The difference is that Amazon holds huge market power on ebook market, is practically a monopoly. So in my opinion it should not be allowed to arbitrarily decide which books to sell and not to sell on their marketplace. Imagine next time they decide to stop selling books criticising tech corporations.

Amazon doesn't write and publish books and there's no technical issue in others distributing them so - no monopoly other than the quasi-monopoly established by people choosing to use Amazon as against other book sellers. Similar arguments apply in the transient opinion distribution industry currently dominated by Facebook and Twitter. These company's powers are entirely in the hands of their users who have a choice and should remember that today's market will likely look quite different within a few decades if not sooner.

If you want a book-seller who doesn’t censor your buying options, don’t go to Amazon. Plenty of other sources.

Quasi-monopoly is still a monopoly.

Dr. Seuss Enterprices probably own the copyright to the books they don't want to distribute. Amazon Inc probably does not own the copyright to the books they don't want to distribute.

> Amazon Inc probably does not own the copyright to the books they don't want to distribute.

I'm not sure why you think that's germane.

Amazon Inc owns the privilege of choosing what they offer for sale just like any other business. This is free enterprise, my friend. Should we also demand that vegan grocers sell meat? Are we to raise a ruckus if our local 7-11 doesn't also serve eggplant parm with its taquitos?

Vegan shop is expected to not sell meat.

Global shop which sells almost everything is expected to not decide to not sell something because they not like it for some odd reasons, because otherwise at this scale it's some kind of censorship?

At some scale we can't act like "it's just private business" because it's naive

> Vegan shop is expected to not sell meat.

No, the vegan shop HAS DECIDED to not sell meat. They could just as easily decide to sell parma ham to worthy customers and stop being an exclusively vegan shop.

Do you think that 7-11 is "expected" to not sell eggplant parm too? Why not? They already sell pizza and taquitos. But I don't get to make them sell eggplant parm if they don't want to even though eggplant parm would go great with taquitos.

> Global shop which sells almost everything is expected to not decide to not sell something because they not like it

Ok, so, 94 countries have no criminal legislation prohibiting slavery according to https://theconversation.com/slavery-is-not-a-crime-in-almost.... So should Amazon, the global seller of everything, also sell slaves in those countries? I mean if they're expected to not decide to not sell something because they don't like it, surely the answer must be yes.

Sure let's jump into extremas

There's giant gap between selling slaves and selling books that challenge some way of perceiving things.

One causes actual harm - both physically and mentally, the second at best triggers some people.

Was academically proven that this book is bullshit? if yes, then everything's fair, if not then...?

I'd rather avoid allowing corpos to decide what's the truth

> Sure let's jump into extremas

You think that 7-11 selling eggplant parm or a specialty food shop deciding to sell some other specialty food are extremes? I feel like you're strategically choosing to ignore half of what I say because it doesn't fit into your narrative.

> One causes actual harm - both physically and mentally

And is totally legal in those countries which clearly have different ideas about what is ok than you do and therefore may legitimately expect Amazon to operate with their ideals just like you expect Amazon to operate with yours.

> the second at best triggers some people.

Everyone who studies media, culture, psychology, and the relationship between trauma and lifelong suffering disagrees with your framing of this, so you're probably missing something.

> I'd rather avoid allowing corpos to decide what's the truth

They aren't. They're deciding what they sell.

Sidebar curiosity: Do you know what "trigger" actually means, and does your minimization of it mean that you don't believe that PTSD is real or serious?

>You think that 7-11 selling eggplant parm or a specialty food shop deciding to sell some other specialty food are extremes?

No, I've been talking about slavery part.

>And is totally legal in those countries which clearly have different ideas about what is ok than you do and therefore may legitimately expect Amazon to operate with their ideals just like you expect Amazon to operate with yours.

Fortunely we have ethics, morality, international laws, human rights and many more and we're actually able to draw conclusions that slavery is bad.

>Everyone who studies media, culture, psychology, and the relationship between trauma and lifelong suffering disagrees with your framing of this, so you're probably missing something.

No doubt that I'm missing something.

>They aren't. They're deciding what they sell.

Limiting access can be form of it.

Google removing something from its search is really being close to some kind of censorship.

Google pushing one narration over other in its search index is very significant way of creating the "truth".

Some people says that a lie repeated thousand times becomes a truth and I definitely believe that it's true to significant extent.

>Sidebar curiosity: Do you know what "trigger" actually means, and does your minimization of it mean that you don't believe that PTSD is real or serious?

I do believe that PTSD is real, but I'm not talking about trigger as of flashbacks.

> slavery is bad.

If it's so universally bad, why is it legal in all of those countries? And it wasn't always considered bad. Should Amazon in the 1820s have been abolitionists or slavers? Maybe one day we'll all conclude that calling different gender and sexuality mental illness is bad and Amazon will have been on the right side after all.

>If it's so universally bad, why is it legal in all of those countries?

I don't know.

I guess because nobody in power wants to change it?

>And it wasn't always considered bad.

That's not solid, we live and try to measure this against _now_, we also learned form our mistakes and improved.

>Maybe one day we'll all conclude that calling different gender and sexuality mental illness is bad and Amazon will have been on the right side after all.

