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I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, in a way the bill of rights never had reason to consider. The freedom of speech prohibits government control of s

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, in a way the bill of rights never had reason to consider. The freedom of speech prohibits government control of speech in government (read: public) spaces, in order to conserve public right of criticism of the government. These massive platforms, as a matter of business, attempt to replace and own “the public square.” Google/YouTube, directly or indirectly, controls an enormous fraction of the public conversation. Their interests, as corporations constantly lobbying for favorable regulatory treatment, tend to align along the “appease the government as long as it doesn’t hurt our revenue” axis. You can with some validity argue that an entity that monopolizes control of the public square is obligated to protect the rights intrinsic in that square, all the more so when their interests align with the government’s. You can, with some validity, argue that a company doesn’t have to have a monopoly on the public square to be forced to recognize those rights, but as a continuous function, as they subsume more of the public square they should undergo increasing burden for conserving the functions of that square. It used to be “the public square” was a distinct geographic entity. We are now faced with the fact that it was, maybe, a set of functions attached to that geographic entity, and it’s those functions that must be protected.

themagician 7y ago
These platforms don’t replace the public square. The internet is the “public square” and you can buy your own domain and do whatever you want. These platforms are the giant retail shops that line the square in a capitalist world. They come and go. You don’t have to go into them and they can kick you out whenever they want.
- vanniv 7y ago
  Well, you could, except that if cloudflare doesn't like your content, your site isn't actually on the internet.
  - themagician 7y ago
    Never used Cloudflare. The internet has existed without it for quite some time. I’m not even sure what they do, to be honest. Aren’t they just another CDN? I’ve used AWS and Cloudfront for years, never had a problem. And that’s only for high traffic applications.
    - jamesgeck0 7y ago
      About 10% of web requests flow through Cloudflare. If they decide they don't like you, you're gonna have a hard time.
      - themagician 7y ago
        I guess you just have to do what the other 90% do.
        jamesgeck0 7y ago
        To an extent? But you have no control over what DNS server your visitors use, for example, and Cloudflare is the default for Firefox users in the US.
        themagician 7y ago
        Has Cloudflare created a blacklist on their DNS server of entries they won't resolve? EDIT I just looked this up. Seems like, in this specific instance, Cloudflare is contractually bound by the following: "The party operating the resolver should not by default block or filter domains unless specifically required by law in the jurisdiction in which the resolver operates. Mozilla will generally seek to work with DNS resolvers that provide unfiltered DNS responses and, at its discretion, may remove from consideration resolvers subject to legal filtering obligations, depending on the scope and nature of those obligations."
- ghaff 7y ago
  The argument is that YouTube is the big private park (with its own rules restricting speech) that everyone goes to while the actual public park is some square of concrete off on the edge of town that no one visits. There's at least some merit in an argument that YouTube is so dominant in user-uploaded video that, absent a big budget and/or notability to drive viewers elsewhere, if your video is not on YouTube it might as well not exist as far as the broader world is concerned.
  - themagician 7y ago
    No, it’s not. My parents barely even know how to use YouTube, let alone use it regularly. You spend too much time in tech and you get blinders and literally start to think that nothing else exists. Most people still get their information from television and, believe it or not, radio. YouTube just makes video hosting easy. You have a freedom of speech, not a freedom to a guaranteed audience. Have you ever actually seen someone in a public square going on a rant? They are often lucky if they reach a few people.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      >dominant in user-uploaded video As far as I'm aware, I can't upload videos to CNN. I'm certainly aware that other sources of video exist; I don't even use YouTube much myself. I'm actually sympathetic to your overall argument especially when complaints focus on the difficulty of monetizing video outside of YouTube. But it's at least worth discussing what it means when a private company has outsized control over certain types of information sharing.
