GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Other than my agreeing with the moral position in this case, how is this different than a baker not making a cake for some particular customer?
We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals, especially when it comes to utility and infrastructure providers (which arguably bakers of cakes are not).
Sure but at what point is it inconvenient enough that the bakers are infrastructure? Like if there is a single baker in a town and the next one is idk 20 miles away?
“Bake a cake at home”
“Buy a computer and host the website yourself”
The TOS is a contract which the Texan group had signed with GoDaddy. They can sue if they believe they’re not actually in violation.
This is nothing like the case of not selling a wedding cake to someone in a protected category.
They’re selling the service to everyone with the same terms, and the Texan group’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to their violation of the TOS.
Some may claim abortion is against some vague "christian values" but those people either didn't read their own holy book or use it as a thinly veiled excuse to oppress other people.
The idea that GoDaddy should need to make an exception to their ToS when a case is politically charged is scarier, IMHO.
Your argument definitely stands though: there's not much difference in private information that's requested on a crime stoppers form[1] vs the right to life form[2].
Also, a person’s health-care information is quite private.
GoDaddy had a ToS that includes statements about inquiry of medical conditions
Crimestoppers or whatever isn't asking you to submit things regarding people's medical status, it's asking for crime reporting.
There's been a large amount of privacy with regards to healthcare in the US in general for the longest time. The fact anybody is surprised by this is somewhat unsettling.
“violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that *you owe* to another User or any other person or entity.”
Most people don’t owe any privacy rights in regards to others medical care.
GoDaddy can say “we don’t want to be involved in this sort of thing.”
But they should not pretend their clients are breaking the law.
There is lots of caselaw involving whether anti-abortion groups can gather this sort of information.
They can.
GoDaddy doesn’t have to be involved in it. But they shouldn’t pretend there is an obligation or duty being violated by the site owner.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent."
That seems way stronger in forbidding the exact purpose of this site. (With the privacy/publicity/confidentiality rights sometimes applying, but only to specific reports.)
“You will not collect any PII about any entity without their consent.”
There’s probably an implied “You will not use this service to collect …” at the start.
So basically, you can’t host a portal to gather PII on non-consenting parties.
It would be pretty easy for the website to get around that.
The website asked for the contact info of the user and then had a textarea field with the caption “If applicable: Do you have information about potential violations of the Texas Heartbeat Act?”
All they would have to do is change that textarea into a Yes/No radio button.
Edit: confusingly, it said, “we will not follow up or contact you” but also asked the best time to contact you.
GoDaddy could maybe argue that the fundamental purpose of the website was still to facilitate gathering that data, but that seems more of a stretch. "You are using our servers to gather this forbidden data" vs "you are using our servers to gather this allowed data, which will later be used to gather forbidden data elsewhere"...
I'd guess that the reason the website doesn't want to make this change would be that it'd greatly increase their own costs in terms of followup they'd have to perform. Makes it a more high-touch operation.
As I mentioned, it promises not to contact you, and then asks the best time to contact you.
Not exactly high caliber user research going on there.
I also get the impression it’s more about get names they can hit up for donations.
Notice how it asks if the “reporter” is already involved in anti-abortion movement.
That’s probably to avoid duplicates when they add the name to their mailing list asking for money.
The last thing it wants is a security breach, followed by an obligation to inform all of the affect parties who reside in California and the EU.
It's really easy if you don't try and make perfect abstract rules, and remember that context is important.
Yes, the argument can be made in these cases that there are two sides, so someone's rights are being violated either way.
But, there does seem to be a consistent quality here that the particular "infringed" right of one side is the "right" to deny others' rights.
Might that be the difference?
very interesting question! what sort of "term of services" are we implicitly agreeing on when ordering a cake or any other food?
What this illustrates is that liberalism only "works" incidentally when people share the same ethos and moral standards or who submit to the ruling ethos and moral standards in relevant conduct, as it were. As those diverge, mutual coexistence becomes increasingly impossible. That's why libertarianism is such a joke.
Furthermore I believe GoDaddy has already assessed the potential loss, made customer comparison between both parties and concluded this is better financially.
EDIT: additionally, they may also compared the hosting plan with the spam attacks and PR attacks they get.
Personally and morally I don't know whether this is the right thing or not, but financially I believe this is.
Title VII protections tend to be applied to housing and employment discrimination, not restricting the general right of business owners to freedom of association with respect to who they'll take on as customers.
Most shops come with a sign posted saying they can refuse to serve you for any reason whatsoever, including total personal whim, and that doesn't get challenged.
Businesses don't have to do business if they don't want to. Tough for this website, sucks to be discriminated against for a political belief. It isn't like there is a shortage of domain registrars in the world.
If there is a legal technicality where someone has to vote Democrat to start a domain registrar then there is a problem here. VeriSign doing this would be a concern. Unless I'm misreading this it isn't troubling; GoDaddy is not that important.
It'd be sad if the DNS system becomes political. But at this point we should be bracing for it, there aren't a lot of future paths where it stays neutral.
There's already precedent for this. Cloudflare de-listed a major neo-nazi website a few years ago if I recall correctly.
As much as I might loath one website or another, I think basic web infrastructure, from DNS to certs to even cloud services should be treated as common carriers, and it should only be by legal order that they're allowed deny services to a particular site.
There's so much consolidation going on that we're not so far from a situation where a hand-full of corporations are the defacto gatekeepers of online life.
For instance, I don't think cloudflare is required to host a site. Millions of entities online are able to function without cloudflare or godaddy.
So where do we draw the line for basic web infrastructure? To me it seems like the ISP is a good place to start. If you have internet, you could host a site on hardware yourself, or with a minor hire
Sure it’s possible to get your own fiber connection, manage your own hardware and host a web company, but you’re never going to be able to compete with another party who has access to AWS or GCP to run on top of.
That said, a line? The line that should be drawn is anyone declaring that they have a right to financially coerce women to making adverse health decisions.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, the internet is the commons in the modern world, and currently we're ceding governance of it to private enterprise.
I have to say, since I moved to Europe I have become much less convinced of the inherent futility of democracy.
This would essentially prevent godaddy from limiting service to a customer because they would be required to work with all peoples
My argument, was that yes, I agree that some things should be governed more like public utilities, like ISPs. Other things should not, like CDNs, or DDOS protection, etc.
IMO once you have internet, that is what is obligated to be made available to you, all these other services might help you but they are private companies that can refuse service for any reason
Anyway, I doubt this discussion continues as the topic is stale now, but I wanted to clarify my comment regarding where the line was. I wasn't talking about morality of issues, I was talking about where common carrier status should start / stop
this is one of the reasons for it's existance [1] and thanks to the federated nature, it still exists.
