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// private companies a re de facto writing the laws // We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty lib

• nonethewiser 3y ago
  Freedom of speech is a pretty fundamental value. It's not surprising to expect it beyond where it's legally required.
  • bluescrn 3y ago
    Freedom of speech was a pretty fundamental value. A couple of generations ago.
    • goodpoint 3y ago
      Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be racist etc.
      • bluescrn 3y ago
        If you want to preserve free speech, you need to defend hateful speech. This is not a new problem: https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-civil-liberties-union-defends-free-speech-racists-and https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-...
        • goodpoint 3y ago
          No you don't, not even close.
      • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
        Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be anti-Juche counterrevolutionary etc.
• stale2002 3y ago
  You are not understanding. We already have many laws that effect companies. For example, power companies cannot just turn off your electricity because they don't like what you say. These are called common carrier laws and they are completely uncontroversial. We live in a society, and it is perfectly OK for us to put limits on what major monopoly type companies can do.
  • rhelz 3y ago
    Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with, or would it just open up a whole new front in the culture wars, of endless, highly-politicized and ham-fisted control over, say, whether or not twitter has a block function or not?
    • stale2002 3y ago
      > Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? I am not sure if you were aware, but this article is about ISPs and we currently have laws that already regulate them and make the behavior described in the article as illegal. So yes we do regulate them. And these laws are called common carrier laws. And those have have existed for decades and uncontroversial, and yes they work. > Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with Both sides are indeed already happy with our existing common carrier laws that apply to ISPs, yes. Common carrier laws are not controversial.
      • rhelz 3y ago
        Your point about common-carrier regulations already existing is very well taken. What's not so clear to me is whether (A) the allegations against the ISP have any merit (the article itself states it has no confirmation), or (B) even if they were true that they would run afoul of the common carrier laws. As far as I understand, these regulations do not prohibit the carriers from selectively promoting (and, ipso facto, selectively suppressing) the content they carry. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The capacity of the carrier is always going to be finite, therefore, tough choices are always going to have to be made as to who gets priority access. Common carrier legislation can happily co-exist with a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" sign on the shop door.
• ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  > "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?" That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.
  • foldr 3y ago
    Sure, pretty much everyone except extreme libertarians agrees that there are limits to private property rights that can be overriden in certain circumstances. However, if we (rightly) force businesses not to discriminate on the grounds of race, then it seems logically consistent to also allow businesses to refuse to associate with racists. I am not sure how someone could be ok with government intervention to prevent "whites only" restaurants and yet not ok with the government merely refraining from interfering with businesses that voluntarily choose not to associate with racists.
    • Dylan16807 3y ago
      I'm not saying it's a great policy, but it makes sense to me. Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist. In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.
      • foldr 3y ago
        Yes, I suppose there is a logically consistent space there, but not one that seems either appealing or consistent with the way the legal lines have been drawn in the US. For example, as it is not illegal in the US to express hatred for people of a particular ethnicity, should bakeries therefore be required to bake 'Ethnicity X sucks' cakes? That seems both absurd and inconsistent with the eventual outcome of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.
• wvenable 3y ago
  > But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass. > The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!! That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.
  • rhelz 3y ago
    What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem? E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective. Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?
    • wvenable 3y ago
      This sort of questioning just supports maintaining the status quo even if that benefits nobody. I don't know what the regulations should be but that doesn't mean regulations shouldn't exist. Businesses are under perhaps thousands of regulations and I can only name a few. How many can you name? What problems do those regulations solve? Do you think they shouldn't exist as well?
      • rhelz 3y ago
        // This sort of questioning // chuckle Surely you are not trying to suppress my right to ask questions? :-) We are all frustrated here and know things have got to change somehow. It's just not exactly obvious how, not to me anyways. But suppose we actually did have a concrete proposal, something we could legislate. No matter what the legislation was, there would still be media winners and media losers. And the media losers would still feel they are being systematically excluded. Here's the kicker--they would be absolutely right!! Moreover, they wouldn't have to appeal to vague dissatisfactions about "corporate abuses"--they could point to specific line items of regulations which had the effect of suppressing their speech. There would be endless, highly politicized fights about what the regulations should be, but no matter what they were, the regulations would inevitably have the effect of promoting some points of view and suppressing others. I.E. I really don't how regulations could provide any sort of solution to this problem.
• loup-vaillant 3y ago
  > * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!* Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs. Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well. Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make. Freedom is a tricky thing to balance.
  • jameshart 3y ago
    Owning a factory doesn’t give you the right to tell people what to do. Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.
  • rhelz 3y ago
    Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights. Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations would otherwise be subject to. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc. So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways. Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.