I know this is a heated topic but I really don’t understand what the other options are. Having businesses dictate who they want to serve seems like censorship but having the government dictate it seems way worse. I’m not sure how to decouple or balance the freedom of will as a business, freedom of will as a person and the societal mandate of the majority (which is how democracy works? It’s always about the majority values).
The problem is these companies are too big and powerful now. If a small business refuses someone its no big deal, go to another business. But when these titans join together to make an action that affects you and there are no alternatives left, thats a different case.
If both Apple and Google ban your app when the app is legal and useful, is it good for society that there is no way around this?
They also care about squashing competition which prevents many apps like real web browsers, game streaming and alternative stores which can not pay the 30% fee.
IMO its fair for the app store to remove whatever it wants but there needs to be an escape hatch where apps blocked by apple can be manually installed. Since the API apps have access to is secure, this should not be a significant issue.
Apps like Parlor may be full of ToS violating content but users should still be able to sideload the app and the government should be the one to shut them down if the content is illegal.
And what do you do when your webhost becomes your moderator and deplatforms your site, on the exact same day?
We can take this all the way to fabricating wires to build computers to make our own servers; at some point we have to discuss the actual issue: where to private and public rights intersect and what is the role of government in resolving the conflict.
If the web browser was actually a replacement for apps there would be no apps in the app store because it would be easier and far cheaper to run a website.
An unrestricted democracy can be exactly that. But hopefully, a country has sufficient guardrails in its constitution to prevent it from becoming a mob rule.
> Having businesses dictate who they want to serve seems like censorship but having the government dictate it seems way worse.
Leaving B2B aside, for B2C it is basic consumer protection laws common in EU. If a service is offered to a general public, then provider may not arbitrarily exclude someone from using it. If a provider excludes someone for violating ToS, then the excluded one may dispute that at appropriate authority / state office.
Surely there is a middle ground: let businesses operate how they please so long as they follow the law, and have the law require them to act in a way which is considered reasonable. If you’re a business trying to sell something then you are required to be somewhat honest in how you represent the thing, especially if you are selling some kind of food. If you’re a bank then you are required to be fair to a certain extent in how you choose the customers you serve and what services you offer them.
I don’t see why a business that presents itself as a quasi-public space that is generally open to all at no cost should not have some duty to be faithful to the way it represents itself and to treat its users fairly.
> Surely there is a middle ground: let businesses operate how they please so long as they follow the law, and have the law require them to act in a way which is considered reasonable.
A lot of people would argue that is the situation we have now.
The government wasn't against twitter because they were looking like they were going to remove right wing stuff, they were angry because they were being fact checked.
If we are going to attribute emotions to governments, my bet would be fear. Political leaders and political parties rely on multiple international companies to handle daily operations, and the risk that they could be cut out at any time is being demonstrated.
People can try to convince politicians that there is no risk and that only obvious bad people will be targeted.
No freedom is absolute. As a society, we choose where to draw the line for the common good. We can choose to make whatever laws we want to regulate business and technology. Indeed, we already have made many, many of them.
Tech benefited enormously from moving fast and being mostly unregulated as a result. Looking at the finance industry though, every new law was written in blood or tears over the course of centuries. Now blood has been spilled by social media in the US Capitol and the world has taken notice.
It's not going to be easy or fast, but good policy can help keep Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg from controlling the political outcomes of every democracy in the world.
We have other more democratic models of handling this in distributed social networks that aren't under centralised corporate control. Email, telephone system, Mastodon... Federation and regulated platforms, and some other ways of organisation let you have localised systems of censorship that aren't all-powerful in the network.
It doesn't have to be a system where the government can pick and choose who they want to ban/keep, but rather a system where businesses must go through a legal government process to ban someone themselves. That platforms need to be held to the same freedom of speech standards the US government is held to.
No, just have certain businesses operate just like utility providers do which means they can't decide who they provide service too as long as it's within their service area.
You local electrical company probably can't shut off the power even to a meth lab as long as they are paying their bills, and even if they do not you are usually required to go through a rigorous process before you can take action.
This isn't really about freedom of will, this is about the bottom line and companies trying to score cheap points. If it was pretty darn clear that no amount of pressure that does not go through the courts could make Amazon or Twilio cancel Parler there wouldn't be as much noise about it.
There's a reason why no one is tweeting at the power or water companies to cut off their services to the Trump campaign, it's not because there aren't people that would like to see that happening, but because even the most deranged of them know that it cannot happen.
You already have precedence for this, back when corporate towns were a thing that's where the public square concept emerged despite the entire town technically being corporate property it was deemed that people cannot be silenced on the streets or in the town square.
The issue here is that the Internet isn't treated as a public square but as solely corporate property and yes sadly without a bunch of corporations the internet doesn't actually exists.
You cannot get to the point that you need to essentially become a global Tier 1 ISP before you can put on a service that does not break any laws but that would essentially be immune to being canceled, and if you want to monetize it you probably need to become major payment processor if not an an acquiring and and issuing bank too because as we've seen in the past PayPal/PCI can easily prevent you from taking any payments.
We do not have an open and distributed network a handful of companies can block any content they want at any time, TOR, VPN's or anything else won't save you and won't help you your ISP can block anything it wants with a single line in a config file and if it's not on Google it might as well not be accessible.
Your hosting options today are rather limited especially for a platform that needs to have a global reach and that you couldn't take down with a single 5G connection.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a tiny handful of others are the only ones who can provide you with that infrastructure, if you are going with a smaller or more traditional hosting provider then there are only a handful of CDNs that can provide you with content distribution and DDOS protection/mitigation services.
If you want to grant companies the same freedom you grant to people when it comes to making decisions you need an actual free market for that, but globally the internet isn't a free market and no one can make the argument that it is free yet alone a free market when in order to provide a legal service (regardless of how distasteful it is) without any of the existing market players being able to completely shut you down you have to build a Bank of America, a Visa,a DeepOcean and a Cloudflare first.
add political views into the list of non-discrimination laws and let the courts decide, if it's important enough to have to be legislated, that's the closes framework upon which to model it.
It is, if the government bans fact checking because they don't like it, then that IS the government dictating something.
This last year SHOULD be a warning on why government control is a bad plan, do you want each government just outright banning stuff from the other side?
