Conversely, if you’re prohibited from censoring on something you own, a means of your free expression has actually been limited. This is not a simple thing, and

Conversely, if you’re prohibited from censoring on something you own, a means of your free expression has actually been limited. This is not a simple thing, and people who would have you believe that there is a single dogmatic “always right” answer are either naive or selling you something. Sometimes censorship is terrible, sometimes it’s acceptable, and most of the time it’s just complicated. I would support YouTube censoring a channel of child pornography, be against censoring a channel teaching people how to make hummus, and conflicted if they censor a channel showing people how to load custom shotgun shells. At the end of the day though, a video being downed from a private service doesn’t make it go away, for better or worse. It does make it harder for the average goon to find, unless they’re strongly motivated in which case they still find it. The ability of a private service, however large, to choose what the host also strikes me as reasonable, just as I have a choice to use them or not. We have a right to freedom of expression, not convenience of expression; it sort of feels like people arguing that 20 years ago, everyone should have had the right to get Simon & Schuster to publish their book, or they were being censored. The same facile arguments about “sort of a monopoly” could have been applied then, and they would have been ridiculous then too. So instead of a good debate we’re stuck with either slippery slope arguments which ignore the history of all countries other than the US, or dishonest arguments about the definition monopoly.