5 ms·

>People are quick to point out that First Ammendment doesn't apply, but Freedom of Speech isn't just that, it's the principle - "I disapprove of what you say, b

>People are quick to point out that First Ammendment doesn't apply, but Freedom of Speech isn't just that, it's the principle - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". I'm sorry, if I'm paying for hosting and you come to a page I run and start saying stuff I don't care for yeahhhh I'm removing it. That's my right. It's not a public venue, domain names are usually handled as real-property as far as taxation and hosting fees are a real thing. If you come into my house and start spouting stuff I don't approve of, I'm showing you the door. I'm all for free speech, and being allowed to support who and what you believe in but not on any given website. If you use a website, you have to play by the owner's rules. If you don't want to do that, go make your own... it's pretty easy and affordable.

ameister14 8y ago
As I've pointed out elsewhere, this argument implies ownership and content control beyond what we've traditionally held forum owners/operators responsible for. By claiming such control, do you think forum owners should be liable for the content posted on their websites?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > As I've pointed out elsewhere, this argument implies ownership and content control beyond what we've traditionally held forum owners/operators responsible for. This is false, and appears based on both narrowing consideration of accountability mechanisms to legal mechanisms and a faulty understanding of the reason for certain online exceptions to the general traditional legal liability of publishers, which is not lack of responsibility (otherwise they would apply to publishers more generally) but balancing of social costs/benefits of imposing legal liability.
  - ameister14 8y ago
    >a faulty understanding of the reason for certain online exceptions to the general traditional legal liability of publishers, which is not lack of responsibility (otherwise they would apply to publishers more generally) Are you saying that they aren't exempted from responsibility because they are not responsible, but because it's better that they not be held responsible? Why would they apply to publishers more generally if it was about lack of responsibility? If you recall the decisions about the Communications Decency Act, it states that - "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This means that people that own or operate forums are not treated as publishers of the content on forums, and removes the responsibilities of being such a publisher. The act was passed in part because providers said it was injurious to force them to regulate all content - they shouldn't be responsible because they couldn't regulate content without massive cost. Now you're saying that they should regulate all content - ok, but if that's the case then they should be treated as publishers of said content, since they can decide on a case-by-case basis what is and is not published on their platform.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Are you saying that they aren't exempted from responsibility because they are not responsible, but because it's better that they not be held responsible? No. I'm saying: (1) They aren't exempted from responsibility, full stop. Site owners and operators manifestly are held accountable for content by a variety of social mechanisms independent of legal liability; you are incorrect to equate responsibility or accountability with legal liability, which is a very small subset of accountability, and that alone, without any other errors, would be a fatal flaw in your argument. (2) Also, yes, they aren't given the exemptions that apply to similarly situated parties in other media because the internet is fundamentally different mechanically or in ethical situation in a way which changes the ethical responsibilities of people actively deploying resources to selectively relay content, but because (in the somewhat idealistic view) because the perceived benefits of imposing the usual legal liability were viewed as less than the perceived collateral costs in economic development of freeing site operators from legal liability for user-supplied content with certain limitations, or (in the view more in tune with the realities of lawmaking) because the cost of buying off the objections of a set of big money internet interests with a liability exemption was viewed as outweighed by the benefits of imposing the sweeping obscenity and indecency controls they were packaged with. > Now you're saying that they should regulate all content No, I'm saying that operating a site inherently involves that, and that they have the right to choose how to do so, even when that excludes certain views from their site, and that that right is enshrined in the First Amendment. I'm not saying anything about what they should do.
      - ameister14 8y ago
        >No, I'm saying that operating a site inherently involves that, and that they have the right to choose how to do so, even when that excludes certain views from their site, and that that right is enshrined in the First Amendment. And I'm saying that no, it is not enshrined in the First Amendment. There is significant legislative regulation that applies to publishers and not to web hosts because they could not possibly regulate content on an individual basis. That's why your second point is incorrect - if you read the legal decisions that have upheld the Communications Decency Act's Safe Harbor provisions, they aren't based on the collateral economic development cost or big money interests - they are based on the idea that it is an impossible task to regulate obscene speech online and that in order to do so, sites would have to chill speech. This chilling of speech (which is kinda what we're talking about here) is the reason sites are not treated as publishers, with again, the underpinning being that it would be impossible for them to regulate content. If you are correct that they can do so and inherently do so, then the protections they are provided by not being held responsible, legally, as publishers, for the content they publish, should be stripped from them and websites and host should be treated as publishers, with all the regulations that apply therein.
apacheCamel 8y ago
Agreed. Someone stated the other day on something similar and it matches up pretty well, it went something like: "...you have the right to free speech, not consequence free speech"