[1] probably also worthwile to lookup rir/lir in that regard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry
Except for all sorts of exceptions this isn't true. As a "principle" you could write everything you said above but substitute racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination and it wouldn't stand up, because businesses absolutely have to do business in these cases.
>has to vote Democrat
No, but has to not promote conservative political policies, thus supporting, just like voting does, Democrat political objectives. What's the practical difference? Democrat political power is mandated just the same.
Although the law disagrees with me, I'd say the same thing to them too. I do think it is unfair that GoDaddy might choose to boot me for my political beliefs but would get in to legal trouble for booting an LGBT group.
I see perfect parallels between GoDaddy expelling this site vs. GoDaddy expelling a site for LGBT advocacy. Both are stupid actions for GoDaddy to take, but both should be legal options.
> We can’t reasonably be making “this type of refusal to do business is okay, but that one is not” based on moral agreements of individuals
We actually can. And the difference between this and the baker is in the details you omitted.
The actual baker situation was denying a customer based on their sexual orientation. That type of refusal is not okay and the reason why is pretty well-established in the law. Sexual orientation (like religion, race, sex, etc) is protected from such discrimination.
And the baker was allowed to not serve the gay wedding anyways! Despite that!
Being pro-life is not a protected attribute. You could argue these pro-life beliefs are due to religion..but this isn't about Jesus Christ Himself. This is a political opinion derived from the church that plenty of Christians don't have.
This is not true. They were perfectly happy to bake a cake for gay people; they objected to baking the cake specifically for a gay wedding. The cake was to have wording which the bakers disagreed with for religious reasons.
Being gay is protected, as is being Christian, both.
Demanding a cake that expresses certain beliefs such as celebrating gay marriage or trangenderism or any other thing may not be protected by law.
Just as demanding to be sold hosting services for your anti-abortion hotline based on your Christian beliefs probably isn’t protected by law.
It's a little more nuanced because abortion is less linked to religion than gay marriage is to being gay. You can in theory link a variety of nonsense to your Christian faith (if you can prove false you can prove anything blah blah blah)
I don't think private businesses should be obligated to work with any government for any reason.
There's probably a good argument that the government should have to invoke eminent domain and proceed with manufacturing themselves.
I can't say that I've put an excess of thought into the matter, though.
Not that the weirdos behind this site are a protected group, but even if they were, they couldn’t demand that a bakery, say, sell them plastic explosives, only things that it sells to other people.
This is not refusing a customer, but more refusing an ingredient on customers request: "I know you request to have shit in your cake, but we're not going to do that."
It's not like GoDaddy is the only option.
No they can't. There are plenty of restrictions on denying service. An obvious example: you can't refuse to serve people based on their race. And since the door is open on disallowing such, a lot of other arguments are made and will be made in regards to who it's ok to not serve. Which is what's going on here with regards to GoDaddy's actions. Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people), you can expect the rules/laws pertaining to situations like this in business to get more complex over time.
The restriction, is literally, "You cannot refuse service to people in a protected class." The burden of proof is on the person who was refused to show that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the reason that they were refused was due to them being within a protected class. It's not a low bar to clear. It has been this way since the civil rights movement.
> Since the US is rapidly shifting to a hyper tribal, protected classes system of rule of law (different laws for different people).
You don't have any understanding of the jurisprudence here, this is embarrassing.
There is tons of ways to "not serve" people. Just try not to be an outright racist and you're fine.
A business with a terms of service that you signed always says "Random Business has the right to refuse service for blah blah".
So the “reporting” would be on someone other than the person having an abortion. Let’s say, a boyfriend who pays for an abortion.
The person doing the reporting is someone other than the “abettor” or the person getting an abortion. Let’s say the boyfriends ex-wife.
Once a certain number of people know about something, it’s not private.
Even current medical privacy laws, and including abortion laws, don’t create any privacy obligations for non-commercial third partied, much less fourth parties.
If my ex-boyfriend tells me he helped his girlfriend get an abortion, I have no obligations to keep this secret. As it should be.
This website allowed fourth parties to communicate with fifth parties (Texas Right to Life).
Think about this: someone is informing an anti-abortion organization about an abortion.
At this point the cat is out of the bag. It’s not a secret. It’s in the open. It’s public.
Imagine if social media organizations decided to treat abortions the same way they treat CSAM, revenge porn, the identity of intelligence officers, nuclear secrets, copyright violations, and misinformation about COVID.
Is that what we want? Some people do. I’m sure there’s a constituency for that.
But notice how the we are descending down a slope.
Maybe we should be doing that. But let’s do it with our eyes open and with rigorous debate that results in action.
That’s not how GoDaddy approached this.
I totally disagree, that seems completely reasonable to me. Are we not allowed to say that doing something moral is okay but doing something immoral is not ok?
This is why the logic of "who is more moral" fails because someone believes they're safeguarding "true" morality. Hence why we are a nation of laws and institutions that upholds or challenges them. Which is why I disagree with you, it is unreasonable (even though it's not why GoDaddy dropped them). If the law is immoral/unjust, take it to court. Otherwise shut up and deal with it. That's what civil rights leaders did back in the 60's. They didn't just whine on twitter.
It is not.
> If the law is immoral/unjust, take it to court. Otherwise shut up and deal with it. That's what civil rights leaders did back in the 60's.
Have you really not heard of civil disobedience?
See how your logic can be turned against you?
I'm also not sure it's accurate to say people aren't taking this law to court. In fact, they did that before the law became law. Then the Supreme Court declined to enjoin the law. Then they managed to enjoin literally this group from enforcing the law, as part of the legal process that's currently unfolding.
My take on your post is that it's a very (classical) conservative view: in many cases, liberty undermines order, and that a sort of benevolent guiding force can keep order, which benefits us all. This is, like, Edmund Burke 101. It's anti-(classical) liberal. And in fact one of the major issues political conservatives were concerned with was the restriction of speech that agitated or disrupted harmony, so they agree with you on this.
Without trying to reductio ad absurdum you, let me suggest what I think this would look like. One possibility is that you are calling not for any solution, but for just a sort of feel-good agreement, a sort of principle among people, that we should go along to get along. I think that's tempting. We can all recognize this status quo of cultural cleavages leading to rag-tag boycotts is not working very well. But I am going to conclude that would fail.
The reason I conclude it would fail is more or less because that's what lead us here to begin with. So if you think that factionalism is a problem, and judging from this thread I would assume you do, then clearly people aren't going to voluntarily agree to do this.
