biggest difference generally between a private enterprise (foreign or domestic) and a democratically elected government is that participation with the government and its rules are:
- compulsory - enforced by physical violence
If I disagree with googles rules I can avoid google. If I a disagree with the governments rules (for example tax rates they impose), there will be people with weapons to force compliance.
That's exactly what Germany's highest court denied if they "move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public communication themselves" because it is not easy to avoid Google/YouTube.
I think we are way past the illusion of democracy and governments protecting their people at this point.
They might have very different views than Americans and Google about what should or shouldn't exist.
As if America and its private companies have the monopoly of what's "right" and what it means to "protect the people" of the world, this is ridiculous
Companies can only provide products and services to willing customers. To restrict them is to restrict the choices of your own people to choose products they prefer. So what you're really arguing for is the majority in a country restricting the freedom of a minority in that same country.
How did you extrapolate that ? No
I really don't get your second point. You can't sell me a car without seat belt, you can't sell me weed, you can't host a jihad video platform.
You're already restricted in many ways. The world doesn't have to kneel in front of YouTube &co and accept all their bullshit.
America isn't a role model, neither in politics nor culture, the world doesn't need to conform to what America think is right.
Also, YouTube doesn't exist to serve the people, certainly not, it exists to make money and uses tax evasion to pay as little as possible in most EU countries, if they wanted to serve the people they could start there
As for the second point, yes and those examples are also cases of restricting their own citizens. Hence the discussion is still about rights of the citizenry versus their own government restricting them, not "rights" of companies as you put it.
The world is free to not use YouTube and always has been. And by the way I don't agree with many of the major websites' censorship decisions in the last couple years either. They depict only what a loud subset of America thinks is right.
Companies generally make money by serving people. I suppose there are business models where this isn't so (e.g. they exist to sue people or something, but exploiting govt's ability to take money by force instead), but in YouTube's case, they entice people the consensual way.
But that is what they are doing here, no? They just use Youtube as the way to provide it. Governments doesn't have to run businesses themselves, private actors are much better at running the day to day stuff usually.
Similarly if you own a huge amount of land and build a city there and let lots of people move in, don't get surprised when the government seizes your square and roads and make them public, or at least force you to let people move there as if they were public roads.
Some people currently seem to have the attitude that a corporation can be protected by the state but not responsible for its actions that negatively impact the common good. This was not the original intention.
> But wether public or private, corporations were originally only granted special legal privileges by government, conditional on them serving some PUBLIC good. With special rights came special restrictions, and their operations were periodically reviewed for compliance with their stated purpose. However, over time the system of incorporation has been altered by corporations themselves, such that the benefits of state-grants have been kept, while the responsibilities discarded. [0]
[0] https://ptolemy3.medium.com/but-corporations-are-private-com...
Whether or not Youtube should have a clause in their terms allowing them to remove arbitrary content is a different question, and yet another is whether they should be allowed to have such a clause.