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I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on

by izacus 5y ago

I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior company, that will magically have incentives to fight for them instead of making money. It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry. Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

duxup 5y ago
The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands. I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...
- throwaways885 5y ago
  > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
  - landryraccoon 5y ago
    That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.
    - teh_infallible 5y ago
      I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.
      - derek_codes 5y ago
        What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.
    - jlawson 5y ago
      No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them. If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times. You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.
      - mason55 5y ago
        But I think we need to examine both sides of this. When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen. Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies. But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different. I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.
  - gcanyon 5y ago
    This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.
    - lenkite 5y ago
      Until they commit crimes and are formally charged and prosecuted in a court of law, they can believe anything they like.
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      Well, remove their voting rights then if you think that they are too stupid. Why should I be the one who suffers?
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...
      - prox 5y ago
        Because there are an awful lot of knowledge domains where there is consensus among experts, and one can verify their own knowledge along those lines.
        wtetzner 5y ago
        The consensus of experts has been wrong many times throughout history.
        prox 5y ago
        1)depends on the domain 2)not for a lack of trying 3) theories can be challenged, new proofs can be found Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    > Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember. In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.
    - porknubbins 5y ago
      Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.
      - michaelpb 5y ago
        I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.
      - 5y ago
  - ferdowsi 5y ago
    To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.
    - throwaways885 5y ago
      But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality? Why is information intelligence not taught in schools? Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to 1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth 2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities 3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        > Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        How is the education system today going to help people who went to school in the 1970s? Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?
        5y ago
  - bserge 5y ago
    Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.
    - eigen 5y ago
      > Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - zuminator 5y ago
    Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.
      - mahogany 5y ago
        Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term? It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        Strictly speaking, "platform" is an umbrella term, and people are actually distinguishing between publisher and non-publisher.
    - throwaways885 5y ago
      What I'm suggesting is that neither I or large corporations are capable of making that distinction. Nor the government for that matter.
      - nobody_at_all 5y ago
        Corporations only make that distinction on their property. These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone. Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    There is always a line and content that is illegal and the question will always be where that line is drawn.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal. There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits. I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.
  - yibg 5y ago
    I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality. Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      > fact that half the population is dumber than dirt I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoting-dangerous-bleach-cures-for-autism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti... I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash. One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers. If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position. On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.
  - slg 5y ago
    >Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Within the law of which country? Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands? Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US? Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China? If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa. EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial. I'm not sure why this is a revelation.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.
  - koonsolo 5y ago
    You clearly don't have kids that consume content on the internet.
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared. This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform? In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person? Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion. New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'
  - ixtli 5y ago
    “Within the law” undermines your point. It takes the issue and just shifts it to another location on the map. It resolved nothing. We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.
  - diego 5y ago
    The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.
  - pasca1 5y ago
    It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.
  - oceanplexian 5y ago
    +1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.
  - laumars 5y ago
    > Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      > The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps. Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
      - silentsea90 5y ago
        So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections? The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive. Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.
        brandonmenc 5y ago
        No, they're not "ok", but I personally believe that outright censorship is worse. ymmv.
        silentsea90 5y ago
        It is a hard problem. The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom. Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.
  - ai_ja_nai 5y ago
    > Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few. Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right? I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike. Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    Yeah. I think there is very little I see that should be censored beyond holocaust denial. Maybe CP. Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - jb_s 5y ago
    >Within the law Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    In 2006/07 they bought YouTube and Doubleclick. That is the inflection point on the evil meter.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor. Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.
  - concordDance 5y ago
    > To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions. I think others will too. For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  Do you support the right of others to host content you consider violent or garbage?
  - gizmo 5y ago