On the other side of the spectrum, you could imagine a very heavy-handed intervention wherein wide swaths of issues are declared off-limits in the name of comity. Now, many people would say "hey, agreeing not to argue about something is a status quo politics that favours some majority opinion" but I'm actually going to sidestep that argument and just imagine that we could do this. In this theoretical world, you'd likely still have factions -- some of the original factions were tribal! Doing business with the people you know, the people who are closer to you, the people who are like you, who speak your language, preferentially... that's the original factionalism. My father-in-law was an engineer, and he worked with a few mechanics, and when my wife and I bought a used car, he referred us to the mechanics he worked with. They owed my father-in-law a favour or two, so we got discounted mechanic work. In return, we recommended him to some friends. And on and on.
Moreover, in all but the smallest towns, you typically have a choice of multiple merchants for a given good; so, like, I can choose to go to Sal's Cupcakes or Sweet Treats Cupcakes. Probably I don't have enough business to always go to both. And it might even be the case that the quality of their products and their prices are going to be around the same, so more or less my preference is going to be some kind of aesthetic -- meaning broadly more about the store's location, the friendliness of the service, things that basically don't matter -- preference. How do I force myself as a customer to affirmatively do business with everyone?
I think probably we're not going to be able to build a society where I am affirmatively obligated to do business with someone I find immoral, unless you're talking about a degree of central planning that more or less de-duplicates or centrally owns market sectors. It's true that every cupcake company was OmniCake by government fiat, and if I was only zoned to purchase from the one on Oak Street, then I wouldn't have a choice. But otherwise, I do. We do have this option, but I think here we'd be talking about a degree of totalizing central planning that more or less eclipses the USSR, DPRK, etc.
But of course there aren't just both ends of the spectrum, there's an in between. What would a "first step" of depoliticizing basic commerce look like? To my eye, any restriction on a consumer's speech is going to be more liberty-infringing than a restriction on a firm's speech. To me, it's less important that Chevy be able to express opinions without fear of reprisal than that I do.
So you might start by saying that any firm (over a certain size? if you're making this rule apply to sole proprietorships then we're basically back to square one here?) needs to shut the fuck up, broadly construed. They should not, either by law or just by convention, weigh in on any political issues. Although probably they want to weigh in on regulatory issues? Okay, so maybe they can weigh in on issues that affect them, but not "other" issues. Okay, it's true, justice issues affect staff and by affecting staff affect the firm, which is why FB and Apple weigh in on immigration and gay marriage. Crap. Now we're back to the status quo where firms are responsive to employee and customer political demands, which is the thing we're worried about in terms of factionalism.
Okay, maybe we just want to ban firms from weighing in on anything. No donations, no lobbying, no congressional testimony, no political research, no public communications about politics, no ads mentioning politics, they must legally no comment if asked, etc etc. Can they still donate to non-political charities, like can a charity shop still give money to the diabetes association? I don't know, that seems borderline, it's a hop skip and a jump from this to religion and politics.
This ends up being pretty tricky. Maybe the best outcome is that we sort of incrementally iterate on the sorts of issues we think ought be admissible and to what degree. Maybe there are some views that are so immoral they are deal-breakers, and others that bother me but I'll put up with them, and others that don't bother me but might bother you. And then we all, in a public sphere, advocate for which issues fall under which category. And this can change over time, so salient issues today aren't salient tomorrow. Shit, how do we keep ending up back here?
A slightly more serious suggestion: a lot of what's occurring here is the nationalization of politics. As firms are national and global in scale, issues are national and global, and so a lot of the comity you get for free from local homophily (meaning the tendencies of alike people to associate with one another, and thus for the people in your geographic vicinity to be more like you than people at random) has been eroded by the size of firms and the size of issues and the way in which consumers feel more solidarity on lines other than geography. You can solve this by breaking up firms, putting up market barriers, and basically structuring society around the idea that success comes from mutual investment in local firms; I win when I invest in Main Street in my neighborhood. This makes the social factions closer to the primordial ones of regional tribe and further from the modern ones. Of course, this would still disadvantage people who lose the geographic lottery and get born in a place they don't fit in well with. And this, by the way, explicitly subordinates efficiency and local advantage and mutual gains from trade to the idea that an organic solidarity of local homophily breeds comity and order.
My experience is that most people calling for comity more or less wish others thought more like them (and thus were bothered by the things they were, and not bothered by the things they are.) I think that might be a little naive.
You can refuse service to someone because you don't like the color of their shirt, but it's illegal to refuse service to someone belonging to a protected class because they belong to a protected class.
"Abortion reporting form operators" are not a protected class, and they aren't being denied service because they belong to a protected class.
The cake maker refused to bake a cake depicting a gay wedding.
Regardless of the protected class status of whoever was ordering it.
People get this wrong all the time about this story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake. In other words he was unwilling to provide any cake for this purpose regardless of what was shown on it.
The law isn’t that literal for good reason. Put another way saying it’s ok to reject a mortgage because it’s a black mortgage rather than a black applicant is silly. It’s clear in the case the rejection was based on sexual orientation.
A bakery can’t reject an order because it’s for a religious ceremony due to the religion associated with that ceremony. However, it’s likely a bakery could reject being part of any wedding independent of religion or sexual orientation.
Anyway, the same baker is in court over refusing to make birthday cake for transgender woman.
If the bakery would sell a non designed cake to a gay couple, or if they refused a straight couple to make a gay cake, that is different than your example.
To be clear, I'm not sticking up for the bakery, it just doesn't seem like a clear proxy like you are saying
And in context a strait couple can’t have a gay wedding, the difference is inherently gender dependent thus making it a proxy. [edited for clarity]
And the baker wouldn’t have sold it to them.
Therefore the baker is not discriminating against gay people.
The baker won’t sell cakes for gay weddings to anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.
A mortgage is impersonal, this is more like requiring an LGBTQIA+ artist to paint a picture of Trump against their will.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
Are you sure about that? Like, a cake depicting human sacrifice to Satan, and your random baker couldn't say "uhm, no, I don't do those"?
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.”
So a symbolic ritual sacrifice is protected, but an actual human sacrifice isn’t.
If so, would it be possible to refuse to make that particular decoration (but make a cake)? Wouldn‘t this kind of be like telling an artist what exactly they have to paint?
I‘m wondering purely from a legal viewpoint, not based on what would be the right thing.
“Masterpiece's owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
It might actually be 100% legal to reject providing gay themed decorations while providing a cake
It's pretty clear, this was never a ordinary couple looking to have a nice wedding. The point of the whole operation was to find somebody who was not sufficiently supportive of them and use the power of the state to crush them.
If you have to go looking for a particular individual to "oppress" you when you've already found plenty of alternatives that work fine, maybe what you're facing isn't in the same ballpark.
Segregation on the basis of individuals belonging to protected classes is illegal, the law makes it very clear.
