In fact, it is exactly the freedom for such parties to decline to do so that is included in freedom of speech.
Should we simply stop expecting anything resembling free speech on the internet?
This is not a theoretical problem. After Quillette published the response of 4 scientists to the Google memo they were DDoSd off the net.
BlackLotus hosted stormfront for years, CloudFlare hosts reams of controversial content - wikileaks, the pirate bay, 8chan, etc. They're practically known for it.
Currently at least, it's still quite possible to find a provider who will look out for their customers. In the registrar category there are a few providers who shine, DynaDot and EasyDNS have really gone to bat before.
Where? Your bedroom? You can and will be blocked by your ISP. Colo? Private facility and network interconnects. Outside the country? Blocked at the borders, or you have to register with a US company (.com is managed by a US company, as is .net; .org is a global company but still incorporated in the US).
Plugged directly in to the backbone? You can still be shut down by Level3 and its ilk (or by the terminating ISPs).
In short, I disagree that even by hosting your own site you can still avoid censorship by private companies.
This is the problem. If nobody wants to host my speech, fine: I can set up a server in my own bedroom if need be. But if nobody accepts my domain, it's not quite so easy to set up my own registrar.
Private companies arbitrarily censoring domain names is a can of worms that shouldn't be opened. Registration must be held up to a higher standard, like an utility.
If I make a nazi movie nobody has to show it in their theatre. If I write a nazi book no publisher has to pick it up and print it.
If you want a nazi domain name system then go ahead and create it. Run a DNS server, advertise it as "this is the DNS for nazis" and you can have www.holocaustdenial.nazi all you want.
Google is under no obligation to provide such a service to a party they deem objectionable (on pretty good grounds).
> they are well within their rights as private companies to deny service.
Many utilities are also private companies and they they are required to provide service anyway. So one does not strictly follow from the other.
That's why I said DNS providers should be considered utilities. At least the national-level ones. If resellers won't take it you should still be able to get it straight from the ccTLD registrar.
Not on the hosting side.
> Many utilities are also private companies and they they are required to provide service anyway.
Yes, but they're not. DNS is a nice-to-have, not a must. Hosting is a must, if you want to make a case then you are going to have an uphill battle where a hosting provider would have to supply and and all paying customers.
I assumed we were talking about hosting from home, since hosting at some datacenter would again be dealing with additional private entities.
> if you want to make a case then you are going to have an uphill battle where a hosting provider would have to supply and and all paying customers.
I guess that would be an alternative. So either non-discriminatory treatment from hosters or non-discriminatory treatment from ISPs + DNS registrars.
That's because they're not exactly private companies; they're government-sponsored monopolies. If they weren't, and if there were real competition for the services they provide (like all of the other local businesses), then they wouldn't be required to provide services to any particular customer.
Static IPs are available and if you are hosting content you usually should prefer them.
OTOH, I think in the regime we do have, expecting Nazis to get a free pass for violating registration firms TOS is unreasonable, and granting such an exception, even silently by failure to enforce, would send a terrible message.
Just like you can't get kicked from your internet service, electricity or water providers for arbitrary reasons.
Given that the net neutrality regulations which were adopted to actually explicit protect all lawful content and applications are unlikely to ever go into effect given the new FCC makeup, this is not true. Nothing stops ISPs today from having restrictive, content-based TOS restricting lawful activity.
That being said, I can appreciate the argument that DNS service should be covered in an even more expansive net neutrality framework than the one we almost had in the US.
The entirety of the internet is not composed of private entities. There are plenty of public entities that comprise parts of the internet. (And, in the US, those public entities are restricted in viewpoint discrimination when they create public fora.)
Now, it's true that private users in the US generally must deal with private vendors for internet services, and most of those services (including, e.g., DNS services) are neither public nor regulated-utility services, which does mean that lots of things one might want to do on the internet are subject to viewpoint discrimination by other private parties whose collaboration would be necessary for one to complete one’s intent.
> Should we simply stop expecting anything resembling free speech on the internet?