    In a free society sites like liveleaks and wikileaks absolutely have a right to exist. As well as all the fringe conspiracy sites. The problem with censorship by Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google is different. Here the government is putting pressure on the tech companies to censor content they don't like. Censor the bad people or risk antitrust action. It's so gross and so clearly in violation of the first amendment. Even elected officials and professors are not exempted. It doesn't matter if you're elected by the people or if you're an expert in your field, if you say something that is considered 'misinformation' by the Ministry of Truth you get censored. It's outrageous, and if big tech doesn't change course we need to start building alternative platforms. But it might already be too late.
    - CyberRabbi 5y ago
      It doesn’t matter if competing platforms are built. Normal people don’t care one way or another, especially outside of how those other platforms are popularly characterized, so those other platforms will never take off. Only a minority of people are conscious of their liberties and subsequently any potential infringement to them.
      - ShroudedNight 5y ago
        > Normal people don’t care one way or another... As far as I can tell, no shift of the overton window begins with 'normal people', rather it always ends with 'normal people'. Any campaign of this nature is a long and sustained effort over months and years. One requiring that normal people precede them on the wave of change is a guarantee that one will never begin to move in the first place.
      - code_duck 5y ago
        All of the major platforms of today will surely be replaced eventually. Snapchat and TikTok came seemingly out of nowhere in roughly the same FAANG environment as today.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Yet it is rational to oppose distribution of what you think is wrong and promote distribution of what you think is right. You must have a hidden premise in there somewhere.
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    That is rational, yes. I think pretty much everyone thinks this way, with differing definitions of both "promote" and "oppose", and "wrong" and "right". Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    I think most religion is wrong, yet I'm not opposing that. I also think genocide is wrong, and yes, I'll oppose that. Same with anti-vax rhetoric. While religion can be a real negative, it isn't generally the goal and often, there are good intentions. Genocide hurts people, though, through its nature. Anti-vaccine propaganda hurts folks as well. You simply cannot have these movements without hurting folks.
    - hanselot 5y ago
      People take the vaccine they die. They don't take it they die. Why bother taking it then? It doesn't do anything a vaccine is supposed to do. So why cal it that? Why not call it what it is? Experimental gene therapy with 0 long term studies. Why the social pressure to force others to make the same mistake you made by volunteering for use of a drug that you can't even sue the creators of if it kills you? My hat off to you for being willing to die so that others can learn from this experiment, but don't pretend you are anything more than rats in a lab.
    - stevenicr 5y ago
      Some religions have hurting people codified in their main directives - so some should be stopped from being shared. Ponzi schemes? Crypto investments? Drugs? Gambling? Alcohol recipes? Sugar? i-robot protect us all with truth! (except hunter laptop, and lab leak theory - hide those haha) Actually - I am kind of okay with this new kindergarten gloves way of treating the people - let's give them the sharing a ability they deserve. California knows best what's good for everyone - just don't talk bad about beef. Well you may have to censor that in some other parts of the world. Different kindergarten for different countries? different states? Think how much better and safer this internet world is going to be without all these bad things!
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.
  - duxup 5y ago
    Man I'd love to find test that theory scientifically.
  - filleduchaos 5y ago
    Complacence might be a better descriptor than mad/outraged. For example nobody really gets up in arms over companies choosing not to host (what they deem to be) pornography for example, and various bans of risqué content and the people who produce them from major platforms tend to get a lukewarm response from people who are otherwise vocal about free speech (see: the USA's FOSTA/SESTA)
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    There is a long history of people in the USA and elsewhere being mad that companies host certain things - pornography was illegal to distribute for decades because of such beliefs, and is still segregated from non-pornographic content, and shunned by all regular advertisers (you won't see Coca-Cola ads or Beats headphones on pornographic sites) for precisely this reason.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  I am absolutely happy if a company is ready to host everything legal.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  host some violent folks' content Consider the Irish Troubles. Consider the US Civil Rights movement.
  - robotresearcher 5y ago
    Isn't US Civil Rights movement notable for its nonviolence overall? MLK emphasized asserting basic human rights, so that the violence of the state should be seen more clearly by contrast. The US revolutionary movement might be a more clear example where violent action was decisive.
- logifail 5y ago
  > we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system. There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up. Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it. I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down. However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important? * or gin :)
  - freedomben 5y ago
    I think rather than "violently" you meant to say "vehemently." If not then ignore this comment. If so then you should probably edit as the two have important differences in meaning.
    - logifail 5y ago
      I believe "violently" can have two different meanings, the first involving the use of physical force, the second meaning "strong" or "vigorous". All my violent disagreements are the latter not the former! :)
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    There are two more ways to deal with content we don't like. We've largely abandoned these to our great harm: 1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it. 2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others. Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like If by "we" you mean US politicians and mass media, then sure. But I'm not sure that's true for the general populace in the US, nor for other countries. On another note - I don't like that they host things, at all. That is, I don't like that the entity which runs a search engine is also the one which hosts a large part of the videos available for free on the Internet. Or that a company making popular computing hardware like Apple is also the host and gatekeeper for mobile apps, podcasts etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
JasonFruit 5y ago
What makes you think the government is that Messiah? Is it likely, in your view, that the government will go out of their way to "encourage the spread of misinformation"? I'm not seeing that happening.
- duxup 5y ago
  >What makes you think the government is that Messiah? I didn't get that impression from that post...
- bdcravens 5y ago
  I don't think izacus suggested it was. My read: there is no messiah, and a system of checks and balances is how we protect the public interest.
- paulluuk 5y ago
  In the EU, governments and actually trying very hard to discourage the spread of misinformation, as well as passing legislation that the tech sector has always claimed was not needed. So yes, it's very likely, as it's already happening.
semitones 5y ago
