Is this actually the case? Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me. The internet is big; I'm sure you can find elsewhere to host your videos. Is a company taking steps to distance themselves from such a contentious issue equal to "flying down the slippery slope of authoritarianism"? As always when I hear these panicked comments, I fail to see how this is true.

It's not that they're being threatened, it's that they're actively being taken away. Society may react to this loss of liberty by restoring it through alternate approaches. Or, it may not.

> Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me

I mean yes, obviously there are plenty of people who want censorship for one reason or another, otherwise it wouldn't be happening. So one's own comfort with censorship is not evidence that censorship is not happening.

> Is a company taking steps to distance themselves ...

It's what they're doing, not why. Despite the trope, evil never shows up twirling a mustache.

YouTube is effectively a monopoly. You can upload your video elsewhere, but next to nobody will see it. That gives YouTube equal censorship power as a government censor. We should be equally appalled by it.

  First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
  Because I was not a Socialist.

  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
  Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  Because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

  First they came for the firearms, and I did not speak out—
  Because I did not like firearms

  Then they came for the sex workers and I did not speak out—
  Because I was not a sex worker (or used them)

  Then they came for something I cared about and there was no one left to speak for me.

This isn't government oppression, there will be alternates to the services offered.

For a start, have you talked to people outside of your bubble? Do you know what "web browser" means to most people out there? It means Google. Honestly, go out and ask people.

The Internet is not such a big place any more. It is very centralised. You might think that if the worst happens you can just host videos yourself but I think you would be mistaken. To do that you need to use one of a small handful of CDNs. Good luck trying to host your own server now.

It's been the case for a while that most people have had asymmetric lines, ie. a poor upload speed, so we ended up going the centralisation route.

Add to that the loss of net neutrality and the prevalence of "devices" as opposed to general purpose computers and I would ask you: do you still fail to see how the slope is true?

We do. We exist in objective reality. The reality is you're engaging in a narrative that has direct, practical negations in the real world. In front of your face. They've existed for decades. Half the people who claim to be "hackers" on here couldn't exploit a wet paper bag. They're just american centrists, full of "acksually"-ism's who happen to write code. I mean the fact that PG's writing is considered interesting or note-worthy should be your first sign that this community isn't terribly academic in any field, really.

>do you still fail to see how the slope is true?

Yeah. I guess I missed the part where you kind of just lightly touched on different characteristics of the current technological landscape and then just jumped right back into your conclusion.

As powerful as the four-horsemen might now have become, they'll surely become past-their-prime IBMs or Microsofts in subsequent generations.

In this context, a responsibility of technologists is to provide another round of disruption - sooner than the last - in order to prevent incumbents from getting too entrenched.

>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.

Promote it yourself.

Also, it is worth noting that these actions are a result of a law enacted by the government, so even if the government isn't expressly curbing anyone's speech, it is having the chilling effect that opponents of sesta/fosta said it would.

They've both always had the equivalent of the security guard in the golf cart, who kicks people out for violating the mall's rules, and is often wrong.

(Oh, and there aren’t public roads, either. There’s just one big private road network, which finances itself by placing billboards on the roads. For the most part, they’ll build out roads to any location, big or small, without worrying about what kind of activity goes on in those locations. But only for the most part…)

Luckily, most people never need to deal with these difficulties! There‘s one big shopping mall chain that dominates the whole country - most of the world, even. (It’s owned by the same company as the road network.) And it has a really nice offer for everyone: you can have all the space you want to engage in everything from idle chitchat to grave political lectures, from science demos to showing off your video game skills - all for free. Plus, the mall staff takes care of efficiently guiding people around to speakers that might interest them, so it’s really easy to spend hours bouncing from one interesting session to the next, with all your needs taken care of. Altogether, a highly engaging, communal, even productive environment. Much nicer than going to someone’s house. The only catch is that the staff will never recommend anything outside the mall, no matter how relevant. Oh, and... there is that mall cop. He mostly stays out of sight, though. There are only a few things that bother him, so just make sure to steer clear of those and he’ll leave you alone. Although, he does sometimes change the rules at a whim… and if he does kick you out, there’s almost nowhere else to go…

People should be cautious about flouting the "they're private businesses and can do what they want" argument. It actually makes a compelling case for nationalizing these services and treating them as public utilities, a line of thinking that is rapidly picking up steam in various political groups.

There are no street corners on the internet. And there never will be.

That's your street corner.

Pre-internet you couldn't walk into a TV centre and demand to be broadcast to everyone on Channel 73 and now similarly you can't expect to force YouTube to stream content it doesn't like.

Just because a huge proportion of the internet has joined the YouTube club, doesn't magically make it a commons. Theyre the ones paying for hosting, staff, etc, not the state.

TV never was how people talk to each other. Internet - and particularly the monopoly platforms like FB or YT - are the modern day street.

If you want to go and shout in Times Square in NY or Trafalgar Square in London, you'd have to physically go there, make an effort.

What you want is much worse though, you want a way to contact millions or billions of people for free. It is precisely like my TV analogy, because you want the sort of reach only newspapers or TVs previously had, which you had to pay for. What you want is to be lazy and have a company promote you to their audience without limit, while dismissing the reality that there are no limits to how to promote yourself online, outside the company gardens. You could text all your friends your website address and ask them to text it to all their friends. Or email them. Or flyer your website address to all your neighbours.