Free speech involves, fundamentally, the challenge of convincing others that your speech should be relayed. The internet is no different in that regard.
There are many, many others.
revcom in particular seems like an ineffective hobby of one guy, based on Wikipedia [1].
Also, skimming around their website, I see calls to protest against fascism, but not calls to violence. [2] contains their "Points of Attention for the Revolution", which ends with We are going for an actual overthrow of this system and a whole better way beyond the destructive, vicious conflicts of today between the people. Because we are serious, at this stage we do not initiate violence and we oppose all violence against the people and among the people
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party,...
[2] http://revcom.us/movement-for-revolution/revolution-clubs/
Selective outrage is curious.
I don't think that was ever the expectation. The internet is a lot larger than the USA. Different countries, different laws.
I'd also be fine if they dropped them from search. I'm not fine with them abusing their status as a domain registrar.
If I violate the terms of my lease I can be evicted. If you violate your registrar's terms of service your website can be shut down. This is not a new concept, not is it somehow special because it's "on the internet".
It absolutely is, just not with the government. If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing. Google is the second registrar to kick them out. I don't care for what they say, but if we want a free internet, we have to allow the good with the bad.
I mean we complain when China does it, how is this fundamentally different?
Because a private company declining to participate in the hosting of somebody's speech is a hell of a distance from the government mandating blocking said speech? How is this even a serious question?
Random House probably isn't interested in publishing a neo-nazi racial superiority manifesto, either. That's neither a free speech issue nor "tantamount to Chinese censorship".
The solution to that problem is to have a federalized registrar that will allow anyone to register anything and is required to uphold free speech laws as they apply to the internet.
Refusing to actively collaborate in spreading someone else's viewpoint isn't gluing their mouth shut.
Now, if you want to argue that domain registration should be a public utility and not a private interaction where the service providers freedom of speech and association is protected, that's perhaps a reasonable argument. But that's not the status quo.
But in the system we have now, domain registrars and DNS providers should not be engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination against the domain owner, or in content-based discrimination against anything they may have on their servers.
I can certainly condone web hosting service companies embargoing troublesome customers, but anything closer to infrastructure than that should not be cut off for any reasons other than failure to pay the bills.
I don't think it is that simple. ISIS does just fine on the web, I'm sure Neo Nazis will do just fine as well. But that's no reason why the IT giants of the planet should aid and abet them.
Perhaps if DNS service was regulated as a utility, or if Google was an arm of a state or federal government, there might be something to your argument.
If you think that a pro-Nazi newspaper would have no problem setting up shop, you are sorely mistaken. They will have the same problems as this website and people of conscience will refuse to have them as clients. This website, as would those newspapers, will need to find suppliers sympathetic to their views.
That few people are sympathetic to their views, in my opinion, is the market at work.
Not to mention that the Internet is a global network with 200+ speech laws.
That's the standard fallback of authoritarians. The law says the government can't ban speech, but the spirit of free speech, particularly on something like the internet, should be protected.
> If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing.
the whole point of the net neutrality folks is ensuring that ISPs can't keep them from accessing whatever sites they want, isn't it?
if it is in some sense OK for google to refuse these domain registrations, is it also OK for google (and then comcast, etc etc) to refuse to carry the packets for these sites?
Also, as I get chastised for using Bing (because they pay me) and much of their traffic comes from browser defaults, it's arguable that if they stopped hosting on google.com it may not be that negative of an impact.
To the same degree, note that Amazon CHOOSES not to list their more specific apps in the google store and force customers to download THEIR store and change their phone permissions.
Nobody is doing that.
Nobody is mandated to give you a medium for your speech. Go on the corner and scream all you want.
Delisting a domain from the DNS is metaphorically equivalent to raiding the premises of a newspaper publisher and ripping the banner off the front page of each printed copy, while leaving the remainder intact, so that anyone attempting to read the latest copy of that paper would not be able to find one, even if they were standing on a stack of them. It is backdoor censorship, by attacking people's name-based associations.
