The highest court in Germany (for civil and criminal proceedings) wrote this in one of their rulings:

> Depending on the circumstances, especially if private companies - as in this case - move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public communication themselves, the fundamental rights obligation of private parties can in fact be close to or even equal to a fundamental rights obligation of the state.

So as long as YouTube, Twitter etc. are open to "the public", they could write "we reserve the right to remove any content for any or no reason at any time" in their TOS and it wouldn't be valid in Germany.

Double-edged sword...

I feel like it is largely a question of what expectations you work to produce among users and potential users.

If people are actively aware of the organization saying "we can remove videos on a whim if we want to, and we very well might do so", and especially if they are generally known to occasionally do that in practice, and this isn't a surprise to any users with a reasonable level of awareness, then I think that's probably fine.

But if the impression they give to a typical reasonable person is that they are "a platform for almost everyone that behaves according to fixed rules, where you can be reasonably assured that if you follow the stated rules your content will stay available, as much as we are able to accomplish this", but then they go around removing videos on a whim / because they have a grudge against someone / because someone paid them to / whatever , then that's not good, because they aren't being honest about the service they provide.

Whether the govt has any place making an organization who is misbehaving in that particular way stop, I'm, not sure one way or the other.

This idea that private companies earn special privileges in this regard because they were started by individuals needs to die.

So what's your take on Lawrence v. Texas?

Two people in their house,

a large, transparent non-profit advocacy organization,

a dark money lobbying org, and

a hundred-billion-dollar for-profit incumbent that acts as a pillar of human interaction for news, education and entertainment across the globe

are very different situations. It isn't as simple as scaling up numbers.

By phrasing what happened in the passive voice, you are downplaying the fact that Google actively strove to make it hard for new competitors to become established.

Of course there still are competitors to YouTube, depending on how we define the market for online video sharing, and Google didn't invent Metcalfe's Law, but nor should they be surprised that it was hard for alternative sites to compete. That is, after all, why they bought YouTube in the first place and discontinued Google Videos.

An attempt at practical antitrust regulation might mean, for example, that if a Walmart replaces every other business in your town through the sheer merit of its business model, that Walmart doesn't get to refuse to do business with you on the grounds that the manager hasn't liked you since high school. It might even mean that you reserve Constitutional rights like assembly/protest within the area that is functionally the public square, which is the private sidewalk in front of the Walmart.

I know which approach I would prefer.

I've recently had to talk to my internet provider, and that certainly increased my citizen's fervor in regulating companies in dominant positions, because every company will immediately turn around to milk/punish consumers, and try to influence politics for their benefit.

But to me, it's not a punishment. It's a natural consequence of YouTube's dominant position: they have to start acting like it.

So ideally if a video is to be taken down, it ought be under a rationale along the lines of "you agreed to not doing [very specific thing] and this video does it, therefore we took it down", not "technically by clicking on a link in our site, you agreed to fine print that says you'll sell us your soul, so suck it"

Yes, and that's a good thing because it encourages competition. No market should have a player with such a dominant position.

Companies exist to benefit the state and the people. If a company is so successful it distorts rights for everyone and puts fundamental rights at risk, it's not 'punishing' the company even though it might feel like it. It's making sure the conditions that created success for youtube remain in place for future generations - free speech to some degree, competition, etc.

I think corporate personhood and corporate rights are a cancer on society and the corporatism/corporate state/fascism-lite that the west is already deep into is destroying the fundamental freedoms in the country. Disney will always have more money than you to argue for their corporate rights against your personal rights.

This ruling is wisdom.

No, they bought that status by regularly sending dump-trucks full of gold to record labels.

No, it is just attaching some minimal responsibility to the enormous benefits that YT exploits their dominant market position for.

I actually think Germany has it backwards here. If the German government wants to provide a free-speech "safe zone", they should provide it themselves.

You're encouraging government coercion of action.

Of course now you might say, if such a phone company existed, those people who were denied service could just choose another one. But if this company would be the one dominating the market, this would mean they couldn't reach all the people they would want to anymore. This is the analogy with Facebook.

