The concept that allowed the struggles from minorities to be heard in the first place, and therefore to improve things tremendously for gay and black people.
We can see that this is not a given, for example Russia is starting to crack down on 'pro-gay' speech : http://thegroundtruthproject.org/russias-assault-on-gay-free...
But defending free speech is sometimes hard, because it also means letting people you disagree with speak freely even if it obvious to you they're spewing bullshit. You can't force them to stop, legally or otherwise, but you can expose their bullshit for what it is.
It is much harder to actually argue with someone (or 100 of people), especially when they're unreasonable/stupid, than to shut them down. However, the alternative is to have some kind of moral police to decide what is allowed or not, and force the literally unquestionable selected truth on everyone, which is much more dangerous overall in my opinion (see what could be done with Trump and climate change, or Putin with gay people).
I don't like what they have to say, but I'm really disheartened that they aren't allowed to say it. Free speech should be a social ideal. The liberty of free speech is a wonderful thing, even if it is sometimes abhorrent speech.
I think anyone who knows me already knows that I value speech a great deal, and I consider it to be almost certainly the greatest ideal that we have. It is, as almost all my friends have probably heard me say, the one thing America gets more right than anywhere else. I've had a couple of websites utterly ruined by the fact that I refused to impose censorship upon them.
I dearly understand the position that EasyDNS is in, and I'm sorry that they are in it. On the flip side, I'm glad that they decided to announce to the world that their 'Free speech' principles have limits instead of quietly refusing service. That they felt the need to broadcast the limits of their respect for free speech is, to my opinion, a good thing, just not in the way that they might have expected. I'm sure they'll get lots of business out of it. People often like to ally the businesses they deal with to their own moral interests, which is almost certainly why they posted it, and decidedly why I'm turned off by it. If I see another company who respects speech enough that they'd be willing to do business with nazis, then maybe I'm on to something... or maybe not. I dunno. I'd still expect it to be a good DNS service, of course.
I feel where people get mixed up on this is that while I can totally and fully condemn nazis doing nazi violence, I have zero problems allowing nazis to talk about whatever nazis talk about. Sure, it's up to whomever owns the business they have to decide whether or not they wish to do business with any particular person or company or whomever, but I dislike the precedent, because it's not too farfetched for me to imagine Antifa, Black Lives Matter, The NRA, or even the ACLU on the wrong side of that line if and when public opinion ever gets codified into law.
This is an odd phenomenon that's only happened in the last couple of years -- situations that folks would previously describe as "disheartening" or "disappointing" are now characterized as "terrifying". It's clever, really -- expressing concern over your physical well being (even when there isn't really any danger) is a cognitive kill-switch; physical safety is at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs, after all.
If their friends are being physically assaulted for those reasons, then it makes sense for them to fear for themselves.
If their fear is based off of sensationalist news articles that significantly over-exaggerate the political climate and influence of various groups in order to generate advertising revenue/clicks, they should reconsider, even if it's difficult. There are far more articles about the KKK on the Internet than there are actual members of the KKK https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w....
Those living in fear should try to rationalize about the probabilities of events happening to them based off of relevant statistics, not articles specifically designed to incite fear and anger.
Do you have many friends right now who are people of color, or queer/gay, or even Jewish? How do you explain to them that you'd like to support the business that goes against the grain and hosts Nazi/white supremacist material?
I'm asking this because, right now, most of my friends are not white/hetero, and right now, they're all terrified of the US political climate for different reasons--the brown folks of being attacked (physically) by white supremacists and knowing the cops won't defend them (and in a lot of cases, the cops ARE the white supremacists), and the gays of being attacked by everyone. They're largely living in fear, and that's shitty.
I don't know if I could look them in the eye and say, "I've switched over to registrar X, because only they stood up for the Daily Stormer."
Actually, I know I couldn't say that to them, because what kind of asshole would I look like to my friends if I did that?
Again, this is my experience, but I'm curious how ours differ.