>On Sunday, July 10, KrebsOnSecurity contacted Psychz Networks, a hosting provider in Los Angeles, to see if they were aware that they were the sole Internet lifeline for 8kun et. al. Psychz confirmed that in response to a report from KrebsOnSecurity, VanwaTech was removed from its network around the time of the Jan. 6 hearing on Tuesday.
So, he called and asked something to the effect of, "Hey, did you know that you're the only provider for 8kun? Any comment for my report?" and we're to take that as Krebs "[deciding] that political speech is a security threat to the Internet, and he is actively working to further the censorship"?
I'm not quite sure that I can make that leap as easily as you can.
So to me it appears that Krebs is working against Internet freedom.
Also, I have never visited any 8kun sites or consumed any of their content. I have no stake in their existence, but I believe that they should be allowed to exist. If crimes have been committed by people using their service, the criminals should be dealt with and afforded due process according to the law, instead of removing the entire platform.
>So to me it appears that Krebs is working against Internet freedom.
No, it appears that Krebs called up and asked if Psychz Networks knew what they were hosting. Psychz looked into it and decided, "Oh, we didn't know and we'd rather not host this, and it's within the terms for us to pull the plug, so we're pulling the plug."
Psychz could've just as easily told him to go kick rocks and kept it online. In that regard, Krebs is only indirectly responsible for the outage despite his statement otherwise. Your ire should be directed towards Psychz.
>Also, I have never visited any 8kun sites or consumed any of their content.
If you've spent any chunk of your time on the internet, or paid attention to the news, for the past five or six years, you have absolutely "consumed their content", in that it has trickled it's way down to you in one form of another.
>I have no stake in their existence, but I believe that they should be allowed to exist. If crimes have been committed by people using their service, the criminals should be dealt with and afforded due process according to the law, instead of removing the entire platform.
Sure. But just as the moderators of 8kun patrol their platform for content they don't want on it, hosting providers are under no obligation to host content they don't want to host. All Psychz did here was exercise their own free speech. C'est la vie.
> Grace Marsh, a Jehovah's Witness, attempted to distribute religious literature on the sidewalk near a post office in Chickasaw, Alabama. The Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation owned Chickasaw, Alabama in its entirety as a company town. Marsh was convicted of criminal trespass. Appealing her conviction, Marsh argued that the state law violated the First Amendment.
[snip]
> In an opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black, the majority ruled in Marsh’s favor. The Court reasoned that a company town does not have the same rights as a private homeowner in preventing unwanted religious expression. While the town was owned by a private entity, it was open for use by the public, who are entitled to the freedoms of speech and religion. The Court employed a balancing test, weighing Chickasaw’s private property rights against Marsh’s right to free speech. The Court stressed that conflicts between property rights and constitutional rights should typically be resolved in favor of the latter.
And, because Silicon Valley is in California:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
> A state can prohibit the private owner of a shopping center from using state trespass law to exclude peaceful expressive activity in the open areas of the shopping center.
Also, I was responding to a blanket assertion that you have no constitutional rights in a private forum. A company town is a private forum.
Yes, but much more narrowly than you're trying to apply it.
Subsequent decisions made clear internet services are not the same as company towns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
> The Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable today because of the disappearance of company towns from the United States, but it was raised in a somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996).[1] Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a such a degree that constitutional free speech protections could be applied. The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level.
The ruling makes clear a company town is not a private forum. One thing that separates that company town or shopping mall from say a private resort is the requirements for access. Cruse ships, aircraft, etc default deny entry making them less public spaces.
Beyond that, a private home can deny access based on skin color while a bed and breakfast can’t. That same bed and breakfast could however deny access because a customer is rude.
But your own stuff explicitly stated that the courts did not deem it a private forum but was a public form.
Websites are not the same thing, so yes a website is still a private forum and therefore not in violation of 1A.
1. The speech being conducted was agreed by everybody to not be disruptive.
2. It was agreed by all parties that no one could confuse the speech of the protesters with the speech of the shopping center.
For social media concerns, these two facts do not describe the actual situation, and so Pruneyard is not appropriate precedent.
While I do not doubt that some of the discussions were legitimate political speech, it sounds like there was a lot more going on.
However, in the same vein, if you want to host said Nazi pride event and need to find private companies and businesses to provide catering and other services, they all legally have the right to tell you to fuck off, and if that means you can't find ANY services, then that's too bad for you, stop being such an insufferable prick.
The right of assembly is essentially codifying "if you are a cunt then nobody will want to deal with you" into law. We've had to work around it in some cases, because sometimes people treat things like skin color and gender and other horrible things as a proxy for "cunt", but explicitly exclusionary and violent ideology is not a protected class.
Substitute 'Nazi pride' (whatever the hell that actually means) with 'being black' and tell me you still support this. Go ahead. I dare you. Public accommodation laws exist for precisely this reason, and I'm not at all convinced they shouldn't be applied more broadly.
> The right of assembly is essentially codifying "if you are a cunt then nobody will want to deal with you" into law.
If you're not being a cunt to at least somebody then you're probably not saying or doing anything of consequence. Once upon a time it was legal to own other human beings until someone started being a cunt about it. Sometimes that's exactly what the doctor ordered.
> explicitly exclusionary and violent ideology is not a protected class
So, just to be clear: When certain parties on Twitter start spewing generalities about "all white males"... they should be deplatformed, right?
I mean, the difference is right there: one is an ideology, while the other is a state of being. Being a Nazi is a choice; being black is not. Seems pretty reasonable to me to say you can turn people away based on their convictions, but not their immutable characteristics.