> It should be impossible to remove someone from banking, PayPal, Shopify, social media, etc.
As a freelancer I can choose my clients. I would hate to live in a world where a bad client could force me to continue to work with them unless they broke the law.
[Citation Needed].
Straight up, a singular company having control over something was well established at the time of the First Amendment.
1. "Monopoly" is a greek word which was used to describe a company that had a monopoly in Greece. This long pre-dates the first amendment.
2. Kings routinely gave out exclusivity of a product to a company, this is the whole backstory on the Tea Act [1].
3. Being denied access to something isn't a new concept. They could've written the first 10 amendments to address private citizens and choose not to. It's not like private citizens didn't try to surpress speech.
Times are not new. Technology is new. Every problem is old.
The few hundred corporations that existed by 1800 were chartered by individual states, couldn't do business outside that state, weren't allowed to participate in the political process, and couldn't buy stock in other corporations.
During and after the civil war is when "modern" corporations started to show. They made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. They lobbied and bribed their way to more relaxed laws that allowed them to accrue even more money and political power, leading to the first Gilded Age.
Then in 1886, the Supreme Court decided that Corporations are People, too[1], and it went downhill from there (except for a brief blip in the 1930s).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....
Utilities lend themselves to monopoly well.
The economy of scale allows one company to efficiently become the only source of that utility for an region.
Meanwhile, the customers of the utility are subject to the dark side of monopoly. Unjustified rate increases or cutting off service for any reason whatsoever.
It makes no sense.
This setup only works well for Power companies, airlines, water, waste, etc. when there are robust regulation around them.
Could you imagine if the power company could cut you off because of your political leanings? or the water company?
It is no different for monopolies on the internet.
Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.
The article mentions disabled company accounts. I'm sure they froze some funds too, which Harr will probably never get back. This is the problem. Capital has all the power & we have no (legal) recourse.
Imagine you get to decide to stop working for a bad client, on whatever terms you want, without warning, and you still keep payment.
ETA: It looks like the shopify account was restored.
The problem is that, due to lack of anti-trust enforcement, we have quasi-utility companies that run commerce. If they have the market position of a utility, they need to be regulated as such.
Certain large internet companies might eventually be considered utilities or common carriers, but I think that this would be a bad thing because it would tend to favor monopolization.
At any rate, no one has or should have a state-enforced right to an account on a particular social media site. It’s silly how fast people jump to comparing Facebook to the electric company.
That's a very bad idea. Because then you have to create a myriad of laws that forbids discrimination on ever growing number of things. It turns ensuring everybody's basic economic freedom into a game of lagging whack-a-mole.
If a business advertises a product or a service to the public with a price they shouldn't be allowed to refuse the product or a service to anybody willing to pay the price.
Besides, how does the first amendment enshrine that?
> how does the first amendment enshrine [the right of association]
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-8-1/ALD...
how can the customer have a right to choose when there is only one option due to [de-facto] monopoly? Or say there are only 2 options and each has deplatformed the customer/user. How the right to choose would work for that customer/user?
Monopoly's right to choose their customers destroys the last remnants of the customers' right to choose (which gets already severly damaged when the monopoly forms).
Also, the whole idea that companies are 'people' and therefore are protected under these constitutional rights is a bullshit concept. It was never the intent of the founders, it was act of corruption of the legal system.
But it is now pretty much settled law that people cannot weaponize their freedom of association to discriminate on these grounds. If you offer a service, you have to provide the service to the classes of people that you could be reasonably expected to serve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States
You can have a "no brunettes" or "no people named Chris" rule and be entirely fine.
That's fine when we're talking about mom-and-pop baptist bakers that don't want to bake your gay wedding cake, or little mastodon instances that don't want Nazis coming in. (An example from both the social left and social right to choose whom they associate with - but that's not what we're debating.)
But when you're dealing with 100M MAUs or daily transaction volumes in the billions, you're no longer a person - you're infrastructure. A public square. And moreover these giant companies are few and they all move in lockstep with one another, which means you have no avenue to turn to when you get removed.
Make all the cakes you want for a limited clientele out of your house.
<s> Of course, I'd like to only rent hotel rooms to the sort of people that I'd like to have as my clients & guests. However, this has been illegal for me to do since 1965. </s>
I’m free to refuse to do business with a company for racial reasons but a company is not feee to refuse to do business with me due to my race.
EDIT: I’m pointing out one of the ways that “free association” for corporations is different than for people.