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The debate here seems like fuel for antitrust issues. A single company deciding not to do business with someone (over actions, not innate stuff like protected

The debate here seems like fuel for antitrust issues. A single company deciding not to do business with someone (over actions, not innate stuff like protected classes) should be fine, but when you let them get to be a backbone service, then issues surface like those discussed by everyone here. If google, for example decided to stop surfacing trump stuff in results, that could be a real issue. Not because it’s google doing a bad thing, but because google has become so big. Maybe “what happens if this service started banning folks?” is a useful thought exercise for whether a platform has accrued too much market share/power/influence.

astura 6y ago
Stripe (and every other credit card processors) have long refused to do business with a broad amount and types of businesses. For example, Stripe themselves don't serve most travel sites. https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed It's a super common practice to deny some customers for basically all financial services companies.
- koolba 6y ago
  If they stopped providing services to all political campaigns that’d be comparable.
  - astura 6y ago
    If you read the blog post I linked to you'd see there are various exceptions that Stripe makes in most categories and they make business justifications for each exception. It's in Stripe's best interest to deny services to Trump because coups and unstable governments are just bad for business. That's why the business lobbying group the The National Association of Manufacturers is calling for invoking the 25th Amendment This is part of their statement: “This is not the vision of America that manufacturers believe in and work so hard to defend. Across America today, millions of manufacturing workers are helping our nation fight the deadly pandemic that has already taken hundreds of thousands of lives. We are trying to rebuild an economy and save and rebuild lives. But none of that will matter if our leaders refuse to fend off this attack on America and our democracy—because our very system of government, which underpins our very way of life, will crumble.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/business/national-association-manufacturers-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/business/national-associa... Financial services companies have always chosen their customers carefully, If there were antitrust concerns with this they would have already been addressed - because this is SOP.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    If they stopped doing business with groups advocating for the violent overthrow of the government that would he compatible.
avianlyric 6y ago
Stripe is hardly a “backbone” service. There a dozens of different payment processors out there, many of them much larger than Stripe. There’s absolutely nothing preventing the Trump campaign from using a different payment processor. It would be a different matter if Visa and MasterCard had blocked them.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  But arguably CloudFlare is such a service and it is still hosting quite a bit of content that actively incites to violence on inauguration day. I won't link to it here though.
zaroth 6y ago
To the extent that these separate companies are actually coordinating a takedown of a third party, they could run afoul of anti-racketeering / RICO statutes. Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges. But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Do you have any actual evidence of coordination, or are you just making stuff up?
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Even if they're talking to each other about it, there's no racketeering or other criminal issue involved when this is the companies enforcing their established ToS. Getting together and saying "hey I think this latest incident really shows we should pay more attention to ToS enforcement" isn't racketeering.
tayo42 6y ago
What your missing is they are advocating for violence against people. Why is it is an issue to disrupt that? No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.
krick 6y ago
Exactly. I'm even sort of glad all of this is happening, because it shows more clear than ever to everyone who can think calmly because he isn't into all this political bullshit (which are few, sadly), how broken all this stuff really currently is. And it's broken on so many levels. First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them. Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either. But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point. Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you. I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy. So either there is decentralization, or there is this.

astura 6y ago

Stripe (and every other credit card processors) have long refused to do business with a broad amount and types of businesses. For example, Stripe themselves don't serve most travel sites. https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed It's a super common practice to deny some customers for basically all financial services companies.

koolba 6y ago
If they stopped providing services to all political campaigns that’d be comparable.
- astura 6y ago
  If you read the blog post I linked to you'd see there are various exceptions that Stripe makes in most categories and they make business justifications for each exception. It's in Stripe's best interest to deny services to Trump because coups and unstable governments are just bad for business. That's why the business lobbying group the The National Association of Manufacturers is calling for invoking the 25th Amendment This is part of their statement: “This is not the vision of America that manufacturers believe in and work so hard to defend. Across America today, millions of manufacturing workers are helping our nation fight the deadly pandemic that has already taken hundreds of thousands of lives. We are trying to rebuild an economy and save and rebuild lives. But none of that will matter if our leaders refuse to fend off this attack on America and our democracy—because our very system of government, which underpins our very way of life, will crumble.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/business/national-association-manufacturers-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/business/national-associa... Financial services companies have always chosen their customers carefully, If there were antitrust concerns with this they would have already been addressed - because this is SOP.
- pixl97 6y ago
  If they stopped doing business with groups advocating for the violent overthrow of the government that would he compatible.

avianlyric 6y ago

Stripe is hardly a “backbone” service. There a dozens of different payment processors out there, many of them much larger than Stripe. There’s absolutely nothing preventing the Trump campaign from using a different payment processor. It would be a different matter if Visa and MasterCard had blocked them.

jacquesm 6y ago
But arguably CloudFlare is such a service and it is still hosting quite a bit of content that actively incites to violence on inauguration day. I won't link to it here though.

zaroth 6y ago

To the extent that these separate companies are actually coordinating a takedown of a third party, they could run afoul of anti-racketeering / RICO statutes. Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges. But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.

pmiller2 6y ago
Do you have any actual evidence of coordination, or are you just making stuff up?
ineedasername 6y ago
Even if they're talking to each other about it, there's no racketeering or other criminal issue involved when this is the companies enforcing their established ToS. Getting together and saying "hey I think this latest incident really shows we should pay more attention to ToS enforcement" isn't racketeering.

tayo42 6y ago

What your missing is they are advocating for violence against people. Why is it is an issue to disrupt that? No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.

krick 6y ago

Exactly. I'm even sort of glad all of this is happening, because it shows more clear than ever to everyone who can think calmly because he isn't into all this political bullshit (which are few, sadly), how broken all this stuff really currently is. And it's broken on so many levels. First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them. Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either. But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point. Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you. I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy. So either there is decentralization, or there is this.