I agree with everything except "I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think" - I don't think this, and I don't think my post implied that I think that either. To clarify my statement: "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." - I don't think that the structure provided by a company is sufficient to do this properly. Rather than companies/governments, we need protocols and standards. For instance, what if we had a decentralized app (dapp) built on something like cardano, that allowed one to edit docs that lived on an IPFS? We might have to sacrifice some micro-conveniences (e.g. google docs saves automatically for you as often as every few keystrokes) to make it tenable on something like a blockchain, but it seems feasible.
danuker 5y ago
Doesn't need to be a private company. For instance, LibreOffice is looking at WASM: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM
- mod50ack 5y ago
  In fact, there is already Collabora, which is production ready, FOSS and based on LibreOffice.
starkd 5y ago
Government regulation is no substitute for competition. The ability for consumers to walk away to a suitable alternative maintains a continual accountability that a single agency is unlikely to deliver.
- macintux 5y ago
  I’ve walked away from Facebook, but I’m still negatively impacted by their algorithm which promotes anger, division, and conspiracy theories.
  - bruiseralmighty 5y ago
    This actually highlights the point well I think. The cost of walking away from Facebook is too high for most people even though they know its' bad for them. Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry). If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse. Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.
    - rainsil 5y ago
      Isn't the Messenger app a "messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse."? They also seem to have standalone web and desktop versions at messenger.com
    - starkd 5y ago
      And how old are you? I don't think it's too much to expect for you to be able to manage your own emotions by now. FB has nothing to do with that.
- avanderveen 5y ago
psyc 5y ago
I'm really sorry for the off-topic, but I've been waiting for a chance to ask because I see it here very, very often. What are people intending to denote with the "private" in "private company", especially where the company is so obviously and well-known to be public[ally traded]? What are you trying to distinguish it from by calling it private? Are you just pointing out it's not the government or quasi-governmental? Are you emphasizing that it has its own prerogatives? Sorry, this has just been becoming a peeve for me on this site. I just want to know what you're trying to express by calling a company that is not privately owned, "private". Thanks.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I feel the exact same way. I suspect "Private Company" is being used in relation to Public/Private Sector and not in relation to whether or not the company is publicly traded.
  - psyc 5y ago
    I feel like your sense of it might be right. But even then, you can count the number of public sector "companies" (like Fannie and Freddie) on one hand, so it just strikes me as such a bizarre distinction.
    - ABCLAW 5y ago
      It's not a bizarre distinction. The discussion is about free speech, and a common talking point has to do with comparing the actions of companies to the protections laid out for free speech in the American first amendment. However, the first amendment is a restriction on government, not a restriction on private individuals or corporations.
      - psyc 5y ago
        Private equity groups are private. My uncle’s construction company is private. Google isn’t private in any sense that isn’t confusing. Why not just say that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to corporations? That seems clear to me. And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper?
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ukie 5y ago
Hitler would be proud of this comment.
clairity 5y ago
we could get a lot closer if markets were well-regulated for fairness and competitiveness. instead, we get all sorts of distortions, some well-meaning but most not. one sign of a good market dynamic is a lot of medium-sized companies, rather than very large or very small, because that means the companies have taken advantage of economies of scale but no one firm has outsized advantage, so all must still compete. to that end, google, facebook, et al. should each probably be split up into dozens of companies to start, with stong privacy, portability and interoperability standards/mandates at minimum.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  I wonder how long it takes until your imho very true observations will be heard. Splitting up of these internet behemoths is so much overdue!
  - leppr 5y ago
    Heard? By whom? Monopoly-capitalism directly benefits rulers, complaining to the very people who have incentives to keep the system as it is will not change anything. You and your fellow citizens have to actually do something.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
I think another error is assuming that having all content within a few hyper-scale hyper-global ad-supported commercial repositories of everything is a natural or healthy state of affairs. Many small websites dedicated to particular things is IMO generally better both from a free speech and a moderation standpoint than these giants that have to thread an impossible needle. In other words, web 1.0 was better.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Can't agree more.
nitwit005 5y ago
> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? A lot of censorship has traditionally been governments threatening to regulate industries if they don't self regulate, and that's pretty much what's been going on.
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ashtonkem 5y ago
I personally think nobody should have this kind of power.
Bud 5y ago
What happened to regulation of private companies? Easy answer. The modern GOP happened.
the8472 5y ago
There is a category of companies that doesn't try to be a content arbiter. Common carriers, utilities, other services that have an obligation to contract. Of course the "contract" with SNPs is that you "pay" with your eyeballs falling on adverts, and the ads in turn don't want to be anything like common carriers. So turning any web service into something like a common carrier would have interesting knock-on effects.
soheil 5y ago
> It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry. Why is it like that and not like gas stations not allowing smoking so their property doesn't go up in flames? It's really strange to think market forces must always be against consumer, there can be mutual benefit if the right incentives are put in place.
- username90 5y ago
  There are absolutely lots of regulations around fire near gas stations, why did you think that gas station owners made those rules? They have to follow them or they will lose their permit and get shut down.
ksec 5y ago
>Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook. I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ). And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.
- takoid 5y ago
  Quite relevant quote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” - John Dalberg-Acton
- magicalist 5y ago
  >> Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah > They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook. Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.
mgraczyk 5y ago
I would much rather live with censorship that can be removed by withholding dollars vs one that requires votes. Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever. When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.
option 5y ago
competition definitely can make things better. But we aren’t seeing enough competition and these companies are engaging in anti-competetive behavior without much consequences.
iammisc 5y ago
Well by all means regulate, but realistically, for example, if we had a Google Drive run by the 'other side' of the political aisle (kind of like Gab v Twitter), then if Google banned certain content, it's unlikely the other would, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the issue here is companies responding to something other than the market.
yazantapuz 5y ago
In the other hand, government agencies are not saviors either.
abaracadab 5y ago
