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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

No. That appeal to some notion of free speech is bunk.

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.

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> Free speech doesn’t mean that you are entitled to a billboard, radio station, or global content delivery network.

What has any of this got to do with Google Drive?

Google Drive is a global content delivery network. A document flagged as "Share with link" is reliably hosted worldwide.

> Google Drive is a global content delivery network.

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?

> No it isn’t.

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.

It’s not a CDN by the widely accepted definition.

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.

"A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users." That accurately describes Drive's infrastructure. It has additional bidirectional support, but seamlessly transitions to unidirectional distributed broadcast if many people connect to the same file.

> 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.

> That accurately describes Drive's infrastructure.

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.

> 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.

> if the radio station has not gotten the consent of the caller to broadcast the call

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.

Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong other than reasoning by analogy from other telecommunications infrastructure (which we already treat differently from Google Drive shared documents)?

[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.

> Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong

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.

There was no appeal to free speech. You’re creating a straw man

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