Comment by colejohnson66
9 years ago
I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting. In a public setting, if people don't like what I'm saying, they can't force me to be quiet (generally). But when hosting a website, there is the ability for companies to silence you.
For example, if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it. People who agree with the site might cry censorship, while the others just say that a company can block what it wants. Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
Tangent(?): Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions.
There will always be companies that care more about making a buck than anything else. For years spammers and malware authors have been able to find hosting without issue, and taking them down has been a serious pain in the ass. All these nazis need to do is rent a server in russia (where they've moved their name server) and they will be fine.
The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical. The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline.
>The idea that companies like Cloudflare should help support sites like this is nonsensical.
It is your framing of the idea that's nonsensical. Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
A modern, stable society needs stable infrastructure that does not bend and shift based on current events or social media campaigns. Even if in some cases it seems "fair". Because anyone with a bit of sense knows it will not be "fair" in all cases. Heck, in the current environment of extreme political polarization that much should be bloody obvious.
AT&T had common carrier status which indemnifies them against what subscribers did but that came at the cost of a lot of government oversight on what they could do in return.
Lots of private companies wouldn't want that (and AT&T butted heads over it).
Personally I think Facebook is already over that line, when you have the eyeballs of about 1/7th of the planet you are already a potential threat that should have government level oversight, in a democracy, you control the eyeballs you control the politicians.
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> Infrastructure companies should not need to police all their services. Heck, they shouldn't police their services. That is what real police and courts are for.
I'm agreed that they shouldn't need to, but not that they shouldn't at all. Making these sorts of companies on the hook for things their customers do would make it impossible to run a company like this at all.
But remember, companies are made up of people. Those people have values and, with those values, make moral judgments -- and it is entirely within their right to do so. In the majority of cases I would hope that most people would choose to be content-neutral, but I absolutely expect and support that some people will eventually hit a threshold where they cannot look the other way anymore. And, in general, I think that's _absolutely ok_.
That's an awful analogy. No one is telling cloudflare to monitor things- what's happening is that people are reporting the issue to cloudflare directly. A better analogy would be AT&T shutting down an account that was using to threaten or harass people.
> As an analogy, should AT&T monitor calls and terminate service for customers using racist slurs? Now, a lot of people would surely argue that such example is false equivalency, but it follows from the same line of reasoning and would have similar long-term consequences.
Angry mobs aren't thinking about "long-term consequences." Unfortunately, the media loves angry mobs because it generates viewership and clicks.
> The slippery slope argument is an awful fallacy and ignores the fact that we can't even get content most of the world agrees is bad (child porn, active malware exploits, spammers) offline
So is false equivalence. Child porn, active malware exploits and spam that fails to comply with the CAN-SPAM act are all illegal. Hating people is not illegal, nor is it illegal to have a website that hates people.
I'm not suggesting that CloudFlare was or is under any obligation to assist Daily Stormer in getting views, but deplorable or not, there's nothing I know to have been illegal about it, unlike the other bad acts you are lumping it in with.
It's not a false equivalence because I wasn't trying to compare the two. My entire point was that the illegal content, and stuff that we all know is bad, is still online- anyone can access it with a small amount of effort (or not), and even though big companies are already blocking it and refuse to host it the content is still readily available.
If we can't even get that content offline, the idea that cloudflare refusing to host this website means this website won't be able to find hosting is absolutely absurd.
Reading this it sounds like you missed the intent of the post. Cloudflare would have not done this had there not been circumstances in which it was indicated that cloudflare supports the organization.
It isn't clear to me where/how they determined this organization was "secretly" claiming cloudflare supported them.
The organization was publicly claiming that cloudflare secretly supported them.
> Replace Google with an ISP, and all of a sudden, it seems everyone says the ISP shouldn't be able to do that.
Well, for starters, in a hypothetical scenario in which Google does this, Google is not making profit off of it, as ISPs probably would in every hypothetical not-netneutrality scenario which we thought of.
> If the web is supposed to be the future of communication, but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them, how is that argument valid? Can someone explain that to me?
You can't shut them down. They can always host their website from the .onion domain, without Cloudflare, and handle all the traffic they want. You can shut down their domains (see: Pirate Bay), you can shut down their CDN provider (see: this example), you can shut down anything you want, but you still won't be able to shut them down completely. Even if you do, their history is on both archive.is and Wayback.
What you can do is distance yourself and do everything to make it complicated to spread their ideas. And that's what these companies are doing. By making conscious decisions, they're refusing to provide a service to a certain website. That is completely legal to do, with very few exceptions (listed here: http://www.phrc.pa.gov/File-A-Complaint/Types-of-Complaints/...).
> Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily.
I completely agree with you in this section.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
If I switch what you said around a little bit:
"I get the whole 'people can choose to interact with whoever they want' argument, but in order to do anything, you have to interact with people."
So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
People run these companies, and they're free to do business with whom they choose. Some ideologies are beyond the pale, and refusing to tolerate them is a perfectly reasonable choice.
A few business decide not to provide goods and services to black people -- not great but there are other options.
Every business decides to stop doing business with black people we have a real problem.
The way I look at it is, assuming you don't hold a monopoly on a particular service, you can choose not to do business with certain people, for whatever (legal) reason.
However, it cuts both ways: your other customers also have the option to boycott you and encourage other people to do the same.