- umvi 8y ago
  There's also an oft-posted xkcd (https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/) that's related. It makes me really uneasy though. I'm starting to think free speech should be protected in non-government situations as well. Because otherwise you can get your job/project/social media account/etc. destroyed by mobs if you happen to have an opinion that's not politically fashionable at the moment. I could just be reading it wrong, but "you have the right to free speech, but not their consequences" seems to have an implicit "...because me and my friends will gang up and hound you if you say something we don't like" hanging at the end of the sentence
  - DanBC 8y ago
    No, it means "you have freedom of speech, but I don't have to pay for your megaphone".
    - umvi 8y ago
      In this specific case, maybe, but in general that doesn't seem to be true. In the case of Brendan Eich, Elia Schito, and other random developers, it's "you have freedom of speech, but I don't like what you are saying (or doing) so I'm going to gather a mob and destroy some aspect of your life to teach you a lesson"
      - SauciestGNU 8y ago
        I think what happened to Eich et al is a perfect example of "the remedy to bad speech is more speech." Everything that happened to Eich was a result of people organizing speech and associating with each other freely to amplify the power of their voices.
    - 8y ago
tomp 8y ago
I would upvote you if your arguments were better. > and hosting fees are a real thing What's the actual marginal cost of a few extra comments? > It's not a public venue It is. > you come into my house Your house is a private venue. In contrast, a public forum is a public venue (even if it's privately owned). > being allowed to support And I'm not denying you that right. I'm just saying it's morally bad, and also counter-productive (to what you or they are trying to achieve) - you'll get more Trumps elected with policies like this, not less. > go make your own... it's pretty easy and affordable Yeah until you get censored by Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal, Visa, CloudFront etc. - censors / opponents of free speech have a lot of market power these days.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >Yeah until you get censored by Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal, Visa, CloudFront etc. - censors / opponents of free speech have a lot of market power these days. Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube are all advertising companies. They allow you, for free, to post your content on their advertising platform. They have every right to sensor you. PayPal and Visa are financial companies, they have to protect themselves from high risk activity (pornography, drugs and drug precursors, money-laundering etc) and are allowed to refuse who they want for any number of reasons. CloudFront... a CDN has the right to refuse to deliver content that they find questionable or flat out illegal, they could easily be drug into a costly legal battle and intrusive investigation if someone is say distributing child pornography, content advocating terrorism etc.
  - tomp 8y ago
    everything that you mention that is illegal (child porn, terrorism, drugs, money laundering) is a strawman. Maybe one could argue that Visa, PayPal and Mastercard are acting as a cartel/oligopoly? That would be interesting...
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      >everything that you mention that is illegal (child porn, terrorism, drugs, money laundering) is a strawman. Uh no, the're things that actually happen. People are constantly trying to sell prodrugs and 'raws' via paypal, you can go on most darknet markets and buy both stolen and 'fake' paypal accounts for any number of uses, etc. A quick google of 'paypal drug dealers' or 'paypal steroids' quickly returns both written content and videos on how to make money selling steroids via paypal and social media. Card networks like Visa limit what sort of pornography can be transacted via their network for various legality concerns. A quick google search will bury you in reading material from the EFF to Forbes to pissed off purveyors. Etc etc so on and so forth, you lose, you get nothing, I said good day sir.
falcolas 8y ago
Not to necessarily disagree, but "go make your own... it's pretty easy and affordable" only holds so long as you can find a hosting provider, network provider, and DNS registrar. As has been shown a few times now, this capability can be summarily revoked.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Then you pay a little more than budget hosting and go to a darknet market for friendly-to-everything hosts, or you go tor with the site, or skip the domain and use the direct IP. Yes all of these can be ultimate censored, but someone can walk up to you and forcefully hold their hand over your mouth too.
- mrsteveman1 8y ago
  There was a time, brief I'm sure, when making something available on the internet basically meant paying for a high speed connection to be installed wherever you were operating, rather than a big cooled building filled with servers. The rental model isn't an inherent part of web hosting, it's just much easier and much of the internet is geared toward things working that way. I'm quite sure that it would be impossible to do that in some situations and for some use cases now, and in some areas it would not work out well, but in other areas it's trivially easy to find "business class" fiber service with at least 1-Gbit up and down, which is faster than the pipes a lot of hosting providers offer. There's a much stronger case to be made against ISPs tampering with or denying service to those sorts of customers, who are directly paying for a physical connection to wherever they're located.
DougN7 8y ago
Replace “Trump” with “gay marriage” and pretty much nobody would agree with your argument. It would be viewed as hate.
- philistine 8y ago
  Gay marriage is a concept. Trump is currently the president of the United States, the most important actor in the world stage and we are seeing the results of him exercising that power. A sitting US president, by the strength of their mere words, have the power to change culture. Trump, just by talking the way he talks about the things he talks about, is changing what legal speech is now disavowed by society. You seem to fail to grasp that a sitting US president is of more consequence than two men marrying one another.