No, it isn't. It is merely saying that you won't take an entry in your copy of the phone book, but you're free to petition the other issuers of phone books and you're free to create your own phone book.
Do you think it acceptable for casual users of the phone network to keep their own list of phone books that include self-published phone books that the major phone book book publishers won't list?
I didn't really get your point, too many books in it. Care to rephrase it, please?
Are you implying that every online community and service should be forced to accept absolute freedom of speech?
Porn is speech, should YT and Fb be forced to host porn?
Also, Google and GoDaddy sure forced Stormwhatever to not be accessible through their domain name. Again, using power given to them by the US government.
Do you believe you are actively fighting against the freedom of this group to speak? Do you see where some people would think you are? Do you think that will come back to bite you in the future?
With no requirements that they should not refuse service to anyone.
> Also, no one is saying "force."
Then what are you saying? Should Google be "xxxxx" to accept Stormwhatever? What is "xxxxx"? Honest question, what are you proposing?
> Again, using power given to them by the US government.
And doing so per the conditions specified by the US government.
First Amendment lawyer Ken White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/godaddy-blacklis...
So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it. The registrars were then privatized, which I don't particularly have a problem with, but since the internet was created with public funds, it should allow the freedoms the government gives us.
Like I said, I'm not suggesting Google be forced to do it, but the US government should run a "public option" registrar that protects the freedom of speech / expression that putting up a website provides. If the government feels like they should ban a website, allow it to go through the court system and see if they agree. With privatization, we don't have the court system to go through (well we do, but since it's a private company, courts probably won't hear it.) That would be a good solution for me. Let Google keep their censoring and data collection if they want.
Very little of the current infrastructure was built with public funds Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure around the world come from companies, some government owned, some private.
> The registrars were then privatized
Actually, they weren't. They never existed in a public fashion. You're mixing up registry and registrar.
Today, it isn't a monopoly, so anyone can create their own registrar if they want. So if they don't find a registrar wanting to do business with them, they can spend a few thousand $ and create their own.
On the "government-run neutral registrar", I'm not sure if that's a good solution. I've rarely ever seen a government keep something neutral...
Domain registration and DNS are [nearly] essential now, in the same way that street signs are essential for a road network. If your city council decides to rip out the street sign that labeled the street you live on, such that visitors could not easily locate your house, and mail would not be delivered in a timely or reliable fashion to your mailbox, do you think you might have grounds to complain?
Assigning a street name and postal address to your lot is not the same as building a house on it.
So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
If Cthulhu comes up to your desk chewing on half of a Dagonite cultist, you accept its business, and charge it exactly the same fee per month as you just charged smiling baby Jesus holding two cute kittens for his domain registration. The amount of editorial control you may exercise is inversely proportional to your power to influence the entire Internet. Since domain registration is right there at the center and has such great power, you do not get to color the whole Internet with your own personal values.
Google or GoDaddy aren't running the DNS system, or even street signs.
They are running a phone book service, which is also run by many other companies, each under their own ToS. They can reject service to anyone (well, except protected classes).
But there in lies the problem. Private companies don't want the stink of Stormwhatever associated with their name in the press and are more likely to banstick them because profit.
I think the best solution is a public option registrar.
no?
okay I'll keep popping up every once in a while to ask.
I also wonder how many of the 300+ million Americans are now quiet converts waiting in the wings. Scary times.
That it happened to be the ideology used to horrific ends in the industrialized world last century is much more a product of its moment in history than due to anything unique about the ideology itself.
The poisonous seed isn't the problem - rather, the ground fertile to it must be tended so that it will reject such things taking root.
So even if it isn't a necessity it certainly will help to make it grow, and will allow it to grow faster.
You're not going to see any trouble anywhere - except on private property - for expressing ideas such as 'men and women differ biologically', note that no government you'd care to list here has ever suppressed speech like that.
