Google and GoDaddy are not beholden to the constitution and are well within their rights to reject the Daily Stormer. White supremacy isn't a suspect class. It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.

I think discussing Constitution protections from the government should include discussions on protections applying when the government allows the private sector to take over some of its work. If privatization reduces constitutional protections... that feels a bit like an exploit, not an intended feature.

Would you be ok if Comcast decided to disallow you from accessing sites they determine are offensive? Or filesharing? Or porn? Even if it is their right to do so, it'd make me uncomfortable.

ISPs can and should be regulated... in fact they should pass a law... maybe call it net neutrality.

That is where we should draw the line, beginning and end of story. If google deems a site offensive and doesn't want to return it in search listings, I'll find another search engine. I don't use facebook and couldn't care less what they do or don't display. If it's vital to you, pick a different social network.

ISPs on the other hand are a utility and should be treated as such. The DOT doesn't get to tell me which stores I can visit before I pull onto the highway. My ISP shouldn't have any right to tell me which websites I can visit either.

Domain registrars look more like utilities, e.g. ISPs, than applications, e.g. Google.

Google and Facebook are not common carriers, so they are under no obligation to be content-neutral. (If you're arguing that they should be common carriers, that's a perfectly fruitful discussion to have.)

Oklahoma City

Dylann Roof

The asshole who drove his car into a group of counterprotestors

Most of the HN crowd, including myself, are big fans of a lot of programs that are easily seen as socialist such as universal healthcare or universal income.

I know the "slippery slope" trope seems tired at times, but this might be a case where it's warranted.

I actually respect companies and organizations that uphold the rights of people they disagree with, such as the ACLU and Cloudflare. They get a lot of flak for that (ACLU for defending neo-nazi rights to protest, cloudflare for protecting websites for pirates, hackers, radicals, etc).

As an individual that leans very left, my instinct is to say "Alright Google and GoDaddy! Screw those Nazis!" but the same leftist freedom-loving side of me says "I would hate it if a controversial site I ran was shut down because it had an unpopular opinion"

This is why instead of names we should use verifiable actions IMHO. Are you calling for acts of violence against people of another race y/n? Are you attacking and injuring people y/n? Are you destroying public or private property and entering into acts of vandalism y/n? Are you telling people they are worth less because of some attribute they can't control like skin color, sexual orientation, etc y/n?

We can pretty much all agree on this stuff. It just gets problematic when you start throwing labels around and basing policy of off that, because everyone has a different idea of what some label means. For instance, Nazis were a socialist workers party who preached a large and benevolent social welfare program, but many socialists or social democrats would be offended if we called them Nazis even though there is much overlap in many of their particular policies. The same is true of conservatives who could also be broadly labeled as Nazis since they may tend to be more nationalist as were the Nazis.

Again its just a flawed way of thinking about the issues IMHO.

Nazis were a socialist workers party who preached a large and benevolent social welfare program

That must be the understatement of the year. You're either trying to rewrite history or are very uninformed. The Nazis conspired to overthrow the government long before they gained any widespread popularity, that's why Hitler rightly went to prison. The SA was roaming the streets, beating up and even killing Jews and political opponents. They were very dangerous and spread terror wherever they showed up.

Of course, socialists and social democrats would be offended to be called Nazis. They literally went to prisons and Concentration Camps because of their socialist views.

I agree. I don't see where I was claiming anywhere that if someone openly proclaims to be something, we shouldn't take them at their word for it. My issue is mainly with people being labeled as something when they are not themselves claiming to be that thing.

> That must be the understatement of the year. You're either trying to rewrite history or are very uninformed.

I don't see how insulting me adds anything here. I got my undergraduate in German Studies and have lived in Germany my entire adult life. I suppose I could have been clearer in my statement in that the Nazi party was only in part built on the principles of a large social welfare state [1]. I thought that was clear since I also mentioned the very nationalistic [1] part of the Nazi party.

Anyway, I don't really know what you're claiming other than general agitation at a claim I didn't make. I pretty much agree with you.

1. https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/25Points.html

Well-intentioned question: where do you draw the line? Where does it start or end? Businesses that have used this same logic to discriminate against LGBT patrons based on the owners' religious beliefs have had a very difficult time selling this same spiel.

Edit: Scrolling down, I can see this same question asked multiple times. My assessment is that, it's a very difficult thing to do and we must admit our biases even as we make our voices heard.

"However vile and despicable the views expressed on the site, they have a constitutional right to it"

They have a constitutional right to express those views. They do not have a constitutional right to express those views on a GoDaddy-hosted domain.

