Actually you have the property rights angle all wrong: People who control the publishing rights and the intellectual property behind an ecommerce platform to distribute things have both decided they don't want to sell certain works for whatever reason. A stupid one IMO. But it's within their rights as we currently understand corporate power. Perhaps we shouldn't be so willing to indulge liberal market freedoms as they can be a double-edged sword - property owners can "censor" cultural touchstones thanks to powerful intellectual property laws.

To fix your analogy: Someone comes to YOUR house and demands you release a "problematic" work of fiction to the public from your private collection because people are censoring it and people need to see its no big deal. You refuse, because it's yours and you don't feel like it... maybe you agree with the rabble? Either way... you know your rights.

If you want to defeat cancel culture you should advocate for LESS property rights, less market "freedom", and strong labor protections. This whole idea that you can somehow defeat a moral panic with some sort of counter moral panic (or backlash) has been tried for over 40 years - it's not working.

> Someone comes to YOUR house and demands you release a "problematic" work of fiction to the public from your private collection because people are censoring it and people need to see its no big deal. You refuse, because it's yours and you don't feel like it... maybe you agree with the rabble? Either way... you know your rights.

Not really. It's more like Person A wants to sell a book. Person B wants to buy a book. Persons C through Z, who are not involved, haven't read the book, have no intention of ever having anything to do with the book, but saw a tweet that said it was bad, interject themselves and decide that persons A and B are not allowed to conduct their transaction.

Person C operates a marketplace platform. They are very much involved in what is sold in their marketplace. They do not want to be associated with material deemed objectionable. They don't need you to agree it is objectionable. Do you think they should be forced to list anything someone might want to sell that isn't illegal? What kind of freedom is that?

If you don’t want to be associated with material that might be “objectionable” then don’t position yourself as a platform where arbitrary people can sign up and list whatever they want for sale.

Instead hire buyers to vet the merchandise you’re selling and stand behind it and take responsibility for it. You don’t get to have it both ways.

Where have they positioned themselves as such? They have always had control over what can be listed, they have never said you can sell "whatever you want". No marketplace has ever been what you are describing. Do you have any references that explain this ideology in more depth because I do not understand it.

Here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu4TJ4sBzAg

"Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay". Unless of course it offends someone.

Persons A and B are allowed to conduct their transaction, just not on a particular platform. Put an ad in “dumb racist old books” magazine and find someone to buy your book.

How about instead you restrict your book buying to a specialty “woke only” bookstore that carefully curates a selection guaranteed not to offend your delicate sensibilities?

If you want to live a life of restrictions you are more than free to do so. What you may not do is impose them on others.

Not a good analogy either. In this case, the publisher is perfectly within their rights to not offer these works for sale anymore. However, under the First-sale doctrine, they have no right to control resale of the physical copies of the works already out there. eBay delisting them means they are choosing to side with the publisher over the rights of the sellers.

But you can dictate what eBay must allow its users to sell?

Yes, just like we can dictate that eBay can't make a rule that only white people are allowed to sell on it. Operating a business involves being a part of society and society is justified in imposing rules on your business to ensure that your business is not harmful to the general welfare of the public.

So you are advocating for some standard according to which marketplaces should be required to sell anything the public brings to them to sell?

Is there a line, in your conception, between what eBay should be forced to sell, and what they are allowed to prohibit? For instance, explicit pornography is legal. Should eBay be forced to sell explicit pornography? If so, is there anything in your mind that they should not be forced to sell on their website?

Yes! We have this standard. It's called "laws". We elect these people called "representatives" and if we want people to not be able to buy or sell certain things like a kilo of heroin or a machine gun, we have them make a law that prohibits it. This way the public has input on the process and it is not left up to the arbitrary prejudices of any particular corporate drone.

eBay is not selling anything. The users on eBay are selling things and they can choose what to sell or not sell. If Wal-Mart wants to decide not to sell the book, fine. If you purport to offer a marketplace where other people can sell and buy things, you should not be involving yourself in the customers' transactions unless they are illegal.

Ok how about this, should my local farmers market be forced to allow me to set a pornography stand?

What horrendous, world-ending catastrophe do you think would occur if someone sold pornography at the farmers market?

If the public doesn’t want to buy porn there, they won’t and the stand will go out of business.

If they do want to buy porn there, why do you think the farmers market owners should be allowed to dictate what adults are and are not allowed to buy?

What if you wanted to set up a stand that sold books exclusively by African-American authors and they told you you weren’t allowed to do that. Is that ok?

There'd probably be a lot less people at the farmers market next week

Its obviously not ok, but its not ok because its racist

Ok, so “racially insensitive” material and explicit pornography are both legal currently. Are you saying that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell both, or are you saying that we enact a new law that says that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell “racially insensitive” material, but not explicit pornography?

I'm saying that if you position your business as a platform or conduit through which people exchange things, whether those are physical goods, IP packets, fragments of text and images, whatever, you should be a "dumb pipe". Such businesses should not be permitted to abuse their privileged position to impose their own will on the general public. Remember Net Neutrality? Same thing. If you want to sell a stack of old Hustlers or a copy of Song of the South it should not be eBay's place to tell you that you can't.

eBay is not the government. They are not arbiters of what we are and are not allowed to do. Many people have sacrificed their lives to ensure that we are not governed by arbitrary tyrants that we have no say in, and it's frankly shocking that people are now like "Well, they paid a lawyer to set up a C-Corp in Delaware so I guess it's fine that they decide what we're allowed to read now".