But Nazism is on a different level, and if you're willing to go down that road protecting the free speech of Nazis you really have to be very optimistic about human nature. I keep hearing echoes of 'it can't happen here'. But I believe it can happen, and it probably can happen everywhere. The question is if we will let it and what it will take to stop it once the ball starts rolling.
They partly are. The USA, for all its faults, is the last bastion of free speech in the world. And I say this as a European.
...which is obviously tautological.
For better data, check out the democracy index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde.... It's compiled by the publisher of The Economist, which is trusted rather widely, and its methodology is public.
And we are certainly not the only democratic country that have similar laws...
Dictatorship is one of the easy to find local minima of human organization, that we have to fight everyday not to slip down towards. You do that by accepting the humanity of your opponents, finding reasonable compromises, and there's no reasonable compromise to be had with the Nazi ideology, just ask the dead.
I have two rather distinct objections to this line of thinking. One is that this isn't especially true. To name one semi-controlled experiment: Germany has laws against using Nazi symbols, denying the Holocaust, and so forth, and yet the crypto-neo-Nazi NPD pulls down hundreds of thousands of votes every election--not enough to win anything aside from one European Parliament seat, but a significant number anyway. Meanwhile, the US has no laws against neo-Nazi expression and also doesn't seem to have very many more neo-Nazis per capita--even in Charlottesville, the neo-Nazis numbered in the high dozens to low hundreds and were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters.
A more philosophical objection is that you don't want to go into the business of deciding what ideas are too dangerous to express, because there's a greater risk that any institution with the power to make and enforce that judgment call will abuse that power. This is also a lesson that Europe learned the hard way, but seems to have forgotten.
As for your second point, ideas may be too dangerous to express and you're still free to express them. But that's no reason to hand someone a megaphone to express those ideas and I think that Europe learned that there are points in time where small changes can have large effects, and that some of those effects can get out of control. So they tried (and possibly failed, but so far so good) to put mechanisms in place to stop a re-occurrence of recent history.
Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.
Likewise, a lot of what's happened in Europe does not have a parallel in the USA. Elections have been seriously contested and sometimes won by the likes of Golden Dawn, Le Pen--both father and daughter--the BNP, Alessandra Mussolini, Jorg Haider, and so forth. Sure, in Europe you don't have a hundred white nationalists marching down the street carrying swastika flags, but you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.
We're working on it. The last batch of elections was pretty scary but so far so good. If WWII wasn't enough to teach the world a lasting lesson you have to wonder how bad it would have to get before we will. Quite possibly it can not be done and we will occasionally revert to type.
Censorship cannot triumph over evil, because it is evil in itself. The only reasonable counter is constant vigilance and tireless opposition. Furtive, deceitful whispers in the shadows call for floodlights and truth. Open demonstrations call for larger counter-demonstrations. The effective counter to objectionable speech is not censorship, but speaking the objection.
Allowing some forms speech has an incredibly chilling effect on other forms of speech, or on the safety of people.
Even America does not have absolute free speech (Although its further on this spectrum then all other Western democracies.) See - fighting words, direct incitements to domestic violence (Indirect domestic ones of the wink wink nudge nudge ones are fine, as are direct ones that incite violence against foreign persons or nations.)
Reacting to the Nazis with violence was tried in Germany. And it backfired very badly.
We are in the midst of a cultural civil war. The funny thing is that the more you suppress their ability to protest and their speech, the more converts you're making.
Maybe we should start by asking WHY these groups are getting more popular, why they are so enraged and angry and suddenly are out front airing their frustrations. And saying this is all about Trump is simply masking something that has clearly been brewing for a long time prior to this.
What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.
Pushing it underground is maybe ineffective as a sole strategy but making it seem acceptable is also not right.
Lots of these people only do this because they feel they have cover.
In that last decade, apparently not much - which is why you have the problem you have now. This idea of doing something has not been done at all, but now all the SJW's have their hammers out and now everything looks like a nail.
It doesn't work like that. In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.
I agree with that. Until we're talking about a party whose sole purpose is to take away those rights from others. That's one rule in the democratic playbook that we should all subscribe to and that should be a prerequisite for being allowed in the sandbox.