How would you feel about a "white couples only" restaurant or bakery? What about a "whites only" grocery store? Or a "whites only" mechanic? Do you feel the same way about those as you do with the "straights only" bakery?
People have used their religions to give a pass to discrimination for a long time[1]. Today's scapegoat is gay and trans people, but a few decades ago it was miscegenation. People discriminated against mixed-race couples and said it was a core tenet of their religion[1]:
> Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The ACLU has this to say about such cases of discrimination:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
There were plenty of places these people could have chosen to do business with, as well, but that doesn't really matter.
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=55...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/religious-liberty/using-religion...
It was the cake, not the customer.
As an extreme example, I think everyone agrees that littering is bad. But how would you feel about summary execution for littering? Feels crazy extreme, right? The actual effective punishment for littering is more like people maybe frown at you a little, and maybe if you're super obnoxious about it or do it right in front of a cop, you might get a modest fine. That seems about right to me. I feel like I'm complaining that maybe we shouldn't summarily execute people for littering and everyone's coming back at me with how dare you support the evils of littering.
I don't like any kind of discrimination. If everyone in town is discriminating against some group so hard that they can't go about the ordinary activities of life, that feels like something that needs to be addressed by government action. On the other hand, if one business in a medium-size city doesn't want to serve some group for some reason, and there's a dozen competitors that are fine with that group, maybe it's best to just let it slide from a legal standpoint. Maybe a local soft boycott or something like that.
If you want to ratchet up the severity of the punishment for an act that is vanishingly rare and hasn't really caused anyone that much trouble, consider the possibility that you aren't the good guys anymore.
I guess I am still not cynical enough to have thought of that. So thank you for bringing in new perspective.
i.e. if it was an off-the-shelf cake, there would have been legal problems.
But a 'song writer' I think can't be compelled to write a song in such circumstances.
It's a little bit of a digression though:
For networking - most people agree in total neutrality i.e. AT&T cannot inspect our packets for 'bad words'.
On the other end, for Social Networks, we mostly agree they should probably have the right to moderate on some level according to their own rules. Perhaps we could require some consistency and objectivity or something, but generally speaking, I think we can live with Section 230 there.
The 'big issue' in IT I think has to do with hosting, which is a service one might deem should be 'neutral' - at the same time, companies may not want to host certain content and may be able to demonstrate 'harm' by doing so.
Like Amazon dumping Parler as the threshold / test case, along with this GoDaddy example - which is complicated because on one hand it's 'expression' on the other, there were some very serious and probably illegal things going on there.
In tech, we tend to focus on these social issues, but imagine if 'Brick and Mortar' business started doing this? i.e. UPS refusing to deliver packages? Or the 'Paper Company' refusing to sell inkject cartridges?
For commonly available things, like groceries, probably we can allow discrimination, because after all, someone can just go down the street to the next one, but for products and services which are unique, it really poses a problem.
However much we might not like some groups, we have to be really careful about banning things.
I was under impression that they actually can inspect, but should not be able to deny/degrade or prioritize service based on whatever they might find in one’s packets.
Inspection part is going to be moot if everyone is using encryption though.
What remains is this [1] 1934 Comms. Act.
In the US it's the Wild West and basically money rules on this issue, like the vague laws about land holding and mineral rights on the frontier in the 20th century, power is winning, not so much civility.
I'm not sure that the EU has the right laws, but at least there are clearly measures enacted to protect individuals and to try to create some kind of more rational 'playing field' even at the risk over over regulation.
Maybe we are in an era where only a few things here and there are going to get banned, and we will arrive at a new 'consensus' without intervention, that Parler was taken down isn't the end of the world for free expression ... or it's possible things will only escalate, it's hard to say.
But it's worth considering if hosting platforms might better fall more under the notion of 'carrier' than they would 'internet service' i.e. Section 230.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
On the other hand, it is clear that heavy handed suppression is not good either, especially when all major platforms do that.
Is it possible to have both alternatives available somehow?
But I like your 'have the cake and eat it too' thinking! ...
I wonder if companies on the margins could be given either the option of Section 230 protections, but then also have an obligation to curate for some things, and to have some kind of 'consistently objective rules' ... or ... take the more 'neutral' approach and wash their hands of everything and be obligated to provide services for 'pretty much anything legal' ... which in this case would be interesting because GoDaddy is looking mostly to avoid populist outrage. If they are legally bound to allow the 'legal site' ... well ... there's little they can do ant the outrage would have be oriented towards the legislators.
My feeling is that both our current Net Neutrality and Section 230 just don't provide very well in the middle ground cases.
For Visa, wasn’t the latest OnlyFan thing that payment networks almost forced them to self-destruct due to some morality rules? That would be a bit too restrictive for “carrier” case I think…
See Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018), section I (1)(a).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colo...
Phillips even said, “I’ll make your birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same sex weddings.” (Notice the lack of nuance: he wouldn’t make any cake, whether it’s plain or designed.)
You can read more in the opinion of the Supreme Court [1], page 4 (7 on your document viewer).
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_j4el.pdf
P.S. A good argument can be made that the Colorado Commission didn’t violate religious neutrality. As Ginsburg outlined in her dissent, Phillips wouldn’t make a wedding cake for any gay couple. So there is a subset of people he discriminates against just because of who they are (gay couples), and another he doesn’t discriminate against. The other bakeries involved that rejected William Jack’s request to make cakes depicting homosexuality as a sin wouldn’t make such a cake for anybody.
To make it easier to understand: Jack Phillips makes plain cakes he gives to one group of people but not another. On the other hand, the other bakeries wouldn’t even make a cake depicting homosexuality as a sin for anyone. So it wouldn’t matter if it’s an atheist or Christian or Muslim. Plus, the very same bakeries made cakes for other Christians and decorated beautiful Bibles, so it’s clear they didn’t find someone’s religion a reason to deny them a cake.
Phillip’s argument might be more convincing if he was asked to, say, design a wedding cake with a rainbow flag. But the gay couple were refused a plain, let alone designed, wedding cake.
So therefore he is not discriminating against the customer, but rather the stated purpose of using the cake.
Edit: also plenty of people on HN who think their Kool-Aid is just water, I see.
I'm not a lawyer, but this doesn't sound right. As an example, I've never met someone who didn't CHOOSE to get married.
Also, pro-life ideals are a proxy for religion- which IS a protected class. And I (as an example) DID CHOOSE my religion.
You guys need to keep the following question in mind when presenting an argument that is legalese nitpicking:
What if Trump (or whatever your political monster du jour is) redefined $statue_my_argument_is_based_on, would I still be arguing this way?
By the way, being against abortion might actually count as a protected class, since it‘s based on the person being of the Christian faith.