It’s not just old Huslters. If eBay were not allowed to prevent explicit pornography from being sold on its website, it would have a much less valuable business, and fewer people would get value from it. Just as an example, it would end up being blocked by “family friendly” web filters that are popular with businesses, schools, and families.

Unless you think that businesses, schools, and families should also be prohibited from blocking pornography, or should otherwise be forced to facilitate access to eBay, your suggestion is untenable from a business perspective.

eBay is undoubtedly blocked by numerous work filters because it is not really relevant for doing most jobs. They manage just fine.

Besides this is a ridiculous strawman. "If you allow people to sell Dr. Suess books, you must therefore also plaster the front page in explicit pornography." Obviously not.

The Internet is increasingly winner-take-all and is controlled by fewer and fewer larger and larger companies. Allowing a handful of corporations unrestricted reign to dictate what we are allowed to say to each other is antithetical to a free society. Reductio ad absurdum arguments are not going to help you when cabal of corporate censors with no accountability decide to eject you from society for daring to question the intellectual fashion of the moment.

I have not made a straw-man argument. Laws must be written precisely, and it’s entirely appropriate to test proposed changes to law by applying them to specific cases of fact.

You may have identified a real problem in society, but you have not proposed a viable solution.

I would just like to point out this terminology used:

"forced to allow"

vs.

"prevented from denying"

Think about that difference.

There's a difference between discriminating against people's immutable identities (ie black people) and people's choices.

I can't kick you out of my bar for being black, but I can kick you out for being loud.

There is a difference between those things, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically support all discrimination that isn’t based on immutable qualities.

If eBay decided to delist all copies of White Fragility we should oppose that too. Ideas need to be freely exchanged and debated not forcibly censored by whoever happens to have power at the moment.

In a free society with free markets, you are free to oppose antyhing that a business does that you don't agree with.

You have many existing mechanisms for expressing that disagreement, including protest, and starting your own business and competing. If people agree with your values, you will succeed.

eBay choosing to delist all copies of a book is eBay exercising their own freedom of expression. Having the government coming along and censoring that freedom seems counter to the idea that "Ideas need to be freely exchanged ... not forcibly censored".

Delisting a book is not an expression. eBay is (should be) a neutral party through which other people are expressing things by buying and selling things. The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech.

> Delisting a book is not an expression.

Do you think a bookshop should be free to choose to sell books written in German or not? If they have that freedom, what's that freedom called?

> eBay is (should be) a neutral party

There's no such thing as "neutral". People, organisations etc. have values which they try and reflect through their actions and practices.

> The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech

Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?

> Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?

Yes, exactly like if the shareholders, board, and employees didn't want to do business with Black people, the government forces them to do so anyway. It absolutely boggles the mind that the justification comes down to "well, some people don't want to do that". Tough shit! If you don't want to deal with all kinds of people from all walks of life with all kinds of backgrounds and opinions, don't run a public-facing business.

So if you were in charge of the government, how would you propose regulating these companies? By forcing them to act as a "utility" that has to list every kind of product?

Do I disagree with the Dr. Seuss delisting? Yes. Do I think government regulations would be more harmful than helpful in this case? Yes.

If eBay was a monopoly, I'd be much more concerned (all the more reason for robust anti-trust legislation). But in practice, if you want to sell a Dr. Seuss book, take your business elsewhere.

businesses can deny service to anyone as long as its not because they belong to a protected group

And 60-70 years ago there was no such thing as protected groups. Businesses could and did deny service to anyone for any reason. Collectively, we as a society looked at that situation and said "Hey this isn't great that businesses can deny service to whole groups of people based on their religion or skin color, we shouldn't let them do that", and we stopped letting them do that.

Similarly, today we can look at what's happening and say "Hey this isn't great that businesses are allowed to restrict our speech and narrow down the realm of ideas to the least common denominator. It is destructive to the public discourse that a small group of people can claim outrage and shut down whoever they want", so we can decide not to let businesses do that, just like we decided not to let them refuse service to protected groups.

Is public discourse being wittled down? I can buy books from across the political spectrum within seconds. Consider Jim Crow versus not being able to buy a physical copy of an obscure book that can still easily be found online for free

Why do you support the wrong side of the power imbalance in modern society?

I doubt the same people would oppose it though. Rights of downtrodden groups are constantly shit on without a peep from the “free speech absolutist” crowd.

There is no difference. Whether something is immutable is to a large degree irrelevant.

So do you think I should be allowed to kick people out for being black, or that I should be forced to serve everyone no matter their actions?

Neither. It depends on the specifics. Should you be allowed to not serve someone who has anger issues? Does it matter if this anger issues are caused by genetic hormonal imbalance?

So there's an angry person in my bar right now, shouting at everyone and driving away business.

Who gets to decide that throwing them out is allowed or not?

The laws and you.