>The Princeton University’s class of 2012 had plans to dress up for their five-year reunion, but their choice of wearing stormtrooper masks from Star Wars got derailed when someone used the magic word -
>Nazis.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/14043/princeton-reunion-cancel...
Amusingly, an alum quipped on a FB post at the time about actual holocaust survivors not having raised a fuss about the term when the original films came out in the 70's.
It wasn't always like this. The best example is the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus, with its Pax Romana and everything related to it, which wasn't seen as a bad thing by lots of writers during the centuries that followed it. The second example that comes to mind is the Investiture Controversy from the early Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_Controversy), which saw the Papacy ideologically battling it out against the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire was definitely not seen as oppressive or anything the like.
On a more generic note, us Christian Orthodox use the phrase "The Empire from the Skies" (my not so good translation, here's the wiki article on it in Romanian which literally translates as "God's Empire" : https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Emp%C4%83r%C4%83%C8%9Bia_...), and, again, the term "empire" is not seen as oppressive or anything similar, quite the contrary.
Racist viewpoints? COVERED
Misogynistic viewpoints? COVERED
Satanism, Cults and "questionable" religious groups? COVERED
Pedophiles and MBLA? COVERED
Websites that advocate illegal drug use? COVERED
Websites that advocate political assassination? COVERED
Websites that advocate killing law enforcement officers? COVERED
There are limitations to free speech, but the reason it EXISTS is not cover speech YOU approve it, it's for speech people you DO NOT agree with and viewpoints that aren't popular.
This is the problem I have with people who say they support freedom of speech, but when it comes to groups like ANTIFA, BLM and others on the left, it's ok to shut down white supremacist websites, but not others exposing the same thing, just on the other side of the aisle.
You can't have it both ways, that's why freedom of speech covers EVERYBODY equally.
It takes a special kind of warp to see either of those as spewing hate, whereas it is pretty easy to why people in general believe Nazis spew hate.
Actually, you can, that's why there are free speech exceptions in US law and protected classes? Hate speech and hate crimes are a real thing.
Also "ANTIFA" (it's "Antifa" lol) and BLM aren't monolithic groups - one is an ideology dedicated to fighting fascism and the other is a social justice movement consisting of many decentralized local community orgs. Neither of these are comparable to Nazis literally shouting to gas kikes in the streets and running over peaceful protesters and if you think they are, you might want to check yourself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, "the law"--as some have curiously called it--can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes' quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.
those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago.
Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Holmes' famous quote is the go-to argument by appeal to authority for anyone who wants to suggest that some particular utterance is not protected by the First Amendment. Its relentless overuse is annoying and unpersuasive to most people concerned with the actual history and progress of free speech jurisprudence. People tend to cite the "fire in a crowded theater" quote for two reasons First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute. Saying it is not an apt or persuasive argument for the proposition that some particular speech is unprotected, any more than saying "well, some speech is protected by the First Amendment" is a persuasive argument to the contrary. Second, people tend to cite Holmes to imply that there is some undisclosed legal authority showing that the speech they are criticizing is not protected by the First Amendment. This is dishonest at worst and unconvincing at best. If you have a pertinent case showing that particular speech falls outside the First Amendment, you don't have to rely on a 90-year-old rhetorical flourish to support your argument. Holmes' quote is the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech.
[Full Excerpt] The damage Holmes inflicted — the malleable and unprincipled standard of censorship he drafted — was not thoroughly rebuffed until a half-century later. Brandenburg v. Ohio states the modern standard:
These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. . . . A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.
Note that Brandenburg does suggest, explicitly, that some speech is unprotected by the First Amendment. But people seeking a generic pro-censorship quote go to Holmes, not Brandenburg, and well they should — Schenck supports a loose and unprincipled interpretation of what the "fire in a theater" might be. [Edit: as a commenter points out, note that to be fair to Chayes she does mention Brandenburg even though she opens with Schenck.]