The private companies would very much like to allow them, as they pay their bills and are a big customer. They are choosing not to allow them because they are being strong armed by a part of the political establishment that considers the spread of the information this websites want to share as dangerous for the country or its citizens.

So yeah, there's some government action against this domestic terrorists and it's resulting in private companies banning their websites.

You can agree with the action or not, I think it's a good idea to have infrastructure in place that thwarts the spread of dangerous misinformation, but that shouldn't be censorship. It should be easy to access education and mental healthcare to help people be strong against misinformation on their own and without the long arm of the law having to babysit them.

You're oversimplifying this as well as constructing a strawman argument which implies it's a simple issue. It's not. You are on Hacker News, do you think people here are think that the framing you make is objectively the singular one that has any moral standing?

I see. So if, for example, the phone company were to spy on your private conversations, and determine you are not a person they want to be associated with (say for example, you talk trash about their CEO) - if they were to terminate your phone coverage, we should just accept it in light of their property rights? It's not an analogy to imply ISPs are exactly the same, but property right supremacy when it comes to infrastructure is not a simple question.

The problematic part of your example is your phone company spying on your private conversations, not them choosing not to do business with you.

It's wildly different from a website company running their public business on another companies infrastructure.

OK, so what about if you are hosting public conference calls they can join about how much their company sucks, and they cut your phone service? Analogies are a stupid form of argument, but I'm trying to surface the problem here somehow. (In this analogy they're not the conference call provider, they're just the phone service provider which enables you to use the conferencing service over their lines, if that wasn't obvious. They're a pipe.)

> not them choosing not to do business with you.

Alright, so then you'd be OK with some phone company, that has a monopoly on a certain geographic area or town, banning anyone who has made a public social media posts that is critical of the company?

Do you see any problems with this position?

I wasn't advocating any particular position in my previous comment.

But to answer your question, no, I would not be OK with that. Utility companies (in the United States at least) are typically contracted by cities to provide service, and regulated by a public utility commission as well as various laws. I assume denial of service over social media would violate a number of regulations or contractual obligations. And I agree with that.

Now if you're really asking whether or not various service providers should be regulated as utilities and obligated to provide service to everyone, that's a much more difficult (and vague) question that I don't have a easy answer for.

The point is regulating them is very specifically society stating "your property rights do not overrule the factors that led to this regulation." Which is the argument being made as worthy of consideration. Regulation that makes such coercion possible starts out as an argument like the one here. Saying these companies ought not to be able to censor people in a certain context despite their property rights isn't saying they should be arrested or something, it's saying we ought to regulate them.

What a fantastic rant

> domestic terrorists

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you don't have a lot of exposure to terrorism. A bunch of idiots breaking into the Capitol and… mostly wandering around taking selfies? Not really very effective terrorists. It was a stupid, pointless move, and illegal — but a long, long way short of terrorism, except possibly on the very fringes of some three-letter organization's idiosyncratic definition.

> mostly wandering around taking selfie

And the ones not taking selfies were running around with zip ties and IEDs. Just because some of them were idiots, doesn't mean they all were.

Edit: how do you think these "idiots" got in? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=20m04s&v=cJOgGsC0G9U

Is there proof they had actual IEDs? Zip ties are bad, but they're not in the same universe as IEDs. If they had IEDs I'd be way more open to the idea of characterizing this as terrorism, and all that comes with it.

Edit: It sounds like the cops say they found IEDs. I'll be following that closely to update my view on the proper response to this.

Edit2: Actually the report is that the IEDs were not found at the Capitol or as part of that but near the RNC and DNC offices elsewhere, and a pipe bomb was found in a car. So there is no evidence that the people who entered the capitol were carrying bombs. The specifics in this case matter.

I think you can stretch the definition of terrorism to meet them (the congress was evacuated in fear, it influenced political events) but the lesson of 2001- is that any dilution of the term of terrorism is no free lunch, and we ought to understand what will happen if we endorse our leaders treating something as terrorism vs another form of illegal act.

That's an excellent expression of my concern. Also, people who agree with some but not all of the ideas held by "right-wing terrorists" suddenly become terrorist sympathizers, and their friends "associate with known terrorists and terrorist sympathizers". Imagine the context you've heard those phrases in on the news, and what you thought was okay when it happened to those people.

Yes, given this and the actual reality of the situation, I take the stance that we ought to respond to claims of terrorism around this (by our leaders, not individuals) with ridicule and derision, despite any merit, given how dangerous it would be to allow this to be treated by the authorities as a moral justification for a domestic War on Terror.

> A private company choosing who to allow on their platform? Seems like the freedom to me.

I wonder when people stopped thinking. By the same argument, should they be allowed to block all black people?

As reprehensible as it is, legally they absolutely are. Remember how country clubs didn't / still don't allow woman, african americans or jews? Common carriers (stores, hotels, etc) are treated differently, and is very much debated. (ie can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.)

>can a bakery deny service based on sexual preference.

It is a little more nuanced than that. Bakeries were not denying anybody based on sexual orientation.

If a gay man went to get a straight wedding cake, a non-wedding cake, or a wedding cake for a gay wedding that did not have anything to indicate it was for a gay wedding the bakers would not have denied them.

Your first sentence implies I am speaking with a time traveler who doesn't realize they just fell out of their time machine 50 years in the future :) It is definitely not legal to bar people from your business based upon race.