Interesting. Isn't this a loophole? If I am the baker in question, can I refuse to bake the cake citing the shirt color instead of the real reason, which is that I am homophobic? (I am not, just asking a hypothetical question)
That might be difficult, especially if you were lying.
If you kick everyone out of your store that wears dreadlocks, no matter what their race or protected class, and that has a disparate impact on people who belong to protected classes, that's also illegal.
Similarly, if you refuse service to, say, immigrants because of the color of their shirts, but you serve everyone else no matter what color their shirts are, that's also illegal.
Is this how it should work though?
YouTube could claim the same whenever they kill another channel.
How many others have you refused service due to their shoes? And if none, what’s the policy?
GoDaddy has their policy.
> GoDaddy's policies say that its registered websites cannot "collect or harvest" information about people without their consent. Its policies also forbid registered sites from doing anything that "violates the privacy or publicity rights of another User or any other person or entity, or breaches any duty of confidentiality that you owe to another User or any other person or entity."
Quote from, https://www.newsweek.com/texas-website-abortion-law-violate-...
It's completely subjective... unless you can read my mind
You can make a decision to not serve people wearing Nazi symbols or to kick them out if they’re loud even if they’re from a protected class.
Put a camera. If they take you to court, show them everyone else in the past you’ve kicked out due to not liking their shoes.
Pick your battles. If the first person after you install the camera is from a protected class, skip them. Don’t be stupid either.
Yes. However, if there's a disparate impact on protected classes based on your shoe discrimination, that can be illegal. You can't just deny service to, say, immigrants and say it's because of their shoes, while letting other people and their shoes slide.
"You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent"
That's how it's different. The cake-purchaser is not a government trying to use the cake as a shield against civil rights litigation.
They are a state government attempting to enforce a law. By definition, it is not vigilante. Whether the law is agreeable or just is another question entirely; a political question.
All the Supreme Court said so far was that they didn't think there was a cause of action at the moment because of how the law was structured.
(Now, was that decision perhaps slightly motivated by the conservative majority and the exact topic of the law? Seems likely. I bet they'd have stayed a law that was exactly the same other than the reportable-act being handgun ownership, for instance.)
Have you been asleep? The OP sees the Texas law as vigilantism because he doesn't believe that the people of Texas have a right to self-determination --- he believes, essentially, that angry-Twitter ought to get a veto over Texan law, and that Texan law that angry-Twitter doesn't like isn't really law at all.
The people of Texas, of course, have limited right to self-determination; whether the absurd law their government had just passed falls under that or not will be determined later.
However, in this case, it’s nothing to do with the people of Texas. This is a private vigilante group, not the government.
Not, really, that it matters in this case. Even the full majesty of the Texas state government presumably can’t force a webhost to ignore its ToS if it doesn’t want to. But in this case it’s not the government, it’s a weird private organisation.
Given that there's a growing movement to use state power against tech censorship, I expect this claim to be empirically tested in the near future.
What have these 'script-kiddies' and 'hacktivists' achieved other than making these websites more resilient and censorship resistant?
What's next? complain to Google Inc, that they are using ReCAPTCHA because they don't like the website?
Perhaps this means anyone can do these sort of methods to anyone else who they don't like until they become censorship resistant. Unfortunately, the website owners have not changed their minds and the site is still up and the law (which I also disagree with) is still in effect. If they were expecting a backlash, it didn't happen.
This is a complete and total failure.
Downvoters: So you are telling me that the website is still down then? So they didn't find a domain provider to move to? Are you telling me that they are still on GoDaddy?
Is there any evidence that substantiates this? Are you really sure?
BTW you're misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists".
> BTW you're misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists".
How exactly? Elaborate. Your claim needs to be substantiated.
If you cannot elaborate further with any evidence, I can rapidly dismiss your claim as baseless.
I also invite anyone else to support the parent's comment against mine. Discuss.
The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
Where did I directly accuse GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or describing them generally as 'hacktivists'? Given they are a private platform, they have the right to terminate service to anyone for violating their Terms of Service.
As for the hacktivism and script-kiddie claims, the context is from [1]
> The developer, whose social media identifies him as Sean Black, also made an iOS shortcut making it easier for non-technical activists to participate as well.
> In the first video, Black says the script sends one request to the Texas website around every 10 to 15 seconds. In the second, Black adds that the script sent around 300 requests in all at the time of upload before the site blocked his IP address.
Does that also mean its fine for me to do it to someones website because I don't like their website?
So it's also fine to distribute malicious scripts and to encourage non-technical users to just hit the run button with the intention to DDoS and attempt to flood and bring down someones website because they don't like the website? If that is not script-kiddie behaviour, I don't know what is.
> The insistence that "script kiddie" is applicable is obviously some sort of 4d chess type of sarcasm trap and I won't engage in it further.
4d chess type of what?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/texas-aborti...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3x9ba/tiktok-texas-abortion...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/3/22656196/godaddy-texas-rig...
If you'd had actually quoted from those links initially when making your comments about script kiddies and hactivists your statements would have made sense. But you didn't and instead of realising this you seems to prefer being outraged that nobody could read your mind to find the context you intended but never provided.
The whole context of this story is covered by multiple articles and all of them are completely relevant and happened BEFORE GoDaddy ultimately took action to de-platform the website.
I assume you also read the Gizmodo article. If you did, you'll find that the article mentions and linked various methods used to directly attack the website which can be described as 'script-kiddie' and 'hacktivism' behaviour, before they themselves suggested their own effective method in getting GoDaddy to de-platform the website.
To go further, I substantiated all of my claims with other relevant and reputable sources that gives more detail and covers the context of the whole story. Not just Gizmodo's ones. The whole story cannot be covered with only one source from one news site.
So, had you 'actually' read the article rather than only just the title in the first place like many others in this thread, you wouldn't be embarrassing yourself with laughable nonsense like '4d chess type of sarcasm trap' and resorting to baseless suggestions that I directly accused GoDaddy Inc. of taking down the website as 'hacking' or them being 'hacktivists' themselves.
Looking forward to your 1500 word rebuttal with citations about the validity of strawman arguments.
If you had read the Gizmodo article, you would find that they mentioned that '...trolls flooded the digital tip line with everything from Shrek porn to phony tips' and linked another previously reported article which again covers the methods used to attack and flood the website, before then detailing to others about another effective way to get GoDaddy to shut down the website for ToS violations.
These sort of flooding and attacks are what can be described as script-kiddie and hacktivist behaviour as I already said before. I assumed you have at least 'read' the Gizmodo article and its links. You clearly have not.
When asked to elaborate further on your original claim of '...misusing the terms "script-kiddies" and "hacktivists"' you couldn't substantiate anything. Now you retreat to attacking another 'argument' and thinking I misused the word 'these'.
