I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to roll their own GitLab (or facebook, or news channel). But this ignores reality.

Facebook control ~90% of social media. There's a very high chance that Facebook could sway every election in America (and lots of other countries also) if they truly wanted to.

I think we are entering a new era. Just as it required a paradigm shift to outlaw anti-competitive practices, I think we need to re-consider what rights these platforms have around speech.

True libertarianism dictates that I can ban whomever I want from my shop. But in reality most of the bans were of the 'No Negroes' variety. I would love to think that the free market would take care of discriminatory businesses, but history shows it will not.

I agree that the true issue is ultimately monopoly: if a town has 10 newspapers and one goes democrat-leaning, no one would really care. But it's different if there is only 1 newspaper.

I worry that there can only ever be a single Friendster/Google+/Myspace around, because people will always gravitate towards the most popular one.

Now try to apply US anti trust laws to it.

Of course, those who make the "publisher or platform, pick one!" false dichotomy aren't really genuinely concerned about the size of the company. They just want to force someone to host their content, which is why they jump to "free speech means more nowadays than what it says in the constitution [so platforms must carry my speech]."

Sorry for the tangent, just want to make sure my position is clear.

It is not nice to lump us all together. Many of us here both

- despise certain content

- while we still find it totally unacceptable that tech giants are allowed to do whatever they want with their power "because hate speech"

This is just a variant of introducing bad laws "because of terrorism":

The laws are bad not because anyone wants terrorism but because we don't want anybody to be punished without a good reason.

And today as tech giants wields more power than many courts or - in many but obviously not all ways - even small countries it might be time to make sure they have to be careful with that power.

No one is forcing all businesses to do serve all customers everywhere always. We are saying you can't discriminate on the basis of marginalized groups.

Source? That doesn't really match the numbers I've seen. Especially not for younger people.

Not quite 90% by that measure, but close.

https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-network...

Mindshare, reach, time-on-site, and media references are alternate measures. Definitions matter.

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

They might not be 90+ everywhere, but they do own a significant amount

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.

Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are, and inflict their dickishness as they wish. Laws are often made to oppress minorities. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

See also part I of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-p...

> Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are

Also worth pointing out that under most democracies, this isn't true. The people decide which people should decide what laws there should be. It's an important difference.

And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.

Of course companies have to offer products to minorities, have you ever seen parking spots for handicapped people in the mall?

Of course a restaurant has to ask you if you have some intolerance before serving you food that could contain allergens.

USA Better start to learn that 300 millions people don't make the entire world.

That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.

No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class.

As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.

Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.

This is a fun game! Suppose the baker is Muslim and you ask for a cake with a cartoon of The Prophet? Wouldn’t that make you the bigot?

My point is you can contrive any example here to get the conclusion you want.

The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.

That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.

The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.

This was not the conclusion of the SCOTUS case.

It pushed the case back down to the State on procedural consideration.

We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I don't think this is relevant to this specific case. The baker didn't refuse to do business with the gay couple. He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

He refused to sell them a personalized cake, which is considered a form of expression. The government cannot compel you to express yourself a certain way if it goes against your religious beliefs.

If you're talking about the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker, he didn't say that until the lawsuit was in-progress. At the time that the couple went in, he refused to serve them without discussing what they wanted.

I would absolutely support adding sexual orientation to that list in every state, or at the federal level. But if it's not there in the bakers' state, then, legally, they are (unfortunately) in the clear.

So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops?

Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.

There are a couple cases being heard by the Supreme Court right now that are attempting to argue that discrimination against gay and transgender people is inherently discrimination based on sex (which is a protected class everywhere in the US); I'm very interested in how that turns out.

Anyways I think your point is mainly that there is a line between what is required of a business and what constitutes a right to self-determination / self-expression. Where to draw that line is certainly not obvious and we understand new things about it as society progresses. So in that sense I do understand your point of view, and I happen to agree that certain decisions regarding what work they take should be allowed by a business, but I hope the point has been made that you have to be careful what you wish for when stating absolutes like "for whatever reason they choose."

That's not what the Supreme Court found; it has not invalidated public accommodation anti-discrimination law in general, nor even the specific law the State relied on in the case. It did rule that the specific procedural history of the case indicated that State officials acted with specific targeted religious animus in the case, invalidating the state enforcement action even if the law was Constitutional and the enforcement factually warranted under it otherwise.

For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time.

This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change.

Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.

I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.

The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky.

Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right?

I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.

So if you sell cakes for €10 and I show up and hand you €10 you are not legally allowed to refuse to sell me that cake. (heads have rolled for less...)

This is pretty effective at preventing discrimination that may otherwise be difficult to prove.

You're thinking in terms of fighting the last war. Companies of today know how to work around things at risk becoming illegal. Today, a more effective strategy to persuade your boss about an issue is to spin it as something outrageous on social media, in hope that news portals will pick it up. This power is very much available to a Gitlab employee.

I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out.

> "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said.

The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.

This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.