Now someone walks in and starts offering Corona. It's not everyone's favorite, but still decently popular, and the owner has no problem with that.

Until a few hours later, when a new line is added to the list of rules on the door: "no Corona". Then the owner tells the person handing out free Corona that they're breaking the rules and kicks them out.

Is that fair? Not in this case, says the court. Everyone agrees to the rules when they walk through the door, but the owner can't just willy-nilly change them after the fact.

(If you want to really understand the decision, you'll have to read the original instead of relying on analogies.)

Then, on YouTube (or woke mailing lists) there are mostly two sides, only one of which gets censored: The one that opposes the dominant clique.

YouTube is full of filth that is kept up because it is non-political and makes money for Google. If Google were really woke, it would take down all videos that are demeaning to women (according to their ideology). They don't, because these videos are a cash cow.

And you're advocating for foreign private companies to have more rights than the democratically elected governments of the countries they operate in.

Last time I checked laws still come from countries, not from Google. The world isn't America's private companies playground

The biggest difference generally between a private enterprise (foreign or domestic) and a democratically elected government is that participation with the government and its rules are:

- compulsory - enforced by physical violence

If I disagree with googles rules I can avoid google. If I a disagree with the governments rules (for example tax rates they impose), there will be people with weapons to force compliance.

That's exactly what Germany's highest court denied if they "move into a dominant position and take over the provision of the framework conditions of public communication themselves" because it is not easy to avoid Google/YouTube.

I think we are way past the illusion of democracy and governments protecting their people at this point.

They might have very different views than Americans and Google about what should or shouldn't exist.

As if America and its private companies have the monopoly of what's "right" and what it means to "protect the people" of the world, this is ridiculous

Companies can only provide products and services to willing customers. To restrict them is to restrict the choices of your own people to choose products they prefer. So what you're really arguing for is the majority in a country restricting the freedom of a minority in that same country.

How did you extrapolate that ? No

I really don't get your second point. You can't sell me a car without seat belt, you can't sell me weed, you can't host a jihad video platform.

You're already restricted in many ways. The world doesn't have to kneel in front of YouTube &co and accept all their bullshit.

America isn't a role model, neither in politics nor culture, the world doesn't need to conform to what America think is right.

Also, YouTube doesn't exist to serve the people, certainly not, it exists to make money and uses tax evasion to pay as little as possible in most EU countries, if they wanted to serve the people they could start there

As for the second point, yes and those examples are also cases of restricting their own citizens. Hence the discussion is still about rights of the citizenry versus their own government restricting them, not "rights" of companies as you put it.

The world is free to not use YouTube and always has been. And by the way I don't agree with many of the major websites' censorship decisions in the last couple years either. They depict only what a loud subset of America thinks is right.

Companies generally make money by serving people. I suppose there are business models where this isn't so (e.g. they exist to sue people or something, but exploiting govt's ability to take money by force instead), but in YouTube's case, they entice people the consensual way.

But that is what they are doing here, no? They just use Youtube as the way to provide it. Governments doesn't have to run businesses themselves, private actors are much better at running the day to day stuff usually.

Similarly if you own a huge amount of land and build a city there and let lots of people move in, don't get surprised when the government seizes your square and roads and make them public, or at least force you to let people move there as if they were public roads.

Some people currently seem to have the attitude that a corporation can be protected by the state but not responsible for its actions that negatively impact the common good. This was not the original intention.

> But wether public or private, corporations were originally only granted special legal privileges by government, conditional on them serving some PUBLIC good. With special rights came special restrictions, and their operations were periodically reviewed for compliance with their stated purpose. However, over time the system of incorporation has been altered by corporations themselves, such that the benefits of state-grants have been kept, while the responsibilities discarded. [0]

[0] https://ptolemy3.medium.com/but-corporations-are-private-com...

Whether or not Youtube should have a clause in their terms allowing them to remove arbitrary content is a different question, and yet another is whether they should be allowed to have such a clause.

No one is holding a gun to YouTube’s head and telling them they have to serve video content to Germans. They want to be in Germany serving video content, so it’s only fair and just that they should listen to the Germans and do what they say or leave.

