Comment by gorgoiler
8 hours ago
It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems to make more sense. It’s analogous to a ban on paper, pens, or bullhorns. I can be sympathetic to the idea that, for some people, one particular proprietary app is their main tool for expression, even if that’s hardly ideal.
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
The first amendment at its core is - if someone wants to say something and someone wants to listen to the first one saying it - the government has no right to prevent or interfere with the process. Banning the app trough which information flows is interference.
And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.
tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
if youtube was being banned instead for the same reason (pretend it was owned by ByteDance), would you feel the same way? what about any other website/platform that you like?
what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
Yes, that’s a good way to think about it.
What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.
I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
China doesn't pretend to be a democracy, so as they don't are nor pretend to be a democracy the rest of us should abandon democracy? Should be stop begin democratic because China isn't?
2 replies →