5 ms·

> ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehens

by zionic 6y ago

> ISPs don't want to host speech they feel is abhorrent But where does this end? Does the phone company want to allow conversations they find morally reprehensible? Does apple want to send iMessages that denigrate their company? After all, they are private companies! /s

manfredo 6y ago
It's actually a serious and legitimate question. Freedom from speech also means freedom from compelled speech. A government can't pass a law to make a Mom and Pop shop sell a certain magazine. And corporations enjoy the same freedoms: I'm very confident that the government could not pass a law forcing Twitter to overturn bans. And ISPs possibly have the same freedom from compelled speech. I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Passing your speech through an ISP is not the same as compelling the ISP to speak.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    Hosting a website and facilitating their traffic are forms of speech, since the ISP chooses to do so.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      That's a form of initiative, not speech. Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.
- zionic 6y ago
  But social media has their cake and eats it too. They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher. A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Yes. If you were running a news stand, should you be sued if one of the magazines you're selling ends up inspiring a riot? If you refused to sell a certain magazine should people be able to sue you or otherwise force you to stock their paper? Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings. Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan. That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.
    - mbg721 6y ago
      If you carefully remove the half of the news you don't like, and your users are most of the country, sure, you deserve antitrust scrutiny. Why are we pretending that Facebook is some slack-jawed Ohioan that doesn't know exactly what it's doing?
tdaltonc 6y ago
It ends where we decide that it ends. There is no slippery slope here. The protections for political speech and the cultural values around speech are incredibly high friction surfaces! If anything the slope is towards free space and historically, any curtainments of it have been temporarily.

by zionic 6y ago

manfredo 6y ago

It's actually a serious and legitimate question. Freedom from speech also means freedom from compelled speech. A government can't pass a law to make a Mom and Pop shop sell a certain magazine. And corporations enjoy the same freedoms: I'm very confident that the government could not pass a law forcing Twitter to overturn bans. And ISPs possibly have the same freedom from compelled speech. I'm no lawyer, but I think the distinction is in utilities. The postal service, for instance, can't just refuse service to people they don't like. Same with power companies. I'm not sure how phone providers and ISPs fit into this. But I think it may be useful to have ISPs, payment providers, and maybe also DNS and DDOS protection providers be considered utilities. My basic measuring stick is that putting HMTL and CSS out on the internet should be protected akin to the ability to send letters through the mail.

marcosdumay 6y ago
Passing your speech through an ISP is not the same as compelling the ISP to speak.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  Hosting a website and facilitating their traffic are forms of speech, since the ISP chooses to do so.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    That's a form of initiative, not speech. Democracies usually protect the freedom of initiative too, but it's a different protection, with very different exceptions, and companies usually have it much more restricted than speech.
zionic 6y ago
But social media has their cake and eats it too. They're granted immunity from lawsuits from the government because they're a dumb pipe, but then they censor/promote as if they are a publisher. A business can't sue facebook for allowing a BLM riot to organize on its platform that destroyed their storefront, and similarly they have no recourse when said business gets a facebook page deleted because they complained about it.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Yes. If you were running a news stand, should you be sued if one of the magazines you're selling ends up inspiring a riot? If you refused to sell a certain magazine should people be able to sue you or otherwise force you to stock their paper? Freedom from compelled speech is the default. Requiring people or organizations to host speech is the exception, and is limited to things like utilities and cigarette health warnings. Making Facebook or Twitter a utility is very coarse grained. They would have to allow all legal speech. They wouldn't be able to ban users for nudity or porn, or explicitly espousing Nazism (actual Nazism, not the much more expansive post 2016 definition of "Nazi"). Both of these things are legal in the US, and a utility would have to permit them. If social media is made a utility, then social media is going to become 8chan. That's why I think it makes the most sense to apply utility status at the infrastructure layer not the application layer. Social media companies can still moderate, people on the fringes can spread their message on niche applications or on sites they build themselves.
  - mbg721 6y ago
    If you carefully remove the half of the news you don't like, and your users are most of the country, sure, you deserve antitrust scrutiny. Why are we pretending that Facebook is some slack-jawed Ohioan that doesn't know exactly what it's doing?

tdaltonc 6y ago

It ends where we decide that it ends. There is no slippery slope here. The protections for political speech and the cultural values around speech are incredibly high friction surfaces! If anything the slope is towards free space and historically, any curtainments of it have been temporarily.