Germany could probably tell Google not to host any videos from the opposition political party under penalty of fine or expulsion. Hopefully we agree that that would be bad?

We can agree that bad things are bad, but that doesn’t really gives us much insight.

It is entirely possible for countries to do things which are against their constitution.

If they want to diminish the impact legally and profitably, they can just drown it in in more intrusive ads.

And anyhow, the GDR dissolved over 30 years ago, I should think their economic policies died with them.

2. Because it's lazy and lacking credibility: it's a claim to being privy to 'the correct path for society', without showing the ability to create something of value.

The state could still tap market forces to bring about public squares that abide with its guidelines, by providing subsidies to private parties developing such platforms, in exchange for the parties entering into an irrevocable covenant that requires them to follow the state's rules.

Also, the company did not have to go to jail, it got a fine.

I think I will take a stroll through the forest, maybe I meat a bear that plays guitar and sells refreshing lemonade. I am prepared for anything.

All legal injunctions are predicated on the threat of imprisonment, even fines:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...

A company is generally its own legal entity, intentionally separated from its shareholders to protect them from any fallout should the company ever go bankrupt or get sued into oblivion. You can get into serious trouble if you founded a company and failed to correctly distinguish between your own and the companies property, because as far as the government is concerned you explicitly told it to make this distinction.

And there is very little privilege that incorporation grants corporations that is not entirely contractual. Limited liability for shareholders for tort is the only one I can think of, and that, in my opinion, should be repealed.

Limited liability for debt can be entirely contractual in its basis, and established by shareholders/companies operating outside of the corporate structure too, simply by stipulating that condition in any loan agreememt the business enter into with another party.

> §14.2 GG: Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen. [0]

Which roughly translates to:

> §14.2 GG: Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good.

[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html

If you believe otherwise, then I challenge you to convince a court of that. Courts, under common law, will invalidate any contract where the parties to it did not provide informed and genuine consent to the terms contained in it.

Resorting to legislative intervention suggests lacking the confidence in the validity of the allegations that premise it to use the judicial free market track.

>>as someone living in a country with multiple nation wide and regional state owned television channels I think they are terrible idea because they are extremely inefficient compared with private ones and also degenerate into propaganda machines for the political party in power, and the longer the same party is in power the worse.

Two points:

a) you think the polity is incapable of managing large organizatons competently enough to compete with shareholder-run private enterprises, yet you think this same polity can craft effective cookie-cutter rules that will affect millions of interactions a day. It's not a coherent model of the world.

b) the state is not limited to organizations under its direct management to support its policies. As I explained in a response to a sibling comment of yours, the state could still tap market forces to bring about public squares that abide with its guidelines, by providing subsidies to private parties developing such platforms, in exchange for the parties entering into an irrevocable covenant that requires them to follow the state's rules.

Yet another option would be the state funding decentralized open-source protocols that are capable of entirely replacing centralized parties in many markets. The state, being publicly funded, is the only entity capable of cost-effectively funding non-profit initiatives like this that produce public goods.

My larger point is that the state should not be monopolizing industries. It should provide alternatives to the private options. If it fails, the public still has the private options. If it succeeds, it did so by providing an option superior to those provided by the private sector. This imposes accountability on the state, by leaving it with competitors to act as a yardstick, while ensuring its interventions only impact the market to the extent that they improve it.

In Spain at least there are lots of instances of courts overturning contracts, the most famous ones maybe related to mortgage conditions. I'm not sure if this is good or not in the long term, but it's the case.

The Japanese infrastructure slush funds are a classic example of that.

And I would also submit that state intervention in healthcare and education has been a dramatic failure, with costs in these two sectors skyrocketing over the period in which the state expanded its role in them.

>>In Spain at least there are lots of instances of courts overturning contracts, the most famous ones maybe related to mortgage conditions. I'm not sure if this is good or not in the long term, but it's the case.

If a court overturns a contract, that is fine. One of the roles of the state, in a free society, is to rule on contracts via its courts, and invalidate those that do not meet the bar for consent.

But legislative bodies do not engage in the same impartial and deliberative process as courts so they are not the proper venue through which to restrict private interactions.

