While we remain on the off topic, what happens if it is a private company providing a service that seems very similar to one the government provides? Imagine if eventually USPS went away, could FedEx/UPS decide to not do business with a group they didn't like (say no mail for anyone under 30)? What if all public libraries were eventually replaced by private ones and any pro-liberal material removed?

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.

UPS and FedEx are "common carriers".

I wonder where we draw the line, particularly with ubiquitous companies like Google, Facebook, and ISPs.

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.

There's no planet on which you can lump those three together. One provides access to the internet, one provides a service on top of it.

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.

> That is where we should draw the line

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

There are hundreds (thousands?) of registrars you can choose to do business with. Meanwhile, there's only one power company that's run lines to your house, only one water company running pipes, and you have a choice of 2-3 ISPs if you're lucky. Those are utilities. A random business service provider with hundreds of choices available on a competitive free market is not a utility.

A key argument for ISPs being treated as utilities (which is, itself, a controversial idea) is that they tend to be local monopolies or oligopolies. This is not the case with domain registrars, a field in which there are many available alternatives selling an interchangeable commodity product.

ISPs are common carriers, requiring them not to do this. (Same thing with airlines, as another example; they would not be allowed to deny someone transport because they became aware that that person was participating in the Charlottesville thing, like Airbnb did.)

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.)

No one has a problem when they remove sites affiliated with ISIS but apparently Nazis should be given a pass because "free speech". Uh huh.....

How many people have been killed by far right terrorism? Exactly.

Off the top of my head?

Oklahoma City

Dylann Roof

The asshole who drove his car into a group of counterprotestors

A drop in the ocean compared to ISIS and even the IRA. A poor showing really in the global terrorist bodycount.

How many dead people will be sufficient? Also, on a related note, who made you the arbiter?

Well if we're going that far back: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, King Herod - plenty of butchers of every persuasion. I was talking about more recent history.

No, but it's not a constitutional issue. Likewise, you can host your alt-right views on the internet, but you don't have a right to a domain name and third-party hosting.

"No Nazis" is a perfectly fine side to draw the line on, in my book.

I'm certainly not a fan of nazis or "white power" groups, but this can easily turn into the kind of behavior that turns into hunts for communists or socialists.

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"

Exactly. I don't share their beliefs but I think we are all capable of looking at what they say and making up our own minds. I trust the good judgement of the general public a hell of a lot more than I trust censorship, and censoring them just plays into their narrative of persecution. The ends do not justify the means.

Everyone agrees with that. The problem is with the semantics of that statement i.e. who is a Nazi and who decides who is a Nazi? Anyone can call anyone a name and then ban them for being that. That doesn't mean the person in question actually is that thing.

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.

This is nitpicking. If somebody shows a Hitler greeting and uses swastikas and other well-known derived symbols, then he is a Nazi. There is absolutely no problem spotting them or distinguishing them from nationalist conservatives. For a start, Nazis are not promoting representative democracy.

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.

> If somebody shows a Hitler greeting and uses swastikas and other well-known derived symbols, then he is a Nazi.

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

Yes, you should have been much clearer and yet you weren't. My comment was not an insult, it literally meant what it said.

Yes - a moral line. However, censoring speech, however vile the said speech is, is illegal and not compliant with net neutrality

No webhost is obligated to host anyone who asks. That's not what net neutrality is about at all.

Nazis are being told they can't speak in others' places of business. It is no more "illegal" to make that rule in a private space than to throw out people who talk in a movie theater.

No one is censoring speech. They can still say whatever they want, just not using their services.

> It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.

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.

edit... i stand correct, didn't read closely enough

They said just that-

"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.

No it's not legal. Additionally, is against net neutrality. Do you believe in net neutrality?

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is well within their rights to terminate these accounts.