Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

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But I think we need to examine both sides of this.

When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen.

Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies.

But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different.

I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.

Pretending free speech was only about the town square is ahistorical.

Free speech has always been about distribution as well - publishing a book or a newspaper, distributing pamphlets - those had similar reach to a random FB post or YT video today (in terms of percentage of the population).

Of course newspapers had no obligation to carry anyone's message, but, far more importantly, a newspaper couldn't be censored by government for printing stuff the government didn't like.

It's also important to remember that there used to exist many more newspapers - factories would have newspapers, most towns would have one or two, many clubs and similar organizations would have one.

The history of printing things for wide scale distribution well predates the first amendment and it is silly to pretend otherwise.

But the history of forcing those publications to host your opinion is unprecedented

Historically there were two modes of distribution, "publishers" and "common carriers".

Publishers (like newspapers) had full control over their content, and also had full responsibility for it (e.g., if they printed something libelous, they could be sued).

Common carriers (like the phone company) had no control over the content, and no responsibility for it, either (you couldn't sue the phone company if someone used the phone to plan a crime, for instance).

Google and their ilk want to have it both ways. They want the full control of publishers, and the zero responsibility of common carriers.

Historically, power without responsibility has invariably been a recipe for abuse.

I think they should have to choose one or the other.

This is the point SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas made in his render opinion, that communication networks like social media should be regulated as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...

That’s the way it was until the passage of the communications decency act. Early social networks found themselves in a bind in that if they tried to moderate for say, spam, or porn, or copyright infringement, they were then liable for everything their users published. The CDA was an attempt to solve that problem.

I don’t have a better answer.

How can an endpoint, no matter how large that endpoint is, be considered to be a common carrier?

Justice Thomas is hardly a reliable source for making it so.

How is Facebook any more an "endpoint" than AT&T?

Facebook is just an endpoint on the internet. Nothing more.

AT&T is an ISP among other carrier things.

How can a server, or a set of servers be anything more than an endpoint?

That you would compare ATT and FB shows a remarkable misunderstanding of the internet and WWW.

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