      - themagician 7y ago
        YouTube is the dominate player in videos hosted on YouTube.com. In fact, they have a total monopoly on YouTube.com. But you can upload videos to your own domain. It’s super easy. When YouTube started you could at least make the argument that uploading video was difficult, because in order for people to watch you had to convert it to VP6 and play it within Flash, but today everything supports MPEG4. Monetizing video outside of YouTube also isn’t difficult. Sponsors are easy to get if you have high quality content. If you have trash content then yeah, it is hard to monetize. Which lets be real here—that’s what we are talking about. People think they have a right to a free audience and a (cost free) revenue stream for uploading garbage content that is just marginally better than literally nothing at all. People seem to believe they have a right to an income for creating what is really just spam in video form. Honestly, I wish YouTube would just terminate the revenue sharing option entirely for non-partners. Let someone else deal with the garbage content and its associated drama.
yk 7y ago
While I am quite sympathetic to the argument, PragerU would need to disagree (if we assume they actually believe their videos are true). So they are American conservatives in the sense that they argue that free markets have the right outcomes, and more importantly they are originalists, that is they argue that one should interpret the US constitution as intended when written, not in a sense, what the principle would tell one when we imagine the US constitution was written today.
- floren 7y ago
  > more importantly they are orientalists Probably "originalists", although they may also be orientalists too :)
  - yk 7y ago
    Indeed, fixed.
- zaarn 7y ago
  They are originalists when they believe it benefits them, otherwise they probably don't care much.
Ajedi32 7y ago
From a philosophical/moral perspective I agree with you; that seems like a very reasonable position. From the perspective of constitutional law though I don't think its very relevant. The constitution only prohibits the government from making laws restricting the freedom of speech; it doesn't mandate the the government take an active role in preventing freedom of speech from being suppressed by non-government entities. If we want to fix that problem we'll have to do so through other means (whether they be legislative, technical, or social).
- tynpeddler 7y ago
  I think the legal precedent that Prager U should have targeted was Marsh vs Alabama. In that ruling, the state held that under certain conditions private property could become a public forum. For example, Knight vs Trump basically held that Twitter was enough of a public forum that the president could not block people on his twitter account (here's a counter argument to that decision: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/twitter-is-not-a-public-forum/ https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/twitter-is-not-a-public-foru...). I'd be curious to know why Prager U didn't try to argue that youtube is a public forum. Youtube is by default open to the public to post speech on, and it holds a near monopoly position on its particular product, much like twitter. The hitch in this plan is that from my understanding, Knight didn't argue that all of twitter was a public forum, they just argued that Trump's account was a public forum. Despite that, it seems a little contradictory to me to have legal system where twitter is considered a quasi public forum, and youtube it not.
  - javagram 7y ago
    The difference in Knight v Trump was that in that case it was President Trump, a public official of the United States, doing the censoring. The reasoning is that it’s similar to a government official holding a meeting, or other such public forum. That has to be open to all comers without viewpoint discrimination. But it doesn’t mean a private business can’t block people from their accounts - just that it’s illegal for a government official to use that feature.
    - 7y ago
flukus 7y ago
It gets even more complicated than that with things like the comments section. Does anyone know prager U's moderation policy? I have a feeling it would be quite hypocritical, they've been known to send false copyright infringement notices. Would things like not allowing comments be controlling the public square? Even the public square analogy doesn't really work because we never had global public squares.

