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This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem. A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what

by Dove 7y ago

This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem. A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in my life may be nearly priceless. I've paid a low triple digit sum for Blizzard games, yet the time and social investments I have made in those games make them a couple of orders of magnitude more valuable to me, now. The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending. The situation we're in now is one in which political thugs apply pressure to private companies to hurt individuals, in an attempt to chill free speech. Free speech is expensive and valuable, and defending it from those who would wish to destroy it requires commensurate resources. We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world. To my view, Blizzard is like a store clerk who gives up the store's money to a robber. It would be nice if he was a hero, but he's not equipped for it. Nobody is paying 7-11 to stand up to violent crime. The problem is too big and expensive to ask individuals to deal with. Society paying for police and courts is at least a response on the right scale. The mechanisms we have for protecting individual rights are antiquaited, and need to be rethought to deal with the current situation. Perhaps a model like the unified response to patent trolls could work? I think, if we want free speech to exist in the current environment, it will have to be something that big.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Mostly playing devil's advocate here: When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own. The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication circuit between me and those who I want to communicate with. So lets say I have 10 wires coming from my house to other houses, and someone I know has 10 other wires connected to a different set of houses, that I'm not directly connected to. I can rely on my own self and build new wires (expensive) or I can work with this person to forward my communication (probably cheaper but he/she can view/hear my communication). If I want to communicate with someone else beyond my network, then a third party is carrying my speech, and we're really no longer in realm of free speech. This third party has rights and should be able to refuse to carry my speech for the same rights and reasons as me, unless entered into a contract beforehand. I think your real question is should corporations be treated as legal persons to the extent that they have the Constitutional right of speech.
- gwright 7y ago
  It seems pretty strange to me that individuals with the right to free speech and the right to assemble and freely associate would lose those rights if they chose the form of a "corporation" as the manner of assembly and association. So I don't think the problem is that the law treats groups of people as legal entities with substantially similar rights to the individuals. I would expect that crimes associated with speech (slander, defamation, fraudulent representations, incitement to violence, threats, etc) would be applicable to individuals and to corporations equally. I would agree that the control that a handful (relative to all corporations) of online companies wield is something quite new (historically speaking) and our laws, regulations, and even legal principles are playing catchup. We may need some original thinking to help us evolve our legal systems to meet the challenge.
  - bliztw2019a 7y ago
    Bigger philosophical question for the US Stage: When a corporation kills someone through their negligence, why does the punishment differ so much from what happens when a physical person does the same? Are corporations trying to pick and choose when they are treated like a person? Does that place them above people?
    - gwright 7y ago
      It is an interesting question. 1) I don't think "corporations" are picking and choosing, there is extensive legal history on this point. 2) Re: "kills someone through their negligence". I think you've abstracted too much for there to be a single answer. I gather you are talking about situations where no identifiable person lead to the death and so there is some sort of "collective" or "systemic" failure that "caused" the death. I think the particular facts matter in those cases and the result is a variety of punishments from fines, to external supervision and inspection, and even in some cases action against individuals that were connected to the faulty decision making. One size doesn't fit all in this case.
      - pmiller2 7y ago
colechristensen 7y ago
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" The first amendment was written when it was much more difficult to abridge speech. You would have to trust hearsay and either remove someone from your property or have them face some consequence based on the word of somebody who heard you. Governments could punish you with crimes, but that was it. Unless you were publishing work through somebody who owned a printing press, you were in complete control of the medium and delivery of your words and few people could restrict you and your words were soon forgotten. Now most things that most people say go through a filter of several others infrastructure and they all can record what you say and limit what goes through. We need active speech protections for platforms which act like the public square. The newspaper doesn't need to publish my whacky opinions, but Facebook needs to let me post as myself freely or change how it fundamentally operates from a space to talk to a publisher of selected material.
unityByFreedom 7y ago
> We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world. Blizzard is an American company. They don't need to answer to China. They may choose to do so, just as consumers may choose not to play their games.
bsanr 7y ago
>The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending. I think that's beautiful, actually. Your ability to stay within this mini-society's good graces is entirely dependent on how you treat other people, and not on how much wealth you funnel in from the outside (to a degree).
aymeric 7y ago
Thanks for this point of view. Very insightful and made me understand Blizzard perspective better.
hharlequin 7y ago
This puts Blizzard in too soft a light, as if they have no choice. A better comparison is Blizzard being a store owner who sells cakes to everyone, when one day a Nazi comes in and says you can't sell cakes to that uppity black person who upset me or you'll never be able to sell cakes to Nazis again. Blizzard then gets to decide which is more important, business with Nazis or standing up for a core set of values. As may occur in this instance, the free market may decide if they're going to side with Nazis, Nazis get to be their only client. At this point people are deciding how delicious they think Blizzard cakes are, and if they still want to eat them.
pmiller2 7y ago
I would argue that Blizzard is much less a hapless store clerk and more an addict whose supply is in jeopardy. They like Chinese money more than free speech, plain and simple. They could choose to get clean (stop taking Chinese money), and protect the public interest, but they choose not to.
SennaD9 7y ago
Boom