So even after bringing up more relevant links and citations to support my own claims on top of what Gizmodo already mentioned, another person who also didn't read the article now says it makes sense and then you suggest I'm defending a strawman argument?
Have I just proved that both of you just read only the title of the Gizmodo article?
Well, my resolve not to use GoDaddy for anything ever has been strengthened a bit.
You want to really hurt their site? Just furnish their database with randomly generated names and addresses. Data poisoning is one of the easiest, cleanest, and effective ways to ruin someone's crowdsourcing campaign if you pull it off properly. Getting angry at people on the internet for having a voice though, that's just a tad petty.
Or a simple DDoS flood.
The hope is that you don't transmit any kind of personal information in any identifiable pattern. If you get that much right, it can be exceptionally effective.
Disclosure: me and my friends used to DOS self-hosted inboxes like this
- a civil statute, not criminal
- reported/enforced by private individuals/entities, not the state government
I suspect the law was crafted specifically to deny the possibility for the government to operate such a site, and that this was the “one weird trick” used to get around the Roe precedent, at least for 5 of the justices. I’m not totally confident in that, so I’d appreciate learning if I’m wrong.
Consumer have the right to use or not use said service.
Been this way for centuries.
I agree we are ruled by corporations, but this isn't an example of that problem.
This wouldn’t necessarily have been something they’d know about up front. The group presumably didn’t write them an email on signing up saying “yeah, we’ll be violating your ToS”.
Israel has something like this with "kosher" phones.[1] One man determines who the ultra-orthodox are allowed to call.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-one-ultra-o...
Godaddy isn't by any means a monopoly. The barrier of entry into hosting DNS is trivial. I don't see the problem.
Not saying Godaddy is right or wrong here. Just that this is a slippery slope.
Maybe you meant the case where the company uses the exact same legal argument to later ban something you support? But this does not mean you must be a hypocrite, because the company might well employ it in error. Or you might have objected to already the first time it was stated because it was overly broad. Clearly hypocrisy does not follow automatically in the general case.
And this is no more a slippery slope than that which you stand on whenever you do any moral judgment. The real problem that godaddy's action calls attention to is rather the arbitrary selectivness by which companies enforce their terms of service.
When you rely on subjective standards, you risk very bad outcomes if you have a bad actor making those subjective judgements.
It's perfectly reasonable to have concerns over handing over the governance of online life to companies which are not democratically accountable, especially in an era of increasing consolidation in the technology space.
But what about AWS? Or data centers? What if banks and farms and electric companies start doing this? That's where this is going. Companies taking political or ideological approaches is becoming normalized, and if infrastructure follows suit, we are in serious trouble. Godaddy is uncomfortably close to this.
The private platform argument applies here as well. The payment providers can refuse to do business with anyone or any individual. Even for political or ideological reasons. Just look at the outrage [0].
The whole point is that, this can happen to anyone.
This spills over into the larger community in strange ways. In Brooklyn, there is strong opposition to bike lanes through ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. Bike lanes encourage people to ride through in scandalous form-fitting outfits.
This is no different from Cloudflare shutting down 8ch or AWS deciding not to host you anymore. We’ve been saying for years that we’re over-centralizing our internet infrastructure and that just a few bad actors have outsized influence on what can remain hosted and what they want to pull the plug on. If anything, this is good because companies might finally wake up and realize self-hosting is in their own best interests.
Just look at what happened to youtube-dl. [0] The private platform argument applies here too, also defeating the decentralised purpose of Git. Had they self-hosted with their own GitLab instance, this wouldn't have happened.
Self-hosting was done years ago is the way to over-come this. Now anyone can get their website, business terminated by any of these companies by anyone who seems to not like your website. (Even if they try to bring it down themselves.)
So one vocal minority with outsized power ("Texas right to life") is upset that an even smaller minority (a single hosting company!) is giving them the boot? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
And how is this a bad thing? This is the free market! Doesn't GoDaddy have the right to decide who they host?
So like, if you sell web hosting on servers in your basement and one of them ends up being the most popular page on the white supremacist webring, you're totally ok with the government saying you have no right to cancel that account?
I think it should be fairly simple to draw a common-sense distinction between small business and the tech-giants which gate keep the internet. If you are not allowed to host your site on the server in my basement, nobody is going out of business because of that. If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
To counter your analogy, if I am the CEO of one of the largest mobile carriers in the country, and I believe you hold unacceptable opinions, should I be able to deny you access to my network and prevent you from making phone calls?
> If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.
...I contend that this is ridiculous. I work for a company that doesn't use any of these services, I know of many companies not using these services, and in fact I'd say most of the companies using these services really don't need them because they'll never scale large enough to make them worthwhile, it's just that it's currently the fad of our industry.
There were 2 things in the Texas abortion thing that reminds me of my country past
1 make abortion illegal and force people in doing risky procedures
2 a system where you can't trust anyone , you could get snitched on, even false accusations that could destroy your life.
So the 2 things combined did the job, individually would not have worked, and Texas has a reputation that I will not be surprised of weird things happening there.
This issue (and especially this particular implementation of law) even be elevated to a political issue. We should keep this on the same page as GoDaddy throwing out a terrorist organization. It’s an issue that doesn’t even have two sides to it.
What would you say to the charge that recruiting for terrorist organizations is actually illegal, and that the Texas laws were created legally by democratically elected officials?
Surely there is some daylight between the 2.
There are certainly shades of gray all over but I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
> actually illegal
The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
Democratically elected officials creating laws without public support is sometimes necessary (e.g for budgetary reasons, environmental reasons or similar). Doing it in this situation isn’t that.
>I also don’t think anything can be excused as morally acceptable because it’s decided democratically.
Wasn't asserted.
>The thing though is that abortions are now in that category too!
The website is not providing illegal abortions. Or else sadly goDaddy would probably be required by law to take it down.
Anyways, I've learned from other comments that these laws are so broad that even activism supporting the right to abortion can be deemed illegal. So inadvertently you might've made a point if that proves true.
This whole episode is inexcusable, and it's about time "big tech" made a stand and stopped participating in activities that are morally vile.
I will continue to be a paying customer of GoDaddy as a result.
How would you explain to a Nihilist that your morals are superior to the morals of those you consider reprehensible?
This made me think; thanks. :)
I'm not arguing that a discussion with an entrenched Nihilist has much chance to have value, but since I'm not a Nihilist I see value in that discussion, even when it was a lost cause.
Reality here is that godaddy gave an unreasonably small time window for a site shutdown, simply because of their fear of the backslash from the public causing PR damage hence revenue loss.
The problem is certain groups want to have their cake and eat it too. There is no consistency.
Should a business be "moral less" and allow all behavior?