themagician 7y ago

These platforms don’t replace the public square. The internet is the “public square” and you can buy your own domain and do whatever you want. These platforms are the giant retail shops that line the square in a capitalist world. They come and go. You don’t have to go into them and they can kick you out whenever they want.

vanniv 7y ago
Well, you could, except that if cloudflare doesn't like your content, your site isn't actually on the internet.
- themagician 7y ago
  Never used Cloudflare. The internet has existed without it for quite some time. I’m not even sure what they do, to be honest. Aren’t they just another CDN? I’ve used AWS and Cloudfront for years, never had a problem. And that’s only for high traffic applications.
  - jamesgeck0 7y ago
    About 10% of web requests flow through Cloudflare. If they decide they don't like you, you're gonna have a hard time.
    - themagician 7y ago
      I guess you just have to do what the other 90% do.
      - jamesgeck0 7y ago
        To an extent? But you have no control over what DNS server your visitors use, for example, and Cloudflare is the default for Firefox users in the US.
        themagician 7y ago
        Has Cloudflare created a blacklist on their DNS server of entries they won't resolve? EDIT I just looked this up. Seems like, in this specific instance, Cloudflare is contractually bound by the following: "The party operating the resolver should not by default block or filter domains unless specifically required by law in the jurisdiction in which the resolver operates. Mozilla will generally seek to work with DNS resolvers that provide unfiltered DNS responses and, at its discretion, may remove from consideration resolvers subject to legal filtering obligations, depending on the scope and nature of those obligations."
ghaff 7y ago
The argument is that YouTube is the big private park (with its own rules restricting speech) that everyone goes to while the actual public park is some square of concrete off on the edge of town that no one visits. There's at least some merit in an argument that YouTube is so dominant in user-uploaded video that, absent a big budget and/or notability to drive viewers elsewhere, if your video is not on YouTube it might as well not exist as far as the broader world is concerned.
- themagician 7y ago
  No, it’s not. My parents barely even know how to use YouTube, let alone use it regularly. You spend too much time in tech and you get blinders and literally start to think that nothing else exists. Most people still get their information from television and, believe it or not, radio. YouTube just makes video hosting easy. You have a freedom of speech, not a freedom to a guaranteed audience. Have you ever actually seen someone in a public square going on a rant? They are often lucky if they reach a few people.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >dominant in user-uploaded video As far as I'm aware, I can't upload videos to CNN. I'm certainly aware that other sources of video exist; I don't even use YouTube much myself. I'm actually sympathetic to your overall argument especially when complaints focus on the difficulty of monetizing video outside of YouTube. But it's at least worth discussing what it means when a private company has outsized control over certain types of information sharing.
    - themagician 7y ago
      YouTube is the dominate player in videos hosted on YouTube.com. In fact, they have a total monopoly on YouTube.com. But you can upload videos to your own domain. It’s super easy. When YouTube started you could at least make the argument that uploading video was difficult, because in order for people to watch you had to convert it to VP6 and play it within Flash, but today everything supports MPEG4. Monetizing video outside of YouTube also isn’t difficult. Sponsors are easy to get if you have high quality content. If you have trash content then yeah, it is hard to monetize. Which lets be real here—that’s what we are talking about. People think they have a right to a free audience and a (cost free) revenue stream for uploading garbage content that is just marginally better than literally nothing at all. People seem to believe they have a right to an income for creating what is really just spam in video form. Honestly, I wish YouTube would just terminate the revenue sharing option entirely for non-partners. Let someone else deal with the garbage content and its associated drama.

yk 7y ago

While I am quite sympathetic to the argument, PragerU would need to disagree (if we assume they actually believe their videos are true). So they are American conservatives in the sense that they argue that free markets have the right outcomes, and more importantly they are originalists, that is they argue that one should interpret the US constitution as intended when written, not in a sense, what the principle would tell one when we imagine the US constitution was written today.

floren 7y ago
> more importantly they are orientalists Probably "originalists", although they may also be orientalists too :)
- yk 7y ago
  Indeed, fixed.
zaarn 7y ago
They are originalists when they believe it benefits them, otherwise they probably don't care much.

Ajedi32 7y ago

From a philosophical/moral perspective I agree with you; that seems like a very reasonable position. From the perspective of constitutional law though I don't think its very relevant. The constitution only prohibits the government from making laws restricting the freedom of speech; it doesn't mandate the the government take an active role in preventing freedom of speech from being suppressed by non-government entities. If we want to fix that problem we'll have to do so through other means (whether they be legislative, technical, or social).

tynpeddler 7y ago
I think the legal precedent that Prager U should have targeted was Marsh vs Alabama. In that ruling, the state held that under certain conditions private property could become a public forum. For example, Knight vs Trump basically held that Twitter was enough of a public forum that the president could not block people on his twitter account (here's a counter argument to that decision: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/twitter-is-not-a-public-forum/ https://abovethelaw.com/2019/07/twitter-is-not-a-public-foru...). I'd be curious to know why Prager U didn't try to argue that youtube is a public forum. Youtube is by default open to the public to post speech on, and it holds a near monopoly position on its particular product, much like twitter. The hitch in this plan is that from my understanding, Knight didn't argue that all of twitter was a public forum, they just argued that Trump's account was a public forum. Despite that, it seems a little contradictory to me to have legal system where twitter is considered a quasi public forum, and youtube it not.
- javagram 7y ago
  The difference in Knight v Trump was that in that case it was President Trump, a public official of the United States, doing the censoring. The reasoning is that it’s similar to a government official holding a meeting, or other such public forum. That has to be open to all comers without viewpoint discrimination. But it doesn’t mean a private business can’t block people from their accounts - just that it’s illegal for a government official to use that feature.
  - 7y ago

flukus 7y ago

It gets even more complicated than that with things like the comments section. Does anyone know prager U's moderation policy? I have a feeling it would be quite hypocritical, they've been known to send false copyright infringement notices. Would things like not allowing comments be controlling the public square? Even the public square analogy doesn't really work because we never had global public squares.