Re:Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Re...
by bilbo0s on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @04:09PM
(#18764913)
It's like the difference between Sam's Club and a typical grocer. The grocer offers services to the public, Sam's Club does not. It is members only. And it can have any requirements it pleases for membership. It doesn't have any racial exclusivity policies, but that would be well within their rights if they did. (For instance, country clubs have often had racial exclusivity clauses, even after the civil rights act.) Sam's Club is not a company for the public.
When you need consideration for membership, there really is just no way you can claim that to be non-private. That includes Patreon, it's private. It's their rules. Full stop. It's like adwords, if you want to use it, you have to start giving Google more consideration. Normally to use the public parts of Google, you don't need to give any consideration at all. (Of course, Google takes the tracking information from you anyway with their public facing services, but they don't ask you to actively give them any consideration.)
At the risk of starting a tangent, this doesn't work when it comes to business. Businesses (or any relationship of dependency) should not be allowed to have "an opinion" because before long it becomes collusion and shunning.
How well did "no, no, you have the freedom to go somewhere else" work for blacks just wanting to buy a hamburger in America pre-1968? We had to pass laws telling businesses to get the fuck over themselves and indeed, it's still challenged to this day when gays try to buy wedding cakes.
If you don't like mandatory arbitration clauses in every single contract you sign, you literally can't do business anywhere. Everything from your job to your car purchase has them. If you don't like being subjected to credit checks, you literally cannot procure the utilities required by law to make your dwelling inhabitable-- all utilities run credit or make it prohibitively expensive to go without.
It's an imbalance of power. You can't just "go somewhere else" when you depend on the service being offered or provided, that you are denied for arbitrary reasons.