In that case, You don't understand the spirit of HN.

People keep saying this but I don't think it is true at all. Not trying to be inflammatory, but that wasn't too popular of an opinion when it was the bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple

Are you born a white-supremacist bigot? Sources point to no, as in, it's a choice.

I think that's the main distinction when it comes to discrimination.

Laws -- including constitutions -- are in some sense arbitrary.

But actually the distinction between political belief and sexual orientation makes a ton of sense and is not arbitrary.

Avoiding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is super easy and clear-cut.

But it's very hard for me to imagine a world where political belief is a protected class. The category is just way too broad and encompasses basically every legitimate reason you might want to fire someone or turn down a customer.

Every restriction I can think of (e.g., party affiliation) is weak to the point of basically being pointless ("I fired/refused to serve you because you support abortion and because you support theft of my money via taxation, not because you're a democrat").

So although I really do believe that 99.9% of people should not be fired for political beliefs (as long as those beliefs don't interfere with the work place), and that 99.9% of financial transactions should proceed regardless of political beliefs, I still don't think it's workable to make political belief -- writ large -- a protected class.

If we're going to outlaw firing people for political opinions, it might be much easier to just end at-will employment all-together. And if we're going to outlaw discriminating against customers on the basis of political belief, we might as well just force businesses to accept every non-fraudulent client. I don't really think anything less than this -- but which still achieves "no discrimination based on political belief" -- is practically implementable.

So, in my mind, that's the major non-arbitrary distinction. Discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation has a clear bright line. Political discrimination not so much.

And all of the bright line problems aside, there actually is a pretty big non-arbitrary distinction between being gay and being a Nazi. So we can talk about whether that distinction should be codified in non-discrimination law. Or even, in the case of Germany, in criminal law. But the distinction is pretty fucking non-arbitrary...

> Not in the US Constitution either.

Which is why it's legal for bakeries and others to discriminate against LGBT customers in over half of the 50 states. What's your point?

Which brings me to my point. Protected classes are arbitrary and discriminatory in themselves. Did you know that it is not possible to discriminate against someone under 40 based on their age? Only people over 40 are a protected class for age discrimination. Why should the protections of the law only apply to those deemed worthy of protection?

But let's say, refusing to bake a cake for a black couple?

There exist groups in the United States we consider protected classes, and the state or federal government passes laws to protect these classes, or court precedent protects them from discrimination.

+Not in every state

I could be mistaken.

JimBob's Cake Bakery also has a constitutional right not to do business with same-sex couples (or really, anyone else they disagree with). You are protected from the government restricting your speech, no one else has any obligation to put up with you.

I found hobby-lobby's denial of contraception illegal and unconstitutional, and I find Google/GoDaddy's actions unreasonable. In both cases, the left and right leaning crowd claimed the exact same exemption for their unreasonable actions. You're all the same - free speech and freedom when it suits you.

The whole motivation behind free speech is to keep it free, especially when it's unpalatable

The constitution has no power in the private sector, its an agreement from the government. If a dns provider doesn't want to take money from a hate group and support them by providing them with visibility, why should they be forced to? Its a private company. Now, if the US government was a domain registrar, the constitution may apply, but even then hate speech is a gray area and is easily worked around.

So going the libertarian route and shrinking government would remove protections. That doesn't seem quite right, because it was still the government that allowed the private sector to take over a duty of the government.

There isn't an approved list of what the government handles. Much of politics is disagreements in this. But it is still a point worth discussing, and saying that it cannot be the government's duty because it currently isn't a valid reason to stop discussion of it.

You aren't talking about discussing it, you're already calling it a duty of the government that the government allowed to be taken over. The discussion is fine, just dont start it from a stance already...

If we start biasing registrars and holding them accountable for the content hosted by all registrants, we get some content put into an "IP only" ghetto, and that fundamentally destroys one of the internet's most important components (even worse than it's already been destroyed by walled gardens like Facebook et al): the convenient ability of anyone to publish anything instantly and accessibly.

Do we really want to have to use IP addresses to access anything that is contrary to corporate-approved narratives? Use a rogue "politically incorrect" DNS server?

ICANN should really step in here and strongly insist that registrars never do this kind of content policing again.

EDIT: This post was not flagged when I started replying, was flagged after. Vouched for content/to counteract what I assumed were reactionary flags, unvouched based on others' assertions that this is derailing the parent thread which is not technically about this issue, which I guess is probably correct. Mods, please consider whether this is really too far off-topic to be allowed.