Honestly a lot of folks should assess the value that big tech provides. We survived the 90’s running MSDOS backing stuff up to disks. And storage is cheap. Cloud this-and-that is great in theory but in practice it makes things too complicated. For instance, whenever I use a cloud-centric application I’m thinking okay… so where’s my files? And the answer is who knows! More specifically I used to use OneNote when it used the local file system and I could get to my data. Then MSFT puts everything behind a cryptic ten-layer hashed URI… The tech industry is like an insurance company now selling people on fear of losing files or productivity—but I’d wager more often than not technology gets in the way of folks productivity. By technology I mean fluffy clouds because obviously tech CAN help. We need a better balance and a lot of that starts by keeping it simple.
ezekg 5y ago
I mean, I don’t really think this holds up. I have personally dropped all Google products I use in favor of privacy-focused alternatives. For example, GA>Fathom, Gmail>Protonmail, etc. So I’m sure privacy-focused competitors will pop up soon, or perhaps they already exist and I simply don’t know of them because I’m not a big user of the OP’s listed Goog products. The market has most certainly spoken: we prefer privacy, and we no longer want to be a product. Competition will come to fill those needs. No need for more government regulation. The free market works.
- antihero 5y ago
  > The market has most certainly spoken This laughable arrogance. The market has most certainly spoken but not in the way you and your microcosm think it has. The market doesn't give a fuck about privacy. They want convenience and want to pay as little as they for it. Privacy might seem to be on people's tongues at this moment and it will continue to be still, but only a core few will actually make decisions that inconvenience them in order to achieve it. Only a few million people are leaving services like WhatApp en-masse. 99% of their customers do not give a fuck. They aren't doing drug deals (well some are), they aren't dissidents, they aren't terrorists, they're just every day people going about their business with likely zero real repercussions other than finding it a bit creepy and continuing to scroll. There's probably more people leaving because things have gotten a bit boring and uncool than people taking a principled stand for privacy. We are, at least currently, outliers. Do not forget that.
  - ezekg 5y ago
    I’m referring to the segment of the market I’m in. I didn’t mean ‘the market’ as in 100% market share. I should have said “the market is speaking.” No need to come off as rude.
- roenxi 5y ago
  That, and Google has ~ 20 years of history where they were perfectly fine and they've really only started to act up recently in ways that are, at worst, objectionable and inconvenient without being particularly harmful. The risks of letting market competition sort it out are much smaller than the risks of making it a political football. As a political topic it is basically going to be two parties fighting over which set of lies get to be true. That won't be better.
coolaliasbro 5y ago
I often wonder whether the solution is setting the expectation with companies that if they act in bad faith, their leadership will be om nom nommed? Apologies for the metaphor, it's the best I could come up with on short notice.
galangalalgol 5y ago
executive agencies should inspect and enforce, but not regulate. That is the legislature's job and they cannot felegate it beyond "implementation details". We have been too lenient with this so we get the FCC, FDA, EPA, ATF etc flipflpping on what amount to laws instead of details with every change of administration. That isn't how its supposed to work. Congress decides laws, no one else.
philwelch 5y ago
As people remind us all the time, it’s not a violation of the right to freedom of expression if a private company stops letting you use their services. It is a violation of that right if the government does so.
amelius 5y ago
The fundamental issue is companies dealing with out data when they should just be making hardware or software. In the old days, computer companies made the hardware and government institutions used that to run the internet. This is how it should be. Companies should not be touching our data directly. They simply cannot handle the responsibility.
ai_ja_nai 5y ago
I'd say that this decision by Google stems from regulators and public opnion bashing against misinformation. Private companies follow the wind of the policies that are there to coerce them. In this case, the policy that is being put in place is that misinformation is dangerous and should be countered. In 5 years, misinformation could be relegated to Tor networks, where it belongs.
mikeiz404 5y ago
> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? My guess is a combination of regulatory capture and apathy on the part of citizens for various reasons.
abecedarius 5y ago
1. The GP said nothing about any savior company. They said "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority". 2. You seem to be saying here that you want a specialized agency to do censorship right, as one centralized decision maker. Am I misunderstanding? A Ministry of Truth?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
imgabe 5y ago
> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? The whole point of free speech was not to have a government agency regulating and inspecting what you are allowed to say.
xupybd 5y ago
The problem is the government is pushing the same agenda
jb775 5y ago
Private my ass. I understand the terminology, but they are part of the defacto public domain, and are a publicly owned company. They built their company utilizing the resources and technological prowess of the United States, then piss in its face to cater to woke leftist silicon valley politics (which doesn't represent 90%+ of America). If that MIT study about the end of the world turns out to be true, THIS type of woke bullshit will be the cause. And when society falls, I have a feeling who's gonna be gunned after first.
- inlikealamb 5y ago
  What do you suggest? the government takes over Google? Prevents them from controlling what they store on their servers? If society fails (which is little more than a prepper wet dream) everyone's going to go gunning for whoever has food and fuel. No one will care about Google or political parties.
  - jb775 5y ago
    I'd suggest we protect freedom of speech similar to how we protect civil rights. Before civil rights, "private businesses" used the same exact excuse as big tech while refusing customers based on race. In the current setup, big tech thrives risk-free via governmental protections separating them from their customers (or what their customers post on the platform). The underlying concept of social media has become a public utility, and should be protected as such. Once big tech began altering visibility of posts based on politics (in any way/shape/form), they crossed the Rubicon.
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_greim_ 5y ago
> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? Government agencies tend get packed with appointees whose political interests undermine the agency's original charter.
PixyMisa 5y ago
What happens is the government makes things worse.
aeternum 5y ago
I would much rather have a even just a handful of private companies be the regulators rather than a single entity. If our founding fathers had one guiding principle, it was to distribute power as much as possible as power has a strong tendency to concentrate and corrupt.
kortilla 5y ago
I think your fundamental error is the fact that you think that a regulatory agency can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior government body, that will magically do something ethical and correct for all of the citizens, and not just some politicians like every other government body in history. Did it occur to you that maybe the GP wasn’t suggesting a company solve the problem and was hinting at open source + open protocol?
EverydayBalloon 5y ago
It looks like our specialized agencies are as corrupt as the industries they're tasked to monitor ... which should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with human nature.