The idea that we should embrace cold, profit-only business entities is much more reprehensible to me.
It seems to me that nobody on either side wants to tolerate freedom of speech. When you see something you don't like, the answer is tolerance, not "This person/thing/company" should go away and never come back. I'm just starting to see it far too often where something gets "cancelled" because it makes some subset of people uncomfortable. Inevitably the pendulum will swing the other way, and those who engage in this kind of activity aren't going to like the precedent they've set.
this isn’t really slippery slope, there are so many red flags here
https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en
For those that don't want to go to twitter:
`the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"`
I don't want to add a ton of exposition to this, but I also don't want this to be a reddit-level comment where I just link to something and bounce so I will add that clearly someone doing something because it is moral and just like hampering the collection of abortion bounties is better than someone doing something immoral and unjust like hampering access to abortions.
It isn't about what I agree and disagree with, it's about what's actually right and wrong.
The Aztecs had no problem sacrificing people, and many sought it out (it's theorized) given that it guaranteed you a place next to the sun and thus in paradise, eternally drunk.
Extremists even today believe in a paradise-after-death if they sacrifice themselves for god. To a lesser extent, self-flagellation (whipping oneself for religious purposes) is still prevalent in many cultures and sects of e.g. Christianity/Catholocism today.
"Right" and "wrong" change over time, and with culture. Thus they are subjective - there is no objective "right" and "wrong". In this sense, your last sentence relates two identical things - what you might agree with and disagree with are your own perception of "right" and "wrong".
It's a somewhat flawed and (in my opinion) dangerous way of thinking about social interaction and morality.
---
E: Because I know this will be mis-interpreted, let me be clear: the website in question is, in my opinion, abhorrent - but I think it's dangerous to celebrate a large company taking it down on the grounds of morality. I understand it was taken down as it specifically violated a pre-existing clause in their ToS which makes it make sense in this case. But to say that this is a great thing and we should do this for people that are "wrong" is beginning down a path that nobody really wants.
You're incorrect about right and wrong changing over time. Even with that information though, it doesn't matter for what I said to still be correct both CURRENTLY (which fits your incorrect ideas of morality) and more broadly.
Care to elaborate?
They have been well marketed for years. If someone wants a website, they think goDaddy. Most people cannot deal with the concept of domain name registrars and http servers. They want a one stop shop, pay several dollars to a year, have a web site, and then forget about the whole thing.
https://archive.org/details/whenabortionwasc00reag_0
We are more regressive in this way that people from the 19th century. Great.
Imagine if GoDaddy was owned by a Trump buddy, like the 'Pillow Guy', and they were shutting down a website that helped sexually assaulted women find abortion clinics.
How would one's concern about the original situation apply in that situation?
I would say Section 230 is a decent bandaid solution but is the opposite of 'neutrality' and we likely need close scrutiny with respect to these things.
We don't want Verizon inspecting our packets willy nilly and blocking traffic depending on who we might vote for, clearly at the 'network' level the motion for 'neutrality' is most obvious. Section 230 defines the domain "interactive computer service" , so it's not at all clear which tranches of technology fall under this.
But 'hosting' and 'social networks', 'blogging + comments' are different, they are not arbitrary distinctions, and it'd be better if there were more clarity and better boundaries around what kinds of things they can 'moderate' etc..
Section 230 probably applies very well to those platforms that host and manage or publish content, like Social Networks, but maybe not so much the GoDaddy's, Amazon's and VISA's of the world.
Obviously a fetus, like any other human at any age, has an absolute right to life. This right is not subject to the approval of the mother. It is arguably less strong than the right to life of a postnatal child due to the presumably more limited nature of the fetus's subjective experience, but if you think there is a moral difference between killing a newborn baby and killing a fetus a day before it is due, the forces that hold you in that position probably have more to do with cultural commitments than reason.
Nature puts two individuals' most fundamental, absolute rights into conflict with one another. It's a tragedy. At the moment, the least worst resolution available to us is to try to find the line before which the mother's right to bodily self-determination outweighs the fetus's right to life. This is an impossible task, because it's impossible to know the subjective experience of another sentient being.
Virtually everyone in the modern US responds to this situation by favoring either the mother or the fetus and discounting or outright denying the rights of the other party. I think it's time for us to move past that and seek to remove the rights conflict by developing technology that allows women to choose to end their pregnancies, without also ending the lives of their fetuses.
I mostly talk to liberals, and most of them push back on this idea at first. I point out to them that replacing abortion with access to technology and services that make it possible for women to end their pregnancies without killing the fetuses inside them would take much of the wind out of the sails of the American right. I also point out that, politics aside, it would actually be morally preferable to universal access to abortion, because it would not require killing fetuses, which actually do have a right to life.
Finally, I point out that liberals are unlikely to win the abortion issue in any other way. Their opponents aren't just going to get old and die. Young people choose to be pro-life all the time. This is because fetuses actually do have a right to life.
This isn't an issue in most countries
As to one bureaucratic choice or another, we've had enough turnover in the White House in the internet era that "the last guy broke this" doesn't really cut it. New executives can always issue new executive orders. It's just whether they want to bother or not.
It is not.
https://www.francepaternite.com/est-il-legal-de-realiser-un-...
So the reason why it is illegal to provide the test is medical data protection. France is really high on this, the restrictions on processing medical data like diabetes, asthma are probably the strictest in europe - probably for historical/cultural reasons, but i'm not sure and only have circumstential evidence of this (and btw, with the americanisation/globalisation of french society, those cultural reasons will disapear).
The genitical data are even more protected.
And by the way, for us (or at least for people from brittany, i don't know that much people elsewhere), being a father or a grandfather is'nt a genetical thing. The man who share 1/4 of my genes with i call Warren, the one who raised my father and me i used to call grandfather (well, more endearingly than that)
The SJW Technofascists & Qui say:
- We can force you to make a wedding cake for gay people even though you religiously disagree with it
- We can also take your website offline because we disagree with.
In the same way a factory owner is "forced" to comply with OSHA lest they be in legal peril, you cannot discriminate against a protected group without putting yourself in legal peril. Your freedom comes in the form of opting out of activities that put you in that position, if you cannot help but discriminate against those in protected groups due to your religious beliefs then you should take up a profession where that's no longer an issue for you.
If aforementioned factory owner was unwilling to follow OSHA guidences due to a deeply held personal belief then I think it's a much better outcome they see punishment for that until they opt out of that profession than for us to change the law to allow it.
Making a cake is a one-time interaction. Sexual orientation is similar to race in the respect of expected protections from discrimination. Apply the same wedding cake refusal for racial reasons and it's obvious this is discrimination.
