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Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

It’s not lawyerly nitpicking. The US has a tradition in rule of law, and it’s a social convention that applies broadly.

YouTube, in their statement, is pretending they have an objective standard that is fairly applied to everyone. In reality, there is no uniform standard. They ban people when business interests dictate it.

So their policy reads as “we have an objective standard,” but reality is “we ban when we feel like it.”

YouTube could fix this contradiction by changing their policy to something like “we will ban creators for any reason, at our discretion.”

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>The US has a tradition in rule of law, and it’s a social convention that applies broadly.

???

You are conflating all the different legal systems of the US. US criminal law is the one of beyond reasonable doubt. US civil law on the other hand is an entire other bag of worms and 'potential' contractual obligations. On top of that private property has a pretty massive leeway in reasons you can ban people from said properties. There is no contradiction here. "Fuck you, your tie sucks" is a completely valid reason to remove you from their private property. Said person being a dick to others is what is typically considered an exceptionally valid reason to remove them from the property.

If we want to follow a broad social convention, then it is be nice to others, how about that for a start?

If the policy is “Fuck you, your tie sucks”, then that should be written into the policy.

YouTube’s policy does not say “Fuck your, your tie sucks.” They say they remove people for harm to users. But there are many creators who harm users who are not being removed. So that is not the policy.

They can easily fixing this by changing the policy to “fuck you, your tie sucks” or “we ban for any reason at our discretion.”

Until they make that change, it’s perfectly fair to point out the contradiction.

>then that should be written into the policy.

Please feel free to take them to civil court and get the mto change it.

Now, I'm not one for this entire "corporations are people too" thing we have going on in the US, but trying to call Google out for this in particular when the courts have sided with businesses freedom of association until it becomes a civil rights violation in the vast majority of cases. You can point out it as much as you like, but it's mostly a waste of your time until you start championing for 'consumer rights'.

The only court that can coerce YouTube to change its policies is here... public opinion.

Well if you're looking to get a groundswell of people to get together and push Google to change... this is probably not the case you want to champion.

> They can easily fixing this by changing the policy to ... “we ban for any reason at our discretion.”

What makes you think that isn't already in their ToS?

Pretty much a staple of US law is "We withhold the right to refuse service to anyone". There are only a few preconditions (civil rights for example) that are exceptions to this rule.

> It’s not lawyerly nitpicking. The US has a tradition in rule of law, and it’s a social convention that applies broadly.

I think this is pretty much objectively false.

Cops are constantly accused of uneven policing.

Court routinely give lighter sentences for the same crime to different demographics.

Sports are not ruled by the rulebook.

Pretty much every business uses a super vague ToS that do not define concrete rules.

Did you give your kids the Codes of Marcell that they have to abide by? With everything they have to abide by?

Society runs off "at our discretion".

> In reality, there is no uniform standard.

> They ban people when business interests dictate it.

That is the standard. They're a private company. They're offering free services to content creators to host their content. In exchange for an ad partnership and revenue.

But YouTube/Google is the company, and for them this is a business. If they think hosting someone is bad for business they can stop hosting them.

How is it everyone here is so pro-Liberty yet fails to understand that the Libertarian position is that YouTube and the people that run it are free to host or promote whatever content they want that makes them money (as long as it's not against the law), and they can choose to not.

Brand is free to take his content somewhere else.

He is not entitled to YouTube's hosting privileges, and they're not entitled to him hosting his content there.

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