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You are conflating the 1st amendment with "free speech". The First Amendment is what protects the People from the Government. Free Speech is a principle that

You are conflating the 1st amendment with "free speech". The First Amendment is what protects the People from the Government. Free Speech is a principle that people should be allowed to express themselves as freely as possible, because contrarian speech provides a critical public service.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jonahbenton 6y ago
Good lord, no. Express yourself, yes, be free from the consequences of expressing yourself- no, unless you are a child. Be entitled to compensation, no, or to compel others to enter into business arrangements with you- no. There is no restriction on expression, in principle or in law. Certain private entities no longer wish to work with Mr Durden in a particular business context. He is free to find others, in fact, he may contract with his advertisers directly, which many prefer to do rather than go through an intermediary platform, like Google, that can take 70% or more when all is said and done. Or contract with his audience, which by the tone of HN comments would be delighted to pay Mr Durden directly for the value his publication provides them. Advertising has always led to the sorts of conflations of which you mistakenly speak, where the loss of an advertiser, or an advertising platform, is a restriction on freedom. No- precisely the opposite. Freedom means you are free to fuck things up for yourself, free to bear the consequences, free to make your way. Cheers.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  This logic breaks down when a company becomes so large as to become an international utility. ZeroHedge has no alternative to Ad-based revenues. Google is effectively a monopoly in that market. ...and think about that. That means that Google can effectively put any online news publication out of business, at will. "but hey, they can just go to news.google.com, right?" Think about the degree of power you are happily handing Google.
  - jonahbenton 6y ago
    Sorry, as someone who has been in the business, this is completely false. There are plenty of alternative networks. I used to work for one. Plenty of content sites that do direct advertising. Even plenty of ways to run one's own adserver. They're open source! Yes, losing monetization through one platform is rough, but that's the algorithm. He has an audience, a valuable audience. If he can't monetize it, it's not from loss of freedom, it's from lack of brains. Furthermore, every high traffic, high value property Google drops is an opportunity for someone else. It's not handing power to Google. It's Google ceding power. Cheers.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      What's the other online advertising provider?
      - jonahbenton 6y ago
        There are many. Advertising is a hundreds of $B, tens of thousands of companies ecosystem. Thousands of subniches. I worked at AppNexus, now Xandr, which was a platform for thousands of B2B companies, both buy- and sell-side. OpenX is another big platform. Verizon. Note that there are pipes between all of the big players, so that everyone sees a lot of everyone else's inventory. ZH is such an ideal ad property: lots of content, high rate of production, very targeted and wealthy audience- if ZH hadn't previously been doing direct deals (which are so much more lucrative for the publisher) then they are just failing at capitalism. Being dropped by Google may turn out to be a blessing. Google is an enormous player, to be sure, but Ads are not Search. Completely different business and dynamics. And ZH is still available for search. Cheers.
        olivermarks 6y ago
        @jonahbenton I think you're missing the bigger picture here. NBC is a giant media monopoly that approached a giant S230 platform monopoly to demonetize a website's ad traffic via that S230 platform's advertising business. The plumbing of the surveillance capitalism advertising world is a detail in a much larger issue. The current siege mentality of starving out dissenting online voices, or merely voices that don't fit establishment narratives, is both undemocratic and harmful to the free speech conventions that define the free world. Tyler Durden as you probably know is a pseudonym for various writers at ZH and they also republish all sorts of other blog posts. Like most people I have mixed feelings about much of what they publish, have picked up invaluable information from their site and have questions about the Bulgarian owners, but I absolutely defend their right to publish and to not be bullied by much larger players.
- surge 6y ago
  The biggest issue is that Google is also a publisher, with comment sections. It competes in the same space, and is pretty much the only game in town for advertising. This is an election year, political biases are a factor in the discussion and other sites on the other end of the political spectrum don't get their advertising removed for speech by commenters. Other sites have comment sections and has its share of trolls (from both sides) and controversial speech that targets identity groups. Does Google hold itself and other sites with that speech to the same standards? This creates an anti-trust issue. And yes, if a company has enough power to control the speech and public discourse with little other alternative is part of anti-trust, just as if there was one phone company to communicate with. There is a double standard here and a conflict of interest (not to mention they teamed up with NBC News to make this happen, another competitor). This will be used as evidence that Google should be broken up. I bet their lawyers are freaking out right now. Section 230 holds the standard that sites are not held accountable for the speech of their commenters. Corporations can censor too. The issue becomes when a corporation uses its market dominance to force another company to censor its own speech. It starts slow, but eventually it'll be any speech against Google getting censored, comments, or news articles will earn a "policy violation" with lop sided enforcement.
  - jonahbenton 6y ago
    With all respect, I'm afraid that most of what you are saying is incorrect. Google is a "publisher" but not in any way that uniquely competes with ZH. No Google property takes traffic from ZH, for ZH's audience. ZH is a well known brand, long established, with huge proportion of return visitors and inbound link traffic. Google is also very much not the only game in town for advertising. They are the default choice for many publishers but there are many, many, many monetization partners, a high degree of liquidity and flexibility, and a brand as well known and with as loyal and wealthy an audience as ZH is ideal for many monetization strategies that are much more valuable than plain old Google ads. I understand the anti-trust framing and the "teamed up" with NBC business and conflict of interest and so forth, but with all respect, that amounts to conspiracy theory/faulty inference thinking. It is not reality. Google's lawyers are not concerned about any of this. Ads is just a monetization tool. Advertising is ALWAYS sensitive to messaging and reputation and issues around implied endorsements and so forth. People confuse that with speech, but it is not. It is about b2b contractual relationships with both sides being free to end them at any time. Ads are not "pipes" like ISP service (or arguably CDN). They are not search, not publishing. Just money. Cheers.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jonahbenton 6y ago

