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Well, should the government tell said private company not to kick this person off of their servers, use their bandwidth, etc? That's really what this boils dow

Well, should the government tell said private company not to kick this person off of their servers, use their bandwidth, etc? That's really what this boils down to, as the only "solution" I can think of for this issue is essentially... government regulation. Telling corporations that they have to support things on their platform they necessarily may not want to support, often for business reasons. For instance, take Twitter. Business reports often mention things like a reputation for harassment and trolling as a big concern towards their growth, because a lot of people aren't going to sign up if their user experience is poor. If they think it would be more profitable to "censor" people engaged in harassment or trolling and try to get rid of that reputation, why would they not do so? No different than other forms of "censorship" they try and do (often poorly, I might add) to improve user experience (eg: kicking off spamming bots, putting up restrictions for pornographic or graphic content, kicking off impersonators, preventing private information from being posted, etc.) If they want to kick someone off for heated arguments and curse words, that's their choice too. That doesn't seem like something a profit-oriented large company like Twitter would do, but I've been in forums where moderators would indeed ban people for these sort of reasons and/or remove heated posts before things turned into a shitstorm. As long as there is room for any sort of corporations or organizations with all kinds of content policies, I don't see an issue with this arrangement. If you don't like a place's content policy, you can go elsewhere. To me this certainly is preferred versus a world where a government dictates exactly what content policy everyone should have. There is, I think, an argument to be made that the consolidation of Internet social media and its overwhelming private corporate nature may have the potential to stifle marginal voices by also consolidating content policy. That's the gist I got from the article, and I would agree with the concern. I just don't see a great solution for this concern at the moment without potentially causing something worse.

beaconstudios 9y ago
it only really becomes an issue in my mind when the censoring parties can effectively shut down a company or user entirely. Then you can't really say "go somewhere else", if there isn't somewhere else to go. If successive domain providers (and for smaller domains like .ai, there aren't that many) decide to kick someone from their service, that essentially grants them the ability to shut down companies whose speech they disagree with. The way we treat the internet in modern times, domain registrars are more akin to the water company than a private enterprise because they provide a constrained resource that one simply cannot substitute for something else.

beaconstudios 9y ago

it only really becomes an issue in my mind when the censoring parties can effectively shut down a company or user entirely. Then you can't really say "go somewhere else", if there isn't somewhere else to go. If successive domain providers (and for smaller domains like .ai, there aren't that many) decide to kick someone from their service, that essentially grants them the ability to shut down companies whose speech they disagree with. The way we treat the internet in modern times, domain registrars are more akin to the water company than a private enterprise because they provide a constrained resource that one simply cannot substitute for something else.