by Dove 7y ago

tenebrisalietum 7y ago

Mostly playing devil's advocate here: When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own. The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication circuit between me and those who I want to communicate with. So lets say I have 10 wires coming from my house to other houses, and someone I know has 10 other wires connected to a different set of houses, that I'm not directly connected to. I can rely on my own self and build new wires (expensive) or I can work with this person to forward my communication (probably cheaper but he/she can view/hear my communication). If I want to communicate with someone else beyond my network, then a third party is carrying my speech, and we're really no longer in realm of free speech. This third party has rights and should be able to refuse to carry my speech for the same rights and reasons as me, unless entered into a contract beforehand. I think your real question is should corporations be treated as legal persons to the extent that they have the Constitutional right of speech.

gwright 7y ago
It seems pretty strange to me that individuals with the right to free speech and the right to assemble and freely associate would lose those rights if they chose the form of a "corporation" as the manner of assembly and association. So I don't think the problem is that the law treats groups of people as legal entities with substantially similar rights to the individuals. I would expect that crimes associated with speech (slander, defamation, fraudulent representations, incitement to violence, threats, etc) would be applicable to individuals and to corporations equally. I would agree that the control that a handful (relative to all corporations) of online companies wield is something quite new (historically speaking) and our laws, regulations, and even legal principles are playing catchup. We may need some original thinking to help us evolve our legal systems to meet the challenge.
- bliztw2019a 7y ago
  Bigger philosophical question for the US Stage: When a corporation kills someone through their negligence, why does the punishment differ so much from what happens when a physical person does the same? Are corporations trying to pick and choose when they are treated like a person? Does that place them above people?
  - gwright 7y ago
    It is an interesting question. 1) I don't think "corporations" are picking and choosing, there is extensive legal history on this point. 2) Re: "kills someone through their negligence". I think you've abstracted too much for there to be a single answer. I gather you are talking about situations where no identifiable person lead to the death and so there is some sort of "collective" or "systemic" failure that "caused" the death. I think the particular facts matter in those cases and the result is a variety of punishments from fines, to external supervision and inspection, and even in some cases action against individuals that were connected to the faulty decision making. One size doesn't fit all in this case.
    - pmiller2 7y ago

colechristensen 7y ago

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" The first amendment was written when it was much more difficult to abridge speech. You would have to trust hearsay and either remove someone from your property or have them face some consequence based on the word of somebody who heard you. Governments could punish you with crimes, but that was it. Unless you were publishing work through somebody who owned a printing press, you were in complete control of the medium and delivery of your words and few people could restrict you and your words were soon forgotten. Now most things that most people say go through a filter of several others infrastructure and they all can record what you say and limit what goes through. We need active speech protections for platforms which act like the public square. The newspaper doesn't need to publish my whacky opinions, but Facebook needs to let me post as myself freely or change how it fundamentally operates from a space to talk to a publisher of selected material.

unityByFreedom 7y ago

> We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world. Blizzard is an American company. They don't need to answer to China. They may choose to do so, just as consumers may choose not to play their games.

bsanr 7y ago

>The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending. I think that's beautiful, actually. Your ability to stay within this mini-society's good graces is entirely dependent on how you treat other people, and not on how much wealth you funnel in from the outside (to a degree).

aymeric 7y ago

Thanks for this point of view. Very insightful and made me understand Blizzard perspective better.

hharlequin 7y ago

This puts Blizzard in too soft a light, as if they have no choice. A better comparison is Blizzard being a store owner who sells cakes to everyone, when one day a Nazi comes in and says you can't sell cakes to that uppity black person who upset me or you'll never be able to sell cakes to Nazis again. Blizzard then gets to decide which is more important, business with Nazis or standing up for a core set of values. As may occur in this instance, the free market may decide if they're going to side with Nazis, Nazis get to be their only client. At this point people are deciding how delicious they think Blizzard cakes are, and if they still want to eat them.

pmiller2 7y ago

I would argue that Blizzard is much less a hapless store clerk and more an addict whose supply is in jeopardy. They like Chinese money more than free speech, plain and simple. They could choose to get clean (stop taking Chinese money), and protect the public interest, but they choose not to.

SennaD9 7y ago

Boom