Good lord, no. Express yourself, yes, be free from the consequences of expressing yourself- no, unless you are a child. Be entitled to compensation, no, or to compel others to enter into business arrangements with you- no. There is no restriction on expression, in principle or in law. Certain private entities no longer wish to work with Mr Durden in a particular business context. He is free to find others, in fact, he may contract with his advertisers directly, which many prefer to do rather than go through an intermediary platform, like Google, that can take 70% or more when all is said and done. Or contract with his audience, which by the tone of HN comments would be delighted to pay Mr Durden directly for the value his publication provides them. Advertising has always led to the sorts of conflations of which you mistakenly speak, where the loss of an advertiser, or an advertising platform, is a restriction on freedom. No- precisely the opposite. Freedom means you are free to fuck things up for yourself, free to bear the consequences, free to make your way. Cheers.

koheripbal 6y ago
This logic breaks down when a company becomes so large as to become an international utility. ZeroHedge has no alternative to Ad-based revenues. Google is effectively a monopoly in that market. ...and think about that. That means that Google can effectively put any online news publication out of business, at will. "but hey, they can just go to news.google.com, right?" Think about the degree of power you are happily handing Google.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Sorry, as someone who has been in the business, this is completely false. There are plenty of alternative networks. I used to work for one. Plenty of content sites that do direct advertising. Even plenty of ways to run one's own adserver. They're open source! Yes, losing monetization through one platform is rough, but that's the algorithm. He has an audience, a valuable audience. If he can't monetize it, it's not from loss of freedom, it's from lack of brains. Furthermore, every high traffic, high value property Google drops is an opportunity for someone else. It's not handing power to Google. It's Google ceding power. Cheers.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    What's the other online advertising provider?
    - jonahbenton 6y ago
      There are many. Advertising is a hundreds of $B, tens of thousands of companies ecosystem. Thousands of subniches. I worked at AppNexus, now Xandr, which was a platform for thousands of B2B companies, both buy- and sell-side. OpenX is another big platform. Verizon. Note that there are pipes between all of the big players, so that everyone sees a lot of everyone else's inventory. ZH is such an ideal ad property: lots of content, high rate of production, very targeted and wealthy audience- if ZH hadn't previously been doing direct deals (which are so much more lucrative for the publisher) then they are just failing at capitalism. Being dropped by Google may turn out to be a blessing. Google is an enormous player, to be sure, but Ads are not Search. Completely different business and dynamics. And ZH is still available for search. Cheers.
      - olivermarks 6y ago
        @jonahbenton I think you're missing the bigger picture here. NBC is a giant media monopoly that approached a giant S230 platform monopoly to demonetize a website's ad traffic via that S230 platform's advertising business. The plumbing of the surveillance capitalism advertising world is a detail in a much larger issue. The current siege mentality of starving out dissenting online voices, or merely voices that don't fit establishment narratives, is both undemocratic and harmful to the free speech conventions that define the free world. Tyler Durden as you probably know is a pseudonym for various writers at ZH and they also republish all sorts of other blog posts. Like most people I have mixed feelings about much of what they publish, have picked up invaluable information from their site and have questions about the Bulgarian owners, but I absolutely defend their right to publish and to not be bullied by much larger players.
surge 6y ago
The biggest issue is that Google is also a publisher, with comment sections. It competes in the same space, and is pretty much the only game in town for advertising. This is an election year, political biases are a factor in the discussion and other sites on the other end of the political spectrum don't get their advertising removed for speech by commenters. Other sites have comment sections and has its share of trolls (from both sides) and controversial speech that targets identity groups. Does Google hold itself and other sites with that speech to the same standards? This creates an anti-trust issue. And yes, if a company has enough power to control the speech and public discourse with little other alternative is part of anti-trust, just as if there was one phone company to communicate with. There is a double standard here and a conflict of interest (not to mention they teamed up with NBC News to make this happen, another competitor). This will be used as evidence that Google should be broken up. I bet their lawyers are freaking out right now. Section 230 holds the standard that sites are not held accountable for the speech of their commenters. Corporations can censor too. The issue becomes when a corporation uses its market dominance to force another company to censor its own speech. It starts slow, but eventually it'll be any speech against Google getting censored, comments, or news articles will earn a "policy violation" with lop sided enforcement.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  With all respect, I'm afraid that most of what you are saying is incorrect. Google is a "publisher" but not in any way that uniquely competes with ZH. No Google property takes traffic from ZH, for ZH's audience. ZH is a well known brand, long established, with huge proportion of return visitors and inbound link traffic. Google is also very much not the only game in town for advertising. They are the default choice for many publishers but there are many, many, many monetization partners, a high degree of liquidity and flexibility, and a brand as well known and with as loyal and wealthy an audience as ZH is ideal for many monetization strategies that are much more valuable than plain old Google ads. I understand the anti-trust framing and the "teamed up" with NBC business and conflict of interest and so forth, but with all respect, that amounts to conspiracy theory/faulty inference thinking. It is not reality. Google's lawyers are not concerned about any of this. Ads is just a monetization tool. Advertising is ALWAYS sensitive to messaging and reputation and issues around implied endorsements and so forth. People confuse that with speech, but it is not. It is about b2b contractual relationships with both sides being free to end them at any time. Ads are not "pipes" like ISP service (or arguably CDN). They are not search, not publishing. Just money. Cheers.