And if every business decides to stop doing business with certain people, then either a) those people really need to rethink what they want to do, because maybe everyone else thinks they're reprehensible, or b) we actually do have a case of a civil rights violation in a new way that we haven't considered making a law for.
Every business deciding not to serve black people would be a case of (b) (though retrograde, as we already have laws around that), and refusing to provide service to hate groups is, IMO, clearly (a).
If you think Nazism, a racist, hateful ideology opposed to the existence of many groups of people, is equivalent to being black in America, we have nothing to discuss.
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> So you're saying I have to interact with Nazis? I have no choice? Hardly.
That depends. Who are you? Is there a code of ethics that would compel you to interact with someone? Is it damaging to society if there isn't?
What code of ethics doesn't have an exception for Nazis?
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This is an argument over which companies should be designated as "common carriers". If ISPs are common carriers, they can't shut you off just because they don't like what you're hosting. The argument I hear is often that ISPs should be classified as common carriers. The difference between an ISP and a search engine is material. The search engine is, by its very nature, interpreting and ranking content. The ISP is what gets you online so you can use search engines or host pages.
The root of the problem is really the botnets. If it weren't for the DDOS attacks anyone could put a server online cheaply and communicate with their relatively small and fringe audience. But because we are incapable of enforcing laws against DDOS attacks you need to be a big a player to stay online.
"Also, by not hosting Daily Stormer, you simply push them further down. One of the big reasons Trump won was because people felt like they weren't allowed to voice their opinions easily. There were people, basically closeted Trump supporters, who said they didn't like Trump, but secretly did. Pushing people down because they're "deplorables" simply reinforces their opinions."
I supported Trump(though didn't vote since I live in a deep blue state) and don't really agree with cloudflares decision, but I wouldn't use Trump supporters and "deplorables" as an argument for the Daily Stormer. It's one thing to be against immigration... heck it's one thing to be racist... but what the Daily Stormer engages in is dehumanization(and normalizes it). There's little on there that isn't said elsewhere more tactfully.
Agreed in this specific case: Daily Stormer is a hate group that promotes horrible things, and there probably isn't a better solution than to just forcibly shut them down.
But I think the poster has a point in the general sense: shutting people up through force rarely changes their way of thinking, and that can come back to bite you later on.
The larger point about trying to censor people out of having opinions instead of ignoring or condemning them is valid. This has raised their profile far beyond simply ignoring or condemning them and treating them like any other repulsive website (of which there are PLENTY that Google/GoDaddy/Cloudflare now "officially endorse").
Serious question: where's the line?
The government shouldn't be censoring.
I don't allow white nationalists into my house.
At what point does "I" represent something too big for me to no longer have the moral privilege to refuse to collaborate with white nationalists?
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In practice the web can't prevent you from voicing your opinion. Even the worst of criminals manage to chat on the dark web. Companies can choose not to promote it though - Google has no obligation to put nasty stuff high in their search and the NYT has no obligation to put it on their front page. I'm not sure there's a problem there.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument, but in order to do anything on the internet, you have to interact with companies.
Gee, it almost seems like there ought to be some set of laws or regulations which apply to companies providing what is effectively a public utility!
If there's a real free market, then people are going to find someone willing to host anything for money. The real problem is when the law prevents companies from hosting them.
"I will disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it."
>'If I want to run my own website, I need an IP address at the minimum, and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting.'
That's why the distributed web exists, things like Freenet ( https://freenetproject.org/) Beaker ( https://beakerbrowser.com/ ) and MaidSafe ( https://maidsafe.net/ ) and tons more exist.
I don't support Nazis, but people should have free speech, even if it's hate speech. Incidents like this will make people realise that in reality a handful of companies 'control' the Internet, and when a company like Cloudflare that positioned itself as a champion of 'free speech' does a 180 like this (no matter how seemingly justified) it's going to push people to alternatives.
Related-ish: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alt-right-money-20170811...
> and ISPs are free to cut off my internet service if they don't like what I'm hosting
The solution for this kind of thing would be using something like tor or i2p. However, if these companies start banning these services as well that would be a problem.
> but can prevent you from voicing your opinions just because they're a "deplorable" or you don't agree with them
If we're gonna talk about Nazis, let's talk about Nazis.
> I get the whole "companies can choose not to host whatever they want" argument
Are you sure? Because it doesn't sound like you do.
No one who supports Trump or Daily Stormer are likely not applying nearly as much inductive reasoning to their decisions as you are in this comment.
According to Blind, at least 40% of Silicon Valley workers support what Trump said regarding this incident. Probably less than 1% support the ideas of Neo-nazis or the Daily Stormer. You're making a false assumption and dehumanizing those who disagree with you.
> According to Blind
Do you see the problem with that sampling method? Blind is a pretty self-selecting audience, and I wouldn't say it represents the average tech industry at all.
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Yea ok whatever you say nazi
› if Google doesn't like a website, it can derank it
If Google actually does that, they're asking for an anti-trust suit.
Google does this all the time, has been sued a few times, and has yet to lose.
No, they're not.
Kinderstart v. Google for one of many examples.
That case had to do with whether page rank itself is anticompetitive. Their page wasn't arbitrary "deranked", the company just didn't like the algorithm. As the judge noted, Kinderstart failed to even identify the market Google was competing with them in. I was responding to the assertions that Google removes pages from their search results without reason or method.