On the other hand, being a domain registrar means a continued involvement in the act being discussed- running this website. GoDaddy are not just selling a one time transaction, they're an active, paid participant. They're service must continue to exist for the website to work, so long as they are the registrar.
And what the website is doing is not protected by law.
What really decides these things though is that GoDaddy needs to answer to their shareholders. How many customers will leave if they choose not to do business with this website? How many customers will leave if they do continue to do business with this website?
In the end, it always comes down to money.
It was specifically using their creative arts to contribute to the wedding that the owner refused to do.
This issue (specifically the issue of the law that Texas passed) has zero place in our society. None, whatsoever. No matter if you're for or against abortion. It is a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights (including our rights to freedom of speech) because it criminalizes anything relating to 'aiding and abetting' abortions. Section 171.208 of the bill HB1515 implies that you could be drawn into a civil lawsuit for simply suggesting or posting about abortions. This site was created explicitly for that purpose: to gather information about people whom violated that section of the law so that they can be sued in court.
I shouldn't need to mention the extreme chilling effect this has not only on abortions but on speech relating to abortions as well. This site (and by extension this law) I repeat can not and should not be tolerated in any way, shape or form.
In other words roe v wade is the law of the land, so they make a law that’s clearly in violation of it, but with a novel enforcement mechanism. Now the issue is challenging this in court, which is strange and weird because of the enforcement mechanism.
Put another way, let’s say California passes a law banning the purchasing of guns, but enforces that law by allowing neighbors to bring suit and shielding defendants from collecting legal fees if they prevail.
You can pretty much use this technique for anything if it’s allowed. Basically it’s opening a legal Pandora’s box.
I don't see how they can reasonably claim they are not involved with enforcement.
Part of me wonders if they were inspired by the Obama care rulings. Basically the enforcement mechanism was taken away, so removing the law was seen as moot, however the plaintiffs wanted to see Obamacare dismantled. The truth is even without enforcement people use it voluntarily.
It’s sort of like a twisted revenge to use the same concept, but in such a new and nefarious way.
In the mean time, a very obvious route to create chaos has been opened up for any state government of any political inclination that wants to deter any constitutionally-protected behaviour whatsoever ...
Yeah, it's the reasonableness standard that doesn't seem to fly. I mean I get that they're making a claim about who's enforcing, but all of these people declaring that the claim creates some grand legal crisis is what I'm not getting. It just seems so patently clear what's going on here that the claim is absurd on its face.
I assume part of the reason for blowing it up though, is that it is such an egregious violation that even the attempt should be characterized as serious and dangerous.
>on the constitutionality of the law until a case has been brought and enforcement attempted.
Yeah this is head exploding. I don't know what the precedent is here, but it seems there's some standard or mechanism for SCOTUS getting involved pre-harm. I mean, if the law legalized murder...
And, at a minimum that's what injunctions are for--avoiding potentially irreparable harms before matters can be fully adjudicated. Denying an abortion is certainly irreparable.
That's why their refusal to grant a stay feels as ominous as it does.
The places your typical American considers exemplars of Social Democracy such as the Scandinavian countries are literally entire nations of Karens. That’s the only way a liberal society can actually function.
People really haven't grasped what this law enables.
You're arguing about Karens, we're arguing about the ability of a State to ban pretty much any constitutionally protected activity they want in a way that prevents citizens from having the ability to sue to block those laws.
Yeah, which is a completely separate conversation.
The biggest problem with this bill isn't that it crowdsources law enforcement, it's that in crowdsourcing law enforcement it provides a novel mechanism for passing laws that can't be preemptively challenged by citizens in front of the Supreme Court.
That is a novel issue. Citizens reporting people to the police, or even citizens collectively attacking, shunning, or boycotting socially unacceptable behaviors is not new. Citizens having standing under the law to sue each other over unconstitutional laws is a new thing.
Cancel culture doesn't give random people standing to claim damages against anyone they want in a courtroom. This law does.
> but it hasn’t enabled anything that wasn’t already a problem.
So California already gave citizens standing to sue each other over owning any gun? It already allowed citizens to sue each other going out in public without a mask? People can be sued by anyone in the state if they go to church and they're not vaccinated? And it removed limits on the number of lawsuits so that citizens could sue the same companies/people multiple times?
Remind me, after Apple refused to decrypt the San Bernadino phone, were they flooded with multiple lawsuits from ordinary citizens that couldn't be dismissed under anti-SLAPP laws, where citizens didn't need to prove standing for the lawsuit, and where Apple was barred from collecting attorney fees even if they won?
People cancelling each other on Twitter, or submitting tips to law enforcement, or even getting people fired over their political beliefs is not the same thing as the Supreme Court signing off on a legal framework for passing unconstitutional laws.
And I'd be surprised if some legislature hasn't already started the process on this. It's more reasonable than the abortion law, because it's about behavior that puts the person bringing the suit into some amount of danger. Any argument that would support the abortion law would support the mask/vaccination law.
We're allowed to care about multiple issues at the same time; you're allowed to be both concerned about Texas and the increased privatization of public infrastructure.
However, it's not really that we're caring about two things at the same time, there hasn't been much discussion about the tech implications of this law -- this law creates a template that can be used to attack tech companies and to sue platform providers. It can be used to bypass constitutional protections about freedom of speech. It can be used to attack constitutionally protected activities like encryption. It's heckin dangerous.
GoDaddy's move may or may not be prudent, but even if we think it's not prudent and that it's not the right thing for them to do -- it's still pretty objectively a much smaller story than the type of censorship that this law enables and the future implications of having the Supreme Court sanction a novel way for States to avoid constitutional scrutiny.
I understand that the abortion angle changes how people are thinking about it, but it's still disappointing to see this happen and GoDaddy being the main thing that people are focusing on. It feels like bikeshedding. What would prevent another state from using this same legal template to ban encryption? If people can't answer that question, maybe the ratio of conversation between GoDaddy and the law itself shouldn't be so skewed.
Again, you're allowed to care about multiple things at the same time, and nobody has to agree with what GoDaddy is doing. But it's kind of silly to say that corporatism is a bigger threat to freedom of speech than actual laws targeting speech.
I think the most egregious thing about the law is that people who sue don't have to pay the defender's fees when they lose. It make it possible to DDOS defendents.
Deputizing the citizenry is also bad, and I'd like to see that struck down as well... but it's not the first time we've seen it either. Technically, this is somewhat similar to how the ADA works too (it does work a little differently though in that not everybody can be deputized). And I'm sure most have heard of good things happening because of the ADA, as well as bad things when people abuse the system. We are going to have to consider pretty carefully what we want instead here.
I'm still worried about companies making political decisions that affect so many people... but yeah, the government scares me even more.
Hope you have an awesome day.