ameister14 8y ago

As I've pointed out elsewhere, this argument implies ownership and content control beyond what we've traditionally held forum owners/operators responsible for. By claiming such control, do you think forum owners should be liable for the content posted on their websites?

dragonwriter 8y ago
> As I've pointed out elsewhere, this argument implies ownership and content control beyond what we've traditionally held forum owners/operators responsible for. This is false, and appears based on both narrowing consideration of accountability mechanisms to legal mechanisms and a faulty understanding of the reason for certain online exceptions to the general traditional legal liability of publishers, which is not lack of responsibility (otherwise they would apply to publishers more generally) but balancing of social costs/benefits of imposing legal liability.
- ameister14 8y ago
  >a faulty understanding of the reason for certain online exceptions to the general traditional legal liability of publishers, which is not lack of responsibility (otherwise they would apply to publishers more generally) Are you saying that they aren't exempted from responsibility because they are not responsible, but because it's better that they not be held responsible? Why would they apply to publishers more generally if it was about lack of responsibility? If you recall the decisions about the Communications Decency Act, it states that - "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This means that people that own or operate forums are not treated as publishers of the content on forums, and removes the responsibilities of being such a publisher. The act was passed in part because providers said it was injurious to force them to regulate all content - they shouldn't be responsible because they couldn't regulate content without massive cost. Now you're saying that they should regulate all content - ok, but if that's the case then they should be treated as publishers of said content, since they can decide on a case-by-case basis what is and is not published on their platform.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Are you saying that they aren't exempted from responsibility because they are not responsible, but because it's better that they not be held responsible? No. I'm saying: (1) They aren't exempted from responsibility, full stop. Site owners and operators manifestly are held accountable for content by a variety of social mechanisms independent of legal liability; you are incorrect to equate responsibility or accountability with legal liability, which is a very small subset of accountability, and that alone, without any other errors, would be a fatal flaw in your argument. (2) Also, yes, they aren't given the exemptions that apply to similarly situated parties in other media because the internet is fundamentally different mechanically or in ethical situation in a way which changes the ethical responsibilities of people actively deploying resources to selectively relay content, but because (in the somewhat idealistic view) because the perceived benefits of imposing the usual legal liability were viewed as less than the perceived collateral costs in economic development of freeing site operators from legal liability for user-supplied content with certain limitations, or (in the view more in tune with the realities of lawmaking) because the cost of buying off the objections of a set of big money internet interests with a liability exemption was viewed as outweighed by the benefits of imposing the sweeping obscenity and indecency controls they were packaged with. > Now you're saying that they should regulate all content No, I'm saying that operating a site inherently involves that, and that they have the right to choose how to do so, even when that excludes certain views from their site, and that that right is enshrined in the First Amendment. I'm not saying anything about what they should do.
    - ameister14 8y ago
      >No, I'm saying that operating a site inherently involves that, and that they have the right to choose how to do so, even when that excludes certain views from their site, and that that right is enshrined in the First Amendment. And I'm saying that no, it is not enshrined in the First Amendment. There is significant legislative regulation that applies to publishers and not to web hosts because they could not possibly regulate content on an individual basis. That's why your second point is incorrect - if you read the legal decisions that have upheld the Communications Decency Act's Safe Harbor provisions, they aren't based on the collateral economic development cost or big money interests - they are based on the idea that it is an impossible task to regulate obscene speech online and that in order to do so, sites would have to chill speech. This chilling of speech (which is kinda what we're talking about here) is the reason sites are not treated as publishers, with again, the underpinning being that it would be impossible for them to regulate content. If you are correct that they can do so and inherently do so, then the protections they are provided by not being held responsible, legally, as publishers, for the content they publish, should be stripped from them and websites and host should be treated as publishers, with all the regulations that apply therein.

