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We can't realistically expect service providers to completely allow free speech until we learn to separate the speech from the service on which it occurs. Supp
by imgabe 9y ago
We can't realistically expect service providers to completely allow free speech until we learn to separate the speech from the service on which it occurs.
Suppose a bunch of Nazis started frequenting Hacker News and dominated every thread with a discussion of Nazism. The site would pretty quickly become known as "that Nazi place" and everyone who's not a Nazi wouldn't want to go there, even if the people running the site don't share the opinions of the people using it.
It's not entirely rational, but if GoDaddy got a reputation as "web hosting for Nazis" that would severely limit their market and hurt their business, so of course they're going to jettison that customer in order to keep all the others.
- milcron 9y agoWe do have DMCA safe harbor. Is that different from what you're talking about?
- imgabe 9y agoI'm thinking more of an economic consequence, rather than a legal one. Customers boycott businesses all the time for speech they find distasteful. A newscaster uses a racial slur and advertisers threaten to pull sponsorship until he's fired. A company owner endorses a candidate or cause that customers don't like so they vow never to do business with them again, etc. etc. I personally stopped using GoDaddy years ago because of their stance on SOPA. So, why couldn't businesses boycott customers for the same? If someone's speech is so odious that nobody wants to be associated with them, even in a remote, business sense, I think that should be allowed as a reasonable consequence.
- lordlimecat 9y agoHacker News is a content curator. Godaddy is network infrastructure. Imagine if Cisco released an IOS update that allowed ISP routers to automatically detect certain types of hate speech and simply RST the connection. Good, or bad for "free speech"? More directly, good, or bad for everyone?