by izacus 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands. I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...

throwaways885 5y ago
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
- landryraccoon 5y ago
  That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.
  - teh_infallible 5y ago
    I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.
    - derek_codes 5y ago
      What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.
  - jlawson 5y ago
    No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them. If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times. You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.
    - mason55 5y ago
      But I think we need to examine both sides of this. When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen. Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies. But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different. I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.
- gcanyon 5y ago
  This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.
  - lenkite 5y ago
    Until they commit crimes and are formally charged and prosecuted in a court of law, they can believe anything they like.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    Well, remove their voting rights then if you think that they are too stupid. Why should I be the one who suffers?
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...
    - prox 5y ago
      Because there are an awful lot of knowledge domains where there is consensus among experts, and one can verify their own knowledge along those lines.
      - wtetzner 5y ago
        The consensus of experts has been wrong many times throughout history.
        prox 5y ago
        1)depends on the domain 2)not for a lack of trying 3) theories can be challenged, new proofs can be found Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  > Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember. In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.
  - porknubbins 5y ago
    Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.
    - michaelpb 5y ago
      I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.
    - 5y ago
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality? Why is information intelligence not taught in schools? Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to 1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth 2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities 3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      > Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      How is the education system today going to help people who went to school in the 1970s? Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?
      - 5y ago
- bserge 5y ago
  Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.
  - eigen 5y ago
    > Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- zuminator 5y ago
  Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.
    - mahogany 5y ago
      Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term? It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        Strictly speaking, "platform" is an umbrella term, and people are actually distinguishing between publisher and non-publisher.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    What I'm suggesting is that neither I or large corporations are capable of making that distinction. Nor the government for that matter.
    - nobody_at_all 5y ago
      Corporations only make that distinction on their property. These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone. Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.
- katbyte 5y ago
  There is always a line and content that is illegal and the question will always be where that line is drawn.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal. There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits. I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.
- yibg 5y ago
  I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality. Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    > fact that half the population is dumber than dirt I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoting-dangerous-bleach-cures-for-autism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti... I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash. One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers. If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position. On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.
- slg 5y ago
  >Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Within the law of which country? Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands? Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US? Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China? If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa. EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial. I'm not sure why this is a revelation.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  You clearly don't have kids that consume content on the internet.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared. This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform? In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person? Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion. New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'
- ixtli 5y ago
  “Within the law” undermines your point. It takes the issue and just shifts it to another location on the map. It resolved nothing. We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.
- diego 5y ago
  The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.
- pasca1 5y ago
  It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  +1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.
- laumars 5y ago
  > Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    > The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps. Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
    - silentsea90 5y ago
      So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections? The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive. Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.
      - brandonmenc 5y ago
        No, they're not "ok", but I personally believe that outright censorship is worse. ymmv.
        silentsea90 5y ago
        It is a hard problem. The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom. Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.
- ai_ja_nai 5y ago
  > Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few. Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right? I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.
- swayvil 5y ago
  I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike. Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  Yeah. I think there is very little I see that should be censored beyond holocaust denial. Maybe CP. Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jb_s 5y ago
  >Within the law Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  In 2006/07 they bought YouTube and Doubleclick. That is the inflection point on the evil meter.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor. Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions. I think others will too. For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
Do you support the right of others to host content you consider violent or garbage?
- gizmo 5y ago
  In a free society sites like liveleaks and wikileaks absolutely have a right to exist. As well as all the fringe conspiracy sites. The problem with censorship by Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google is different. Here the government is putting pressure on the tech companies to censor content they don't like. Censor the bad people or risk antitrust action. It's so gross and so clearly in violation of the first amendment. Even elected officials and professors are not exempted. It doesn't matter if you're elected by the people or if you're an expert in your field, if you say something that is considered 'misinformation' by the Ministry of Truth you get censored. It's outrageous, and if big tech doesn't change course we need to start building alternative platforms. But it might already be too late.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    It doesn’t matter if competing platforms are built. Normal people don’t care one way or another, especially outside of how those other platforms are popularly characterized, so those other platforms will never take off. Only a minority of people are conscious of their liberties and subsequently any potential infringement to them.
    - ShroudedNight 5y ago
      > Normal people don’t care one way or another... As far as I can tell, no shift of the overton window begins with 'normal people', rather it always ends with 'normal people'. Any campaign of this nature is a long and sustained effort over months and years. One requiring that normal people precede them on the wave of change is a guarantee that one will never begin to move in the first place.
    - code_duck 5y ago
      All of the major platforms of today will surely be replaced eventually. Snapchat and TikTok came seemingly out of nowhere in roughly the same FAANG environment as today.
guerrilla 5y ago
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Yet it is rational to oppose distribution of what you think is wrong and promote distribution of what you think is right. You must have a hidden premise in there somewhere.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  That is rational, yes. I think pretty much everyone thinks this way, with differing definitions of both "promote" and "oppose", and "wrong" and "right". Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  I think most religion is wrong, yet I'm not opposing that. I also think genocide is wrong, and yes, I'll oppose that. Same with anti-vax rhetoric. While religion can be a real negative, it isn't generally the goal and often, there are good intentions. Genocide hurts people, though, through its nature. Anti-vaccine propaganda hurts folks as well. You simply cannot have these movements without hurting folks.
  - hanselot 5y ago
    People take the vaccine they die. They don't take it they die. Why bother taking it then? It doesn't do anything a vaccine is supposed to do. So why cal it that? Why not call it what it is? Experimental gene therapy with 0 long term studies. Why the social pressure to force others to make the same mistake you made by volunteering for use of a drug that you can't even sue the creators of if it kills you? My hat off to you for being willing to die so that others can learn from this experiment, but don't pretend you are anything more than rats in a lab.
  - stevenicr 5y ago
    Some religions have hurting people codified in their main directives - so some should be stopped from being shared. Ponzi schemes? Crypto investments? Drugs? Gambling? Alcohol recipes? Sugar? i-robot protect us all with truth! (except hunter laptop, and lab leak theory - hide those haha) Actually - I am kind of okay with this new kindergarten gloves way of treating the people - let's give them the sharing a ability they deserve. California knows best what's good for everyone - just don't talk bad about beef. Well you may have to censor that in some other parts of the world. Different kindergarten for different countries? different states? Think how much better and safer this internet world is going to be without all these bad things!
ceilingcorner 5y ago
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like. Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.
- duxup 5y ago
  Man I'd love to find test that theory scientifically.
- filleduchaos 5y ago
  Complacence might be a better descriptor than mad/outraged. For example nobody really gets up in arms over companies choosing not to host (what they deem to be) pornography for example, and various bans of risqué content and the people who produce them from major platforms tend to get a lukewarm response from people who are otherwise vocal about free speech (see: the USA's FOSTA/SESTA)
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  There is a long history of people in the USA and elsewhere being mad that companies host certain things - pornography was illegal to distribute for decades because of such beliefs, and is still segregated from non-pornographic content, and shunned by all regular advertisers (you won't see Coca-Cola ads or Beats headphones on pornographic sites) for precisely this reason.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
I am absolutely happy if a company is ready to host everything legal.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
host some violent folks' content Consider the Irish Troubles. Consider the US Civil Rights movement.
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  Isn't US Civil Rights movement notable for its nonviolence overall? MLK emphasized asserting basic human rights, so that the violence of the state should be seen more clearly by contrast. The US revolutionary movement might be a more clear example where violent action was decisive.
logifail 5y ago
> we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system. There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up. Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it. I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down. However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important? * or gin :)
- freedomben 5y ago
  I think rather than "violently" you meant to say "vehemently." If not then ignore this comment. If so then you should probably edit as the two have important differences in meaning.
  - logifail 5y ago
    I believe "violently" can have two different meanings, the first involving the use of physical force, the second meaning "strong" or "vigorous". All my violent disagreements are the latter not the former! :)
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  There are two more ways to deal with content we don't like. We've largely abandoned these to our great harm: 1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it. 2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others. Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.
einpoklum 5y ago
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like If by "we" you mean US politicians and mass media, then sure. But I'm not sure that's true for the general populace in the US, nor for other countries. On another note - I don't like that they host things, at all. That is, I don't like that the entity which runs a search engine is also the one which hosts a large part of the videos available for free on the Internet. Or that a company making popular computing hardware like Apple is also the host and gatekeeper for mobile apps, podcasts etc.
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JasonFruit 5y ago