apacheCamel 8y ago

Agreed. Someone stated the other day on something similar and it matches up pretty well, it went something like: "...you have the right to free speech, not consequence free speech"

umvi 8y ago
There's also an oft-posted xkcd (https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/) that's related. It makes me really uneasy though. I'm starting to think free speech should be protected in non-government situations as well. Because otherwise you can get your job/project/social media account/etc. destroyed by mobs if you happen to have an opinion that's not politically fashionable at the moment. I could just be reading it wrong, but "you have the right to free speech, but not their consequences" seems to have an implicit "...because me and my friends will gang up and hound you if you say something we don't like" hanging at the end of the sentence
- DanBC 8y ago
  No, it means "you have freedom of speech, but I don't have to pay for your megaphone".
  - umvi 8y ago
    In this specific case, maybe, but in general that doesn't seem to be true. In the case of Brendan Eich, Elia Schito, and other random developers, it's "you have freedom of speech, but I don't like what you are saying (or doing) so I'm going to gather a mob and destroy some aspect of your life to teach you a lesson"
    - SauciestGNU 8y ago
      I think what happened to Eich et al is a perfect example of "the remedy to bad speech is more speech." Everything that happened to Eich was a result of people organizing speech and associating with each other freely to amplify the power of their voices.
  - 8y ago

tomp 8y ago

I would upvote you if your arguments were better. > and hosting fees are a real thing What's the actual marginal cost of a few extra comments? > It's not a public venue It is. > you come into my house Your house is a private venue. In contrast, a public forum is a public venue (even if it's privately owned). > being allowed to support And I'm not denying you that right. I'm just saying it's morally bad, and also counter-productive (to what you or they are trying to achieve) - you'll get more Trumps elected with policies like this, not less. > go make your own... it's pretty easy and affordable Yeah until you get censored by Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal, Visa, CloudFront etc. - censors / opponents of free speech have a lot of market power these days.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>Yeah until you get censored by Facebook, Google, Twitter, PayPal, Visa, CloudFront etc. - censors / opponents of free speech have a lot of market power these days. Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube are all advertising companies. They allow you, for free, to post your content on their advertising platform. They have every right to sensor you. PayPal and Visa are financial companies, they have to protect themselves from high risk activity (pornography, drugs and drug precursors, money-laundering etc) and are allowed to refuse who they want for any number of reasons. CloudFront... a CDN has the right to refuse to deliver content that they find questionable or flat out illegal, they could easily be drug into a costly legal battle and intrusive investigation if someone is say distributing child pornography, content advocating terrorism etc.
- tomp 8y ago
  everything that you mention that is illegal (child porn, terrorism, drugs, money laundering) is a strawman. Maybe one could argue that Visa, PayPal and Mastercard are acting as a cartel/oligopoly? That would be interesting...
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >everything that you mention that is illegal (child porn, terrorism, drugs, money laundering) is a strawman. Uh no, the're things that actually happen. People are constantly trying to sell prodrugs and 'raws' via paypal, you can go on most darknet markets and buy both stolen and 'fake' paypal accounts for any number of uses, etc. A quick google of 'paypal drug dealers' or 'paypal steroids' quickly returns both written content and videos on how to make money selling steroids via paypal and social media. Card networks like Visa limit what sort of pornography can be transacted via their network for various legality concerns. A quick google search will bury you in reading material from the EFF to Forbes to pissed off purveyors. Etc etc so on and so forth, you lose, you get nothing, I said good day sir.

falcolas 8y ago

Not to necessarily disagree, but "go make your own... it's pretty easy and affordable" only holds so long as you can find a hosting provider, network provider, and DNS registrar. As has been shown a few times now, this capability can be summarily revoked.

ryanmercer 8y ago
Then you pay a little more than budget hosting and go to a darknet market for friendly-to-everything hosts, or you go tor with the site, or skip the domain and use the direct IP. Yes all of these can be ultimate censored, but someone can walk up to you and forcefully hold their hand over your mouth too.
mrsteveman1 8y ago
There was a time, brief I'm sure, when making something available on the internet basically meant paying for a high speed connection to be installed wherever you were operating, rather than a big cooled building filled with servers. The rental model isn't an inherent part of web hosting, it's just much easier and much of the internet is geared toward things working that way. I'm quite sure that it would be impossible to do that in some situations and for some use cases now, and in some areas it would not work out well, but in other areas it's trivially easy to find "business class" fiber service with at least 1-Gbit up and down, which is faster than the pipes a lot of hosting providers offer. There's a much stronger case to be made against ISPs tampering with or denying service to those sorts of customers, who are directly paying for a physical connection to wherever they're located.

DougN7 8y ago

Replace “Trump” with “gay marriage” and pretty much nobody would agree with your argument. It would be viewed as hate.

philistine 8y ago
Gay marriage is a concept. Trump is currently the president of the United States, the most important actor in the world stage and we are seeing the results of him exercising that power. A sitting US president, by the strength of their mere words, have the power to change culture. Trump, just by talking the way he talks about the things he talks about, is changing what legal speech is now disavowed by society. You seem to fail to grasp that a sitting US president is of more consequence than two men marrying one another.