from Hacker News

Yes, It’s Censorship

by timf on 12/4/22, 12:52 PM with 43 comments

• by CM30 on 12/4/22, 4:04 PM

  Thank you, this is something I've said for ages now. If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it. And when about 98% of internet communities are hosted by and controlled by large corporations, the whole 'go elsewhere and start up your own service' thing feels kinda clueless, as if it's deliberately ignoring how powerful network effects are.

  It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient').

  So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough.

  That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out.

• by jmull on 12/4/22, 7:36 PM

  The problem is, at Doctorow’s Anything Goes Cafe, a bunch of people shout loudly and abusively at other tables, incessantly go table-to-table to sell things, and even organize mobs to attack other tables.

  He’s ignoring this, which makes the essay weak and pointless.

• by jleyank on 12/4/22, 1:12 PM

  Gresham’s law applies to discussions as well. There’s two ways to deal with an obnoxious participant: endeavour to eject or mute them or go elsewhere and leave them their empty room. If everywhere on the internet is private space (per the article), then nobody really has a right to be anywhere - my house, my rules. Don’t like my rules, then go elsewhere and set up your rules.

  Commercial sites need customers, so they have to edit the clientele in order to survive. Smaller sites, commercial or not, are like clubs and they can set their membership rules as desired. The former gets the bland middle ground. The latter handles the edges. Most people will just go elsewhere when faced with noise.

• by musicale on 12/5/22, 12:12 AM

  > The 30 year old decision to fully privatize the internet without any public speech forums means that we live in a city without any sidewalks or parks or school auditoriums where the First Amendment applies.

  The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one.

  I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.

• by isitmadeofglass on 12/5/22, 7:25 AM

  > It’s pretty clear that Anything Goes is a more robust promoter of free expression than No Politics. It’s also clear that when a restaurant manager eavesdrops on your dinner-table conversation and then tells you to shut up because they don’t like your subject that they are abridging your free expression.

  This article follows the age old and wrong pattern of defining freedom of speech as some absolute freedom based on nothing but it’s name and ignoring context and contents, then calling everything censorship. Imagine if the constitution was explicit about citizens having “freedom of popcorn”. Here made with a stupid name that has no relation to what it is defined as to highlight the distinction between name and definition. This freedom of popcorn would state that the government shall not inhibit the freedom of movement of its citizens without due process.

  That would be a fairly ok freedom to establish. Essentially saying “the government cannot just put you in jail for no good reason”. Now comes the dumb part. We would then have authors like OP arguing that when their neighbor prevents them from camping in their kitchen, they are infringing on their freedom of popcorn, and are thereby effectively putting them in jail without process unless they let them camp out in their kitchen.

• by MilnerRoute on 12/4/22, 4:48 PM

  The last line...

  "The problem isn’t the calls they make — it’s the lack of an alternative when they get it wrong."

  But as much as he says that... do we really believe there will ever be an alternative?

• by byyll on 12/4/22, 9:29 PM

  I've often seen the argument that freedom of expression is somehow equal to the US constitution. I am glad someone addresses it in a proper way.

• by scarface74 on 12/4/22, 3:48 PM

  > Imagine that every place in the city was privately owned, and again, 90 percent of those places were managed by No Politics Holdings (International) Ltd, and they did not permit political discussion.

  And there is no monopoly on being able to set up a web server at a colo and create your own social media website where like minded people can listen to themselves - ie Parlor.

• by jacooper on 12/4/22, 4:19 PM

  What, Doctorow posing on Medium and not his blog Pluralistic?, why?

• by root_axis on 12/4/22, 7:33 PM

  The discourse around "censorship" has been bastardized to push an agenda. The waters have been muddied so that Elon suspending Kanye on Twitter goes into the same bucket as the Chinese great firewall. If you say "I like social media platforms that ban avowed Nazis" you're bashed over the head with disingenuous rhetoric likening you to an advocate for authoritarianism.

• by Proven on 12/4/22, 4:30 PM

  There's censorship, but it's mostly legal (we'll see of the Deep State gets away with what they've been doing).

  There are alternatives, they are just not convenient.

  There are no monopolies except for governmental - that's where the game is rigged the most.