Both outcomes are possible, so they're either ahead of time or just yet another censors?

I'd rather not rely on corpos/people in power believing that they're "ahead of time".

So you're saying we should socialize Amazon because it's too big to be one corporation? Furthermore, they shouldn't be able to dictate what they sell on their platform?

I mean a lot of people on here hate socialism (I don't, though I dis-like authoritarian versions), it seems though a lot of the people crying foul about corps censoring are the same ones who are libertarian-leaning anti-regulation for everybody and every company and are very leery of "socialism".

I'd agree with Amazon having too much power over it's brand and what it sells, though I don't feel this is an issue. I'm more concerned with Amazon selling knock-off products of its vendors under it's own brand-name then removing their "competing" products. I'm also more concerned with google/apple's control over the app stores, especially Apple since you can't side-load apps.

While, I abhor parler, for example - I can see them doing this more and more with any social media app that could potentially disagree with their world view. I'd like to see more censorship resistant apps pop up just for the sake of freedom (even to be a jerk), I'm also a fan of decentralizing everything some-day and owning your identity and I think Google/Apple could hinder that if they see these de-centralized apps as extremist-enabling apps (even if they aren't really) and just blanket dis-allow them.

There's a fine-line that leftists (and I am one) are walking with censoring everything. I keep thinking of "thought police" in 1984, and it makes me think that even well-intentioned ideas can back-fire and create the very thing they're trying to avoid.

At the same time the terrorism at the capital was scary, we came very close to losing our entire country and installing a dictator for life. So we need to avoid that, but also retain freedoms and the internets "wild west" ability to bring marginalized voices to the fore-front but not if they're inciting violence. Kind of an autistic ramble, but I don't know what the best options are.

I think we need new social networks and news networks that grade everything around perceived "truthfulness" and you can also see who ranked what and what side they lean politically so you know if their ranking is biased, or something.

Somedays I think we'd all just be better if a solar flare hits and disabled electronics for the next 20 months.

>they shouldn't be able to dictate what they sell on their platform?

There's difference between "this product is not selling, we're stopping it" or any other similar business related reasoning and "randomly" deciding "this book is not right, thus we censor this"

There's nothing wrong with Amazon stopping selling stuff due to business/legal reasons and so on

but if their reasoning is like "people shouldn't read this" or "we don't like this idea", then it's very bad.

It's not trivial problem, but I think it's important.

>Somedays I think we'd all just be better if a solar flare hits and disabled electronics for the next 20 months.

Maybe web 2.0 was a mistake, huh.

I think the difference is one says "we don't want to sell our book" and the other says "we don't want to sell your book". Of course it's free market, I don't have a huge issue with either decision, but I think that's the nuance the above poster was getting at.

That doesn't explain why they think that that detail is germane to this conversation.

I bet they wouldn't have a problem with someone saying "I'm ok with my spit in my mouth but not your spit." I get to decide what goes in my mouth, and you get to decide what goes in your mouth, yeah? I don't care whether you want your spit to be in my mouth. We both get to decide for ourselves.

I think the discussion changes slightly if you make your money from allowing people to spit in your mouth though. And allow people to build a business model around the assumption they can continue spitting in your mouth.

(this is the strangest HN comment thread I've taken part in)

Not meaningfully. If I let people spit in my mouth for money I still have every right to say "no, not you" because having their spit in my mouth platform affects me emotionally. If people start to assume that my mouth is a free-for-all, those people can fuck all the way off, yeah?

Thankfully for 7-11, they don't bake cakes.

Doesn't that make it worse? If Amazon won't sell a book you can buy it somewhere else. But a copyright holder possesses the government-backed power to restrict anyone from producing a copy. They can restrict the total number of copies in circulation for a very long time.

> Amazon Inc probably does not own the copyright to the books they don't want to distribute.

The idea that not owning the copyright on a work obligates you to offer it for sale is as bizarre as the idea that the same obligates you to purchase it would be. (In fact, the former implies the latter.)

One is the content owner and the other is a distributor offering a platform and a market. They are also an ebooks monopoly and control more than half of US book sales in general. Censorship actions taken by them have effects as impactful as censorship actions undertaken by governments. Now they’re also abusing their monopoly to hinder the activities of libraries (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/10/amazon-...).

These big tech companies have way too much centralized power and influence. They should be regulated like utilities (required to uphold first amendment and provide equal service to everyone) or broken up or both.

> They are also an ebooks monopoly and control more than half of US book sales in general.

They have more than half of US book sales, but I wouldn't say they control half of US book sales. There are other large retail stores, such as Walmart and Target, that have large collections of books for sale that include the books that make up the vast majority of what the public buys. Oh, and Barnes and Noble is still around and they have a huge selection, too.

Walmart's in-store selection is pretty limited, but they have a big online selection, and it is not just the popular books. They go pretty far into books of very limited general appeal. For example, Walmart's "Gravity Science Books" section [1] is just full of things I can't imagine more than a handful of people worldwide wanting, even if you filter it down to just books sold by Walmart and covered by Walmart+ free shipping, rather than sold by third-party resellers through Walmart's marketplace.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/browse/science-books/gravity-science...