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A comment on Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF. Parent comment

Re:Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF by larkeith on Friday August 18, 2017 @09:52AM (#15046135)
The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative.

So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move from the corporation's policy to decide to the customers'? At one end of the spectrum, we've got corner stores, where there are a million options, and policy is decided by whoever's working at the time; on the reverse side, there are governments, who must inherently be monopolies, with policy decided by the voters. Google, cloudflare, godaddy, all fall somewhere in between, with the concern being that they fall too close to government in terms of power, while decisions remain made by internal managers, without user accountability.

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Re:Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF by celticninja on Friday August 18, 2017 @11:23AM (#15046997)
But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message.

I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host their own site and individual nazis could provide storage and bandwith to keep it online.

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Re:Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF by Chaebixi on Friday August 18, 2017 @11:50AM (#15047232)
> they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message.

I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.

[ Parent | on HN ]