>>Completely free capitalism brings the kind of aberrations that we can already see destroying the livelihood of millions of people in the USA

The idea that the US has "completely free capitalism" is the Big Lie promoted by the state's unionized activist bureaucracy. The US, along with the rest of advanced nations, has rapidly moved away from being a free society with economic liberty, toward one that has a significant amount of centralized control over the private actions of its citizens:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

There is nothing wrong with state-owned corporations in principle. They need not violate any one's rights. How they are funded, and what laws are created to assist them, can of course be problematic, as can the general inefficiency of the state sector.

But if the funding sources for the state subsidies are not based on violating private property or contracting rights, there are no laws enacted to give the state-sponsored enterprise a monopoly over a market, and the subsidies address an externality to produce significant positive economic returns, then it would be fine.

This approach to government intervention is less risky, as failure of government administration will only waste the resources expended on the state-sponsored enterprise, while leaving private citizens with the private sector alternatives. Regimenting an entire sector with top-down rules risks destroying that entire sector if the government chooses the wrong set of rules.

> The German court held that YouTube failed to make its enforcement authority clear in its contract with the account operator who posted the video.

It does contain language quite similar to "regardless of the contract, we hold that ...":

Dahingestellt bleiben kann dabei, ob die Nutzungsbedingungen bzw. die „Richtlinie zur medizinischen Fehlinformation über COVID-19“ einer AGB-rechtlichen Kontrolle standhalten, insbesondere, ob sie dem Transparenzgebot genügen bzw. den Nutzer nicht unangemessen benachteiligen (§307 BGB). Denn die Inhalte des streitgegenständlichen Videos verstoßen bereits nicht gegen die Ende Januar 2021 gültige „Richtlinie zu medizinischen Fehlinformation über COVID-19“ (aa). Bezüglich der Neufassung der vorgenannten Richtlinie hat die Beklagte dagegen nicht glaubhaft gemacht, dass diese wirksam in den Vertrag einbezogen ist (bb).

"The question whether the terms of use resp. the "guidelines regarding medical disinformation about COVID-19" would withstand a check under ToS-law, especially whether they are sufficiently transparent resp. inappropriately disadvantage the user (§307 BGB) can be left aside. Because the content of the video under dispute already does not run counter to the "guidelines regarding medical disinformation about COVID-19" that were in effect at the end of January 2021 (aa). As for the revised version of the aforementioned guidelines, the accused has not convincingly argued that it has been effectively incorporated into the contract (bb)."

Which ruling? Have a link (in German is fine)?

Companies have obligations too, and I think that in Europe (compared to the USA) more people would agree that it's better to limit companies if it benefits people.

Certainly, in this case, it's better for people to have their protests heard than for Google to flex it's censorious whims.

For consumers, it is even better not to read the terms, because then they can say that they have been taken advantage of (it is harder to do that if you change a passage manually in a written contract).

Google might also be intentionally lazy, the Google Play licensing terms for example generally fail in front of a court when they are challenged, as they actively violate every law on anti competitive behavior you could think up. Whenever that happens Google just carves out a new licensing region for that courts jurisdiction and keeps the terms unchanged for the remaining world.

This is a discussion about Germany making it clear to Google what they're prohibited from removing.

Powerful enough governments can just choose to ignore or re-interpret things any way they like and act on them, though.

The clause in the sentence before that part reads "Beneath the rule of men entirely great,..." It was referring to authoritarian government.

Seems like a common trend in many countries around the world. Tech companies tend to be american, so they're a popular punching bag/scapegoat when it comes to enforcement actions.

It sounds like YouTube's stance is that the video may cause harm to their users; one of their criteria for removal.

Literally anything can be argued to be "harmful."

If there weren't people that blindly accepting it as the truth and verified everything this wouldn't be bad, in fact would be good because it could drive attention to something that perhaps was ignored.

Unfortunately large part of population has no idea how to do fact checking, and what's worse many take their news from the Facebook.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/15/online-ha...

(For what it's worth, the proposed law now refers to "safety" rather than "harms").

>UK

Or let me try, is “hateful”?

Yeah. That about clears it up, I guess. Clear as mud.