Yes. Tech VCs hate to hear it, but things like Facebook are really pieces of telecommunication infrastructure, and they have a moral duty to carry their users'

Yes. Tech VCs hate to hear it, but things like Facebook are really pieces of telecommunication infrastructure, and they have a moral duty to carry their users' communications reliably and without interference, regardless of their opinion of those communications. Google's Android store is slightly different, but this applies equally to many of Google's enterprises too. Something has to give. Ideally it would be the CFAA and copyright synergy that makes online incumbents virtually impossible to beat (right now, the oft-cited "network effect" has little to do with the difficulty of competing with a major player, as there are much more significant legal barriers at play). ---- Reply to sibling comment from majormajor which I typed up but am not allowed to post: "Because Walmart isn't sitting in your pantry and throwing non-Walmart items off your shelves. Google is doing the digital equivalent of this on Android devices." Posting this here because HN classifies content critical of running database clusters on Kubernetes as a "flame war". Correspondingly, they throttled my account for holding a professional, calm, and even-handed discussion on that subject, and I can't post replies any more for some hours. The thread that got me throttled can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 ; judge for yourselves whether this constitutes a "flame war". Really kind of appropriate to hit this issue in a thread about lumbering tech monoliths abusing their control over user attention. --- Triple-edit: it's interesting that comments that point out HN's censorship tank so quickly. Is the intent to get the score so low that they can "flag" it off the page and keep it safe from other readers' attention? You wouldn't think HN would do that, but then, you wouldn't think they'd limit an account for expressing skepticism over Kubernetes either...