> in a situation where they fundamentally can't.
I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs
I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs
They can “stay neutral” by limiting the ability to share widely. Free speech doesn’t mean that you are entitled to a billboard, radio station, or global content delivery network.
By aligning global distribution with easy content marketing, Google, Facebook, etc created a monstrosity that encourages the worst content and systematically evicerates high quality content.
That fundamental lack of understanding by naive engineers drives a lot of the problems we have.
What has any of this got to do with Google Drive?
No it isn’t.
> A document flagged as "Share with link" is reliably hosted worldwide.
Just like any other piece of content online.
Are you saying all online content should be subject to censorship just because it can be accessed worldwide?
I'm afraid I don't follow. In what way does it differ?
> Are you saying all online content should be subject to censorship just because it can be accessed worldwide?
I'm saying no CDN is obligated to vend content in violation of its TOS. Content available at drive.google.com is quite different from content hosted at your-site.com: you control the content at the latter. It's your TOS to enforce there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
> I'm saying no CDN is obligated to vend content in violation of its TOS.
Of course private businesses can choose the terms they operate under. It’s Google’s choices that people are criticizing.
Pretending Google Drive is like a billboard is dishonest.
We are talking about a file sharing service used for collaboration by individuals and businesses.
It’s Orwellian for the content of such a service to be monitored. It would be like AT&T disconnecting calls if certain topics were discussed.
> We're talking about a file sharing service used for collaboration
That's one way to use it. Another way is to cheaply host content and then post the link to Facebook or Twitter. It seems Google is reserving the right to not support that use case.
> It would be like AT&T disconnecting calls
Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link. It's a bit more more like a television station cutting a live broadcast if the person on screen starts sweating a blue streak. Though that analogy is also not perfect... Hosted publicly-accessible documents are kind of their own thing. It's not regulated as a common carrier and it's also not a newspaper.
It accurately describes a piece of infrastructure that many (if not most major) services including drive use.
It does not describe drive, but it’s a moot point since there is nothing relevant about calling drive a CDN.
> Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link.
Not at all. There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.
This is actually an excellent demonstration of why phone calls are a poor analogy for publicized Drive links: in the scenario that you describe, if the radio station has not gotten the consent of the caller to broadcast the call or the circumstances don't suggest the call will be broadcast (such as if someone calls the station's customer complaints line and that line is patched inappropriately into the broadcast circuits), in most states (and under FEC guidelines) the radio station could be held legally liable for violating the caller's privacy.
No such law exists for a Google drive document link.
Shared documents are their own thing and previous models don't really precisely fit them. There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong; arguments by analogy break down quickly. A Drive document can be used as a private scratch pad, a multi-user scratch space, or as a stored read-only piece of data intended for broad dissemination on a reliable content network; the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.
That’s weirdly irrelevant.
> There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong
You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
> the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.
That’s the reason this is a problem.
You have conceded that Google’s restrictions on what you can share affect all kinds of collaboration.
[Edit: your comment changed after I posted mine]
Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing. I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house), but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
> Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing.
They do, and ok.
> I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house)
This is a sentiment that I generally agree with as life advice, but is a non-contribution to these kinds of discussion.
> but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
There is no difference between a small scale collaboration and what you have chosen to label a ‘wide-cast’ link, other than how many people read the document.
When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.
To be a good liberal, Google has to decide if it's a publisher or platform. IF it's a publisher, then the hateful content is coming from them and they must take editorial control of google docs and whatnot. If they're a platform provider, then they get the same protections as telephone network operators and others from the actions of their users.
This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.
>This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.
I'm not a historian, but I can't think of many examples where an evil regime gained power by slowly "boiling the frog" and gradually eroding free speech rights.
Communist dictators typically seized power in a violent revolution spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.
Many of the Middle-Eastern dictators seized power in a not-so violent revolution (at least, not violent enough to cause a full-scale civil war) spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.
The colonial powers maintained their grip on power by denying education to the natives, and when they left the dictators that took their place seized power by violence even in a Western legal framework.
Maybe the Nazis did this (I'm honestly not sure), and maybe Julius Caesar too? But this doesn't seem to be a set-in-stone, guaranteed way of seizing power.
These companies are choosing to repeat what people tell them. They should always be considerate when doing so.
Picking operators who's opinions align with yours is the liberal way, using the free market to pick which ideas get repeated
It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society.
Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be.
I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.
this isn't Google's problem. It's a society level problem. Google is just responding to the pressure
Google doesn’t want to eliminate its cash cow, and doesn’t want to be associated with crazy fringe people. It’s pretty simple really.
Running this stuff through a “liberal” or “conservative” lens isn’t productive. Big public companies care about making money and eliminating risks associated with doing so.
Big companies aren't at risk from losing money for quashing unpopular speech - it's exactly why unpopular speech is the speech that generally needs protecting.
I think being credited with empowering right wing nuts can blowback though.
Are nazis marching near the homes of holocaust survivors disgusting? Sure. But there's a reason why it should be allowed if you and your children and their children are going to experience fundamental freedom instead of the arbitrary wishes of a government that may replace this one or the next one or the next one.
extrapolate from there.
Google Drive is a private resource, not an avenue in Milwaukee. Google is not the government.
You have the freedom to speak, but not in a newspaper you don’t own. You have the freedom to assemble, but not in a privately owned shopping mall.
You are technically correct based on current legal precedent but only because of the government's failure to regulate these companies not because it's inherently so.
If Milwaukee had been a company town they would still have been required to allow it, but because of weak politicians failing to ensure free speech is preserved we have arrived at a point where Mark Zuckerberg or Google's trust and safety team can arbitrarily ban speech for billions without any consequence or legal challenge.
Meanwhile just the other day the white House spokesperson was asking why if someone is banned on one platform they aren't banned on all of them automatically. If you don't see this dystopian future just over the hill you never will until it's too late.
If so, that puts the entire search apparatus in the category of "censorship," since it makes opinionated decisions regarding what the answer to your query should be. Choosing to refrain from vending a Drive URL is basically the same thing.
Edit: I could see an argument that they're being a bad steward of other people's data if they choose not to honor share requests on content they host or choose to remove content they've previously hosted. In which case, I'm glad they're putting the fact they'll do that right in a public disclosure, and it is something people should consider when choosing Drive to host their content.
Six months ago saying covid-19 originated in a lab was verboten on many platforms - saying it on facebook or YouTube would get you called a purveyor of misinformation and the content deleted and and your account at risk.
Suddenly it turns out the people involved at the government level funded the work exactly, and they worked with these companies to define what was misinformation, and suddenly Jon Stewart is making jokes about it and these companies allow it to be talked about again.
If you don’t understand how dangerous the platforms that house our public speech banning some speech based on “misinformation” is you aren’t paying any attention. They have set up their systems to detect/downrank/remove arbitrary content and that will be used for political reasons - it already has been and quite recently.
We live in dangerous times and a lot of people are oblivious.
Barnes and Noble isn’t censoring anyone because it chooses to feature some books on an end cap vs. buried on the shelf.