Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.

Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.

Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.

View on HN

I haven't made up my mind yet on the general topic, or rather, how to realize my personal view on this.

I don't want megacorps to take on the role of a government or law enforcement, but I do think there should be societal obligations and expectations towards corporations to use their property and power in a positive way for society. Current law is the overall minimum boundry, not the goal.

My current thought is, that this is mostly a matter of expectations, not actual change from the current state of things. If actors get away from our expectations, they should not be punished as if they broke a law, but it should prompt us to prepare one so it aligns with our expectations.

Maybe it is more a 'please don't force us to legislate every little thing' wishful thinking stance?

>It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job.

IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments.

Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're exposed to online should be able to censor and deplatform whoever they want for whatever reason they want.

I visit Canadian subreddits and they cheer when our telecom oligopoly censors RT news and unironically ask to "do fox news now!"

What aspect of “private company” do you not understand? No shit they have the power to censor on the platforms they control.

It's perfectly understandable that a private company has the right under the current laws to do that.

But that doesn't mean we can't have the social conversation over whether that's a reality we want to perpetuate. A tiny number of private companies have de facto control over what information the masses get exposed to, and to a lot of people, myself included, that just seems like an incredibly unhealthy state of affairs in the project towards an ever more vibrant civilization. We have the right to talk about it and decide to try to change the law.

So should all platforms be forced to allow any content on their platform?

There is an entire internet where you can get any type of information that suits your world view.

why do we have this thread then, and countless more like it?

no shit, private companies have the power to set the compensation to whatever the fuck they want. end of story

This reply is pretty hilarious when I think about it.

It makes me wonder how much overlap there is between the "private companies can censor who they want" crowd and the "CEO salaries should be capped" crowd.

>What aspect of “private company” do you not understand?

The part where they're given more power than we give the government.

So… you want the government to interfere with the operation of private companies so they are forced to give a platform to people they don’t want to do business with…

Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.

I want the government to interfere with the operation of _specific_ private companies so they're forced to give a platform to everyone because of the sheer amount of traffic and eyeballs they get every single second of every single day. Facebook, Google, and Twitter come to mind first.

IMO they can't be trusted with having more power than the government. They have way too much control over what people consume on the internet.

Yes because the government would never do something like pass laws to punish a corporation because they spoke out against a policy - see Florida vs Disney.

The last thing I want is to give the government more power.

>Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people

But why the fuck not? They hold an insane amount of power over people, directly and indirectly. The way for the people to have some power back over them is through unions. The fact that our entire system is set up to block collective bargaining is a huge artificial asymmetry.

Unfortunately, our judiciary seems okay to uphold spending money as free speech. With elections increasingly expensive and individual, not corporate, liberties and rights being encroached a bit at a time, what can we do but petition the corporations for a change in laws aka corporate policies.

> It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job

They are already doing the government's job by hosting their servers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com