There are hosts out there which will host you as long as you're not breaking any laws. This is actually how things should work.

Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Companies will delete your personal account on their platforms without even talking to you. I can't think of any case where a domain was seized without a court order.

Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology. All you have to do is accept Monero as payment. The more people that do this, the more legitimate and popular and well supported it will be.

Yes. There was an example on Hacker News of someone whose blog hosted by .in was shut down/seized because some freelance-style security project that detects malicious sites or botnets or something claimed it was evil. No notification or due process. I can't recall enough of the details to provide a link, but the individual posted on HN asking for help getting his site back, and eventually did. But what stuck out at me is that the (1) accuser was some kind of NGO (2) the site was directly taken down by the registrar (it may have been above the registrar) (3) there was no due process involved.

That's really screwed up. Do you have more details? More examples?

With the help of Algolia's HN search, I was able to find the story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579

Apparently an organization called Shadowserver (a nonprofit security organization) claimed that the blog was part of the control system for a botnet, and the domain was transferred out of the registrant's control with no due process. They got it back, but the fact that such a thing is even possible in the first place was infuriating to me. I don't know if this is a decision that the .in TLD makes, to place trust in groups like Shadowserver (one could argue it's India's TLD and their country gets to run it how they want) but I hope to god that these kinds of "no due process" seizures are not possible with other TLDs like .com. and .dev.

Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law. I understand it's important to fight cybercrime and botnets and the like but there's got to be a solution that involves due process.

Thanks for the details.

> Domain names ought to be property, and like any other property should be protected against arbitrary seizure by courts of law.

I completely agree. Some group saying the domain is associated with malware shouldn't be enough to cause it to be seized. They should have to actually prove it in court.

> There are hosts out there which will host you as long as you're not breaking any laws.

Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”. Because the second someone ACTUALLY practices this, they’re themselves labeled as AltRight. See the problem?

> Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Has a domain ever been seized without a court order?

Ar15.com went down without warning, provocation, or cause because one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them.

> Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology.

That’s one option... OR... we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?

> Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”.

No, I mean hosts like Nearly Free Speech which has been operating since 2002. I've seen this one posted many times on HN and it seems great.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

I understand what you mean though. Since they are usually smaller hosts, they aren't used by big name companies and eventually acquire a reputation for hosting only offensive content.

> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them

Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?

Do you have more examples?

> we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?

What do you mean?

>> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them

> Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?

> Do you have more examples?

The first big deplatforming case was probably Cloudflare pulling The Daily Stormer. This is what Cloudflare CEO said:

> "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."

Seems like even he agrees that they shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Wow that's extremely fucked up. He's right, nobody should have that power. If they do have that power, we should take it away from them.

He kicked it off of cloudflare, not the internet

They were successfully censored from the internet for quite some time. I believe they were only available through the onion. They must've burned through like two dozens of domains at this point.

Changing info at the registrar would have fixed this, they would probably have only lasted a few minutes w/o DDOS but it's not like cloudflare singlehandedly banished them from the internet. I mean, they sort of did due to the lack of protection, but it's not like cloudflare has the keys to the entire internet; just their ddos service.

Sure, I'm not saying that they are the only people responsible. The thing is that everyone has the same mindset to the point where it seems almost like a coordinated effort. And Cloudflare's CEO admitted that the purpose behind their actions was to kick them off the internet.

> Wow that's extremely fucked up. He's right, nobody should have that power. If they do have that power, we should take it away from them.

I agree. We should make the government use its monopoly on force to take freedoms away from people we disagree with. How dare a company decide with whom it does business and under what terms?

Domain name registrars aren't normal companies. They're more like a government institution. The government can't refuse to recognize the fact I own my house just because they don't like my political opinions. Why should it be any different with internet domain names?

It's not about agreement or disagreement, it's about monopolies.

I am fine if the government takes away the freedom of corporations to grow arbitrarily large.

I am also fine with the government making corporations choose between the ability to grow arbitrarily large and the ability to kick off users without due process.

There's no need to take any freedoms away from normal-size companies.

There are already laws in place that do just that.

Unlike YouTube, a business can replace many of these services transparently from the perspective of their customers.

I agree, it is easier to replace a single part if you don't put your whole presence into one single monolith.

It also helps that many other companies offer the benefit of being able to reach an actual human in case something goes wrong, which is something that is basically impossible with anything Google.

All of the examples you listed are easily recovered from and don’t cause a complete disconnect from your audience in the same way YouTube deplatforming does.

From Amazon sellers to YouTubers to high ranking apps to prominent social media profiles, I’m in awe of how much value sits at the whim of some platform which usually won’t even have a person to talk with on the other end.