Comment by AfterHIA
5 months ago
I 100% agree with your sentiment here Jensson but in Googling, "common carrier law" what I get are the sets of laws governing transportation services liability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
Is there perhaps another name for what you're describing? It piques my interest.
Common carrier also applies to phones and electricity and so on, it is what prevents your phone service provider from deciding who you can call or what you can say. Imagine a world where your phone service provider could beep out all your swear words, or if they prevented you from calling certain people, that is what common carrier prevents.
So the equivalent of Google banning anyone talking about Covid is the same as a phone service provider ending service for anyone mentioning covid on their phones. Nobody but the most extreme authoritarians thinks phone providers should be allowed to do that, so why not apply this to Google as well?
This is essentially the free speech maximalist position: allow any legal content.
If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation. Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
Perhaps. But another approach would be to give users better filtering features so that they wouldn't see content they consider objectionable, even if it's not censored and still readily available to other users.
So what's the solution, just continue to build two Americas that will eventually go to war?
> If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation.
Did people leave Google in droves in favor of a competitor that censors out all porn from search results? No, people had no issue that you can find porn on Google, they still used it. Youtube providing porn to those who want it does not cause problems for anyone, just like it doesn't for Google search, and Google even run both so they can easily apply this same feature on Youtube.
> Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
The internet is overrun by spam and porn yet people still use it, so you are clearly wrong. Google already manages as search engine over the internet that is capable of not showing you porn when you don't search for it, but you can find it if you do, so Google has already solved that problem and could just do the same in Youtube.
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