You've still got your street corner.

This raises an interesting question: who built that audience? YouTube or its users?

At what point does a business/service used by the public actually need to serve the public? If Google has a virtual monopoly on a service, why should they not be regulated as such?

I think the right to utility services usually comes from contractual agreements between companies and the localities they serve in exchange for those companies usually exclusive roles in servicing those areas and they usually agree to being heavily regulated.

If we’re going to be a country which is heavily invested in private property rights, the companies will _almost_ always have a choice in what products they decide to distribute and which products they choose to not distribute.

I find it strange to imply google has a monopoly on serving videos, they may have a large and readily available audience, but they’ve spent a rather large amount of time and energy building this audience and the infrastructure needed to accommodate.

It’s not like it’s difficult to go set up a website and serve videos, it’s trivial in labor and trivial in cost.

People seem to be implying they feel like they’re entitled to an audience that someone else built and I think that’s a strange thing to believe.

Again, let’s make other video services more popular rather than pretend YouTube is somehow the only way on the entire internet to serve videos.

That ship has already sailed I'm afraid. Nearly every common internet service now has a single provider that dwarfs the few competitors it has, both in actual usage and mindshare.

Oftentimes that mind-boggling success was fueled by easy treatment from regulators/the government as well as fate and circumstance, not from any groundbreaking ingenuity from the company that made it.

It may sound strange today to think of social media, internet search, etc as a public utility, but within a decade or two it will seem like common sense. Google, Facebook, YouTube and others are censoring their way towards nationalization.

What makes you think having content standards has anything to do with whether or not a content company would be nationalized?

Wouldn’t the first thing to happen under a heavy regulation be something close to television licensing? They have far far stricter standards of what can be shared than any relevant social media platform.

The vast majority of the youtube videos I see, I do not see on youtube, but as embedded content.

>>Removing firearms videos from YouTube seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I am sure Gun Rights are also no a pressing issue for you, or you may even be Anti-Gun Ownership by private citizens...

Let me ask you then, would you feel the same if this was an Issue you cared Deeply about. Pick a Social topic the you care about, then image if You Tube censored that topic from their platform.. What is your reaction.

//Edit to add, before you Paint me as some conservative, I am Libertarian. In the words of Austin Peterson: “I want gay couples to be able to protect their marijuana fields with fully automatic rifles"

https://air.mozilla.org/privacy-lab-orchid/

It's one of my favorite talks, and I love the format: each slide is a news article.

I phrased it this way to avoid outcry from people who disagree that we’re on the slope — but who cannot disagree that we must at least be near the slope.

We have lost footing on this slope.

Just washing our hands of these items, writing them down as the cost of freedom, is not going to cut it.

Because the way I see it, as long as there exist pedophiles who aren't lucky enough to work at the government agencies charged with cataloging child porn, there will be a desire to trade in it. And reducing its availability drives up the price, and thus increases the demand to make more.

My personal solution is to just not look at it, but I understand this may be hard for some in the same way that it's hard for congresscritters to keep to themselves in public bathrooms.

I don't know. I'm just saying that free-for-all is never going to be acceptable to the overwhelming majority of any population, when it comes to certain topics. If the anonymous p2p networks cannot find a solution (any solution) that can keep this stuff somewhat at bay, they will be ostracized.

Ideally, I should be able to run a decentralized facebook-like pod (or any other IM/social/sharing system) with a good degree of certainty that unsavoury material of this or that type will not end up on my pod. The Powers That Be should be able to somehow trust that this is indeed the case without being able to read all content.

If we had a system like that, we could clearly decouple the discussion on what is or is not "unacceptable material" from the discussion on whether a given communication protocol is bad in itself. At the moment, authorities can just say that p2p networks are full of bad stuff so they are bad and should be banned. You cannot fight that charge without showing some effort trying to get rid of bad stuff. Once you have something like that, even very rough and automated, it becomes easier to say "no, I won't ban X from my network because I am certain that X is legal[1]" or "no, you cannot ban me for Y because I'm sure Y is not on my network".

[1] or should be legal, which is basically equivalent for civil disobedience. If you are planning armed resistance, nothing will ever satisfy a censor, and you have very different requirements from regular people.

This might provide employment for the many people, often referenced by users on this site, who may be losing work in the near future due to technology's advances.

The moderators would be like quasi-lawyers: able to interpret content and assess the legality in a tentative way... to be further decided through some other formal review process. Of course, anyone could submit content for review, as well.

I could imagine whole industries being built around this task, especially if it's so important to everyone. Just because it's a lot of work, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

it's just a trade-off. do you value freedom or security?

a side-effect of security is you're also creating the conditions for tyranny. choose wisely!

Specifically, it's not a meaningful argument because it's far too broad, and applies to more or less anything.

Example: "Now they're just banning asbestos and lead. But next year it'll be wood and orange juice!"

Is that true? I always assumed the fallacy was named for the already existing expression.

Funny! I'd never thought of that. For those curious, Wiktionary says that it's actually from the Latin, "fallere", to deceive [1].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fallacy