What makes you think the government is that Messiah? Is it likely, in your view, that the government will go out of their way to "encourage the spread of misinformation"? I'm not seeing that happening.

duxup 5y ago
>What makes you think the government is that Messiah? I didn't get that impression from that post...
bdcravens 5y ago
I don't think izacus suggested it was. My read: there is no messiah, and a system of checks and balances is how we protect the public interest.
paulluuk 5y ago
In the EU, governments and actually trying very hard to discourage the spread of misinformation, as well as passing legislation that the tech sector has always claimed was not needed. So yes, it's very likely, as it's already happening.

semitones 5y ago

I agree with everything except "I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think" - I don't think this, and I don't think my post implied that I think that either. To clarify my statement: "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." - I don't think that the structure provided by a company is sufficient to do this properly. Rather than companies/governments, we need protocols and standards. For instance, what if we had a decentralized app (dapp) built on something like cardano, that allowed one to edit docs that lived on an IPFS? We might have to sacrifice some micro-conveniences (e.g. google docs saves automatically for you as often as every few keystrokes) to make it tenable on something like a blockchain, but it seems feasible.

danuker 5y ago

Doesn't need to be a private company. For instance, LibreOffice is looking at WASM: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM

mod50ack 5y ago
In fact, there is already Collabora, which is production ready, FOSS and based on LibreOffice.

starkd 5y ago

Government regulation is no substitute for competition. The ability for consumers to walk away to a suitable alternative maintains a continual accountability that a single agency is unlikely to deliver.

