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.
Promote it yourself.