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Ask HN: Do Domain Registrars and Web Hosts Need to Be Treated as Utilities?
Because I've seen a lot of comments about Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and other sites censoring users, and that's certainly worrying.
But I feel what's worse is how domain registrars, hosts and companies like Cloudfront also seem to be doing the same thing. They too seem to buckle under pressure from social media mobs and censors, and seem to be a worse threat to freedom of speech in the process. See what happened to the Daily Stormer with Cloudfront for instance, or how controversial sites often get booted from hosting companies.
There's no argument those are private communities or what not, they're closer to the telephone company refusing service based on political beliefs or a landlord throwing people out for personal disagreements.
So yeah, anyone else think those should be subject to similar laws? Perhaps even have something akin to net neutrality forced on them?
- hluska 9y agoThis one is a slippery slope and I don't know which side I fall on. On one hand, this badly restricts free speech. On the other hand, sometimes the act of simply hosting content can create unintended victims. I was in a similar situation when I published a magazine. We had a fellow come in and offer us big bucks for a full page ad. Unfortunately, the full page ad had some nazi imagery. My partner and I were personally offended by the imagery, but we knew we couldn't only dress ourselves in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when it was convenient for us, or we would lose credibility. In the end, we chose not to take the (business changing) sum of money because we knew that we couldn't possibly survive the backlash we would face from publishing it. It sucked because we were in publishing and no publisher wants to say no to any ad revenue because how do you ever offer any sort of editorial/sales separation again? The sad thing is that, as individuals we agreed that we couldn't turn down the ad without losing credibility. But, we had a fiduciary duty to protect our corporation from a massive backlash, including the real possibility of vandalism (cyber or otherwise) or a massive exodus of paying clients. If we were regulated as a utility, we wouldn't have had to make the decision. But, we also wouldn't have been able to publish 95% of the stuff we published and never would have reached a scale where we had to make those kinds of decisions.