macintux 5y ago
I’ve walked away from Facebook, but I’m still negatively impacted by their algorithm which promotes anger, division, and conspiracy theories.
- bruiseralmighty 5y ago
  This actually highlights the point well I think. The cost of walking away from Facebook is too high for most people even though they know its' bad for them. Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry). If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse. Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.
  - rainsil 5y ago
    Isn't the Messenger app a "messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse."? They also seem to have standalone web and desktop versions at messenger.com
  - starkd 5y ago
    And how old are you? I don't think it's too much to expect for you to be able to manage your own emotions by now. FB has nothing to do with that.
avanderveen 5y ago

psyc 5y ago

I'm really sorry for the off-topic, but I've been waiting for a chance to ask because I see it here very, very often. What are people intending to denote with the "private" in "private company", especially where the company is so obviously and well-known to be public[ally traded]? What are you trying to distinguish it from by calling it private? Are you just pointing out it's not the government or quasi-governmental? Are you emphasizing that it has its own prerogatives? Sorry, this has just been becoming a peeve for me on this site. I just want to know what you're trying to express by calling a company that is not privately owned, "private". Thanks.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
I feel the exact same way. I suspect "Private Company" is being used in relation to Public/Private Sector and not in relation to whether or not the company is publicly traded.
- psyc 5y ago
  I feel like your sense of it might be right. But even then, you can count the number of public sector "companies" (like Fannie and Freddie) on one hand, so it just strikes me as such a bizarre distinction.
  - ABCLAW 5y ago
    It's not a bizarre distinction. The discussion is about free speech, and a common talking point has to do with comparing the actions of companies to the protections laid out for free speech in the American first amendment. However, the first amendment is a restriction on government, not a restriction on private individuals or corporations.
    - psyc 5y ago
      Private equity groups are private. My uncle’s construction company is private. Google isn’t private in any sense that isn’t confusing. Why not just say that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to corporations? That seems clear to me. And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper?

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ukie 5y ago

Hitler would be proud of this comment.

clairity 5y ago

we could get a lot closer if markets were well-regulated for fairness and competitiveness. instead, we get all sorts of distortions, some well-meaning but most not. one sign of a good market dynamic is a lot of medium-sized companies, rather than very large or very small, because that means the companies have taken advantage of economies of scale but no one firm has outsized advantage, so all must still compete. to that end, google, facebook, et al. should each probably be split up into dozens of companies to start, with stong privacy, portability and interoperability standards/mandates at minimum.

jhoechtl 5y ago
I wonder how long it takes until your imho very true observations will be heard. Splitting up of these internet behemoths is so much overdue!
- leppr 5y ago
  Heard? By whom? Monopoly-capitalism directly benefits rulers, complaining to the very people who have incentives to keep the system as it is will not change anything. You and your fellow citizens have to actually do something.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

I think another error is assuming that having all content within a few hyper-scale hyper-global ad-supported commercial repositories of everything is a natural or healthy state of affairs. Many small websites dedicated to particular things is IMO generally better both from a free speech and a moderation standpoint than these giants that have to thread an impossible needle. In other words, web 1.0 was better.

rambambram 5y ago
Can't agree more.

nitwit005 5y ago

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? A lot of censorship has traditionally been governments threatening to regulate industries if they don't self regulate, and that's pretty much what's been going on.

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ashtonkem 5y ago

I personally think nobody should have this kind of power.

Bud 5y ago

What happened to regulation of private companies? Easy answer. The modern GOP happened.

the8472 5y ago

There is a category of companies that doesn't try to be a content arbiter. Common carriers, utilities, other services that have an obligation to contract. Of course the "contract" with SNPs is that you "pay" with your eyeballs falling on adverts, and the ads in turn don't want to be anything like common carriers. So turning any web service into something like a common carrier would have interesting knock-on effects.

soheil 5y ago

> It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry. Why is it like that and not like gas stations not allowing smoking so their property doesn't go up in flames? It's really strange to think market forces must always be against consumer, there can be mutual benefit if the right incentives are put in place.

username90 5y ago
There are absolutely lots of regulations around fire near gas stations, why did you think that gas station owners made those rules? They have to follow them or they will lose their permit and get shut down.

ksec 5y ago

>Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook. I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ). And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.

takoid 5y ago
Quite relevant quote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” - John Dalberg-Acton
magicalist 5y ago
>> Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah > They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook. Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.

mgraczyk 5y ago

I would much rather live with censorship that can be removed by withholding dollars vs one that requires votes. Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever. When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.

option 5y ago

competition definitely can make things better. But we aren’t seeing enough competition and these companies are engaging in anti-competetive behavior without much consequences.

iammisc 5y ago

Well by all means regulate, but realistically, for example, if we had a Google Drive run by the 'other side' of the political aisle (kind of like Gab v Twitter), then if Google banned certain content, it's unlikely the other would, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the issue here is companies responding to something other than the market.

yazantapuz 5y ago

In the other hand, government agencies are not saviors either.

abaracadab 5y ago

Honestly a lot of folks should assess the value that big tech provides. We survived the 90’s running MSDOS backing stuff up to disks. And storage is cheap. Cloud this-and-that is great in theory but in practice it makes things too complicated. For instance, whenever I use a cloud-centric application I’m thinking okay… so where’s my files? And the answer is who knows! More specifically I used to use OneNote when it used the local file system and I could get to my data. Then MSFT puts everything behind a cryptic ten-layer hashed URI… The tech industry is like an insurance company now selling people on fear of losing files or productivity—but I’d wager more often than not technology gets in the way of folks productivity. By technology I mean fluffy clouds because obviously tech CAN help. We need a better balance and a lot of that starts by keeping it simple.

