Comment by throwaway7312
9 years ago
This is just the latest in a string of examples like this.
The Christian bakers / gay wedding cakes is one example.
But people being booted off services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are others.
We ought to have the right to exclude people from our own private spaces, our own private clubs, and our own private businesses (freedom of association).
However, at what point (and at what scale) does our private club become so large it is a de facto public space?
There does not seem to be any real precedent for discussions like this. The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
> The Internet has created an entirely new wrinkle in the debate around free speech and public places.
No, absolutely nothing has changed. What has changed is that the internet has given every idiot out there a megaphone and a way to link up with other idiots at a moments notice and groups like the Neo Nazis love like minded company because there is safety for them in a crowd, a way to be part of the monster without having to stand up to scrutiny.
The Christian bakers were sued and then forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because sexual orientation is a protected class. "Alt-right" or whatever Daily Stormer is, is not a protected class. "Political party" is a protected class, which puts Daily Stormer in a possibly fuzzy territory (I have never read Daily Stormer so I don't know if they count as a political publication).
Wasn't it because their service was custom messages on cakes? So they had to expect those messages would be often not to their liking?
Fine, let's make political affiliation a protected class as well. There's no reason to restrict it to registered parties. Nobody should be denied access goods and services because of who they voted for and how they wish to govern this country. Otherwise the majority could use denial of services to silence and coerce their political opponents.
> Fine, let's make political affiliation a protected class as well
No thanks.
The alt-right would undo all the protected classes. Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. Your rights do not supplant mine.
That's stupid. Why should I have anymore right to discriminate against people with red hair than people with black skin? If it's wrong, it's wrong no matter the group you do it to.
I'm talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. You can discriminate against red-haired people but not black people.
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> at what point (and at what scale)
The internet giants are monopolies and should be regulated as such, or broken up. But the government has basically abandoned monopoly enforcement over the last couple decades. The irony is that it is because of right-wing, anti-regulation, libertarian politics that the government has become so reluctant to enforce monopoly laws.
There's enormous precedent around the whole scale from public discrimination to privately owned public (government) forums to private discrimination in special critical circumstances (common carriers, employment, and housing), to private discrimination in businesses that are public accommodations generally, and mountains of statute and case law specific to each.
And, in each of the major categories, the law has already been applied on the internet.
While the specific scenarios may have some novelty, the general issues are not new with the internet.
I think this is key. We're in new territory with the internet.
Will we ever be at a point where a VoIP call is filtered because the service doesn't want to transmit what you're saying?