ezekg 5y ago

I mean, I don’t really think this holds up. I have personally dropped all Google products I use in favor of privacy-focused alternatives. For example, GA>Fathom, Gmail>Protonmail, etc. So I’m sure privacy-focused competitors will pop up soon, or perhaps they already exist and I simply don’t know of them because I’m not a big user of the OP’s listed Goog products. The market has most certainly spoken: we prefer privacy, and we no longer want to be a product. Competition will come to fill those needs. No need for more government regulation. The free market works.

antihero 5y ago
> The market has most certainly spoken This laughable arrogance. The market has most certainly spoken but not in the way you and your microcosm think it has. The market doesn't give a fuck about privacy. They want convenience and want to pay as little as they for it. Privacy might seem to be on people's tongues at this moment and it will continue to be still, but only a core few will actually make decisions that inconvenience them in order to achieve it. Only a few million people are leaving services like WhatApp en-masse. 99% of their customers do not give a fuck. They aren't doing drug deals (well some are), they aren't dissidents, they aren't terrorists, they're just every day people going about their business with likely zero real repercussions other than finding it a bit creepy and continuing to scroll. There's probably more people leaving because things have gotten a bit boring and uncool than people taking a principled stand for privacy. We are, at least currently, outliers. Do not forget that.
- ezekg 5y ago
  I’m referring to the segment of the market I’m in. I didn’t mean ‘the market’ as in 100% market share. I should have said “the market is speaking.” No need to come off as rude.
roenxi 5y ago
That, and Google has ~ 20 years of history where they were perfectly fine and they've really only started to act up recently in ways that are, at worst, objectionable and inconvenient without being particularly harmful. The risks of letting market competition sort it out are much smaller than the risks of making it a political football. As a political topic it is basically going to be two parties fighting over which set of lies get to be true. That won't be better.

coolaliasbro 5y ago

I often wonder whether the solution is setting the expectation with companies that if they act in bad faith, their leadership will be om nom nommed? Apologies for the metaphor, it's the best I could come up with on short notice.

galangalalgol 5y ago

executive agencies should inspect and enforce, but not regulate. That is the legislature's job and they cannot felegate it beyond "implementation details". We have been too lenient with this so we get the FCC, FDA, EPA, ATF etc flipflpping on what amount to laws instead of details with every change of administration. That isn't how its supposed to work. Congress decides laws, no one else.

philwelch 5y ago

As people remind us all the time, it’s not a violation of the right to freedom of expression if a private company stops letting you use their services. It is a violation of that right if the government does so.

amelius 5y ago

The fundamental issue is companies dealing with out data when they should just be making hardware or software. In the old days, computer companies made the hardware and government institutions used that to run the internet. This is how it should be. Companies should not be touching our data directly. They simply cannot handle the responsibility.

ai_ja_nai 5y ago

I'd say that this decision by Google stems from regulators and public opnion bashing against misinformation. Private companies follow the wind of the policies that are there to coerce them. In this case, the policy that is being put in place is that misinformation is dangerous and should be countered. In 5 years, misinformation could be relegated to Tor networks, where it belongs.

mikeiz404 5y ago

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? My guess is a combination of regulatory capture and apathy on the part of citizens for various reasons.

abecedarius 5y ago

1. The GP said nothing about any savior company. They said "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority". 2. You seem to be saying here that you want a specialized agency to do censorship right, as one centralized decision maker. Am I misunderstanding? A Ministry of Truth?

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imgabe 5y ago

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? The whole point of free speech was not to have a government agency regulating and inspecting what you are allowed to say.

xupybd 5y ago

The problem is the government is pushing the same agenda

jb775 5y ago

Private my ass. I understand the terminology, but they are part of the defacto public domain, and are a publicly owned company. They built their company utilizing the resources and technological prowess of the United States, then piss in its face to cater to woke leftist silicon valley politics (which doesn't represent 90%+ of America). If that MIT study about the end of the world turns out to be true, THIS type of woke bullshit will be the cause. And when society falls, I have a feeling who's gonna be gunned after first.

inlikealamb 5y ago
What do you suggest? the government takes over Google? Prevents them from controlling what they store on their servers? If society fails (which is little more than a prepper wet dream) everyone's going to go gunning for whoever has food and fuel. No one will care about Google or political parties.
- jb775 5y ago
  I'd suggest we protect freedom of speech similar to how we protect civil rights. Before civil rights, "private businesses" used the same exact excuse as big tech while refusing customers based on race. In the current setup, big tech thrives risk-free via governmental protections separating them from their customers (or what their customers post on the platform). The underlying concept of social media has become a public utility, and should be protected as such. Once big tech began altering visibility of posts based on politics (in any way/shape/form), they crossed the Rubicon.

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_greim_ 5y ago

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries? Government agencies tend get packed with appointees whose political interests undermine the agency's original charter.

PixyMisa 5y ago

What happens is the government makes things worse.

aeternum 5y ago

I would much rather have a even just a handful of private companies be the regulators rather than a single entity. If our founding fathers had one guiding principle, it was to distribute power as much as possible as power has a strong tendency to concentrate and corrupt.

kortilla 5y ago

I think your fundamental error is the fact that you think that a regulatory agency can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior government body, that will magically do something ethical and correct for all of the citizens, and not just some politicians like every other government body in history. Did it occur to you that maybe the GP wasn’t suggesting a company solve the problem and was hinting at open source + open protocol?

EverydayBalloon 5y ago

It looks like our specialized agencies are as corrupt as the industries they're tasked to monitor ... which should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with human nature.