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

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.

> If I disagree with googles rules I can avoid google.

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.

Sadly Google isn't your mom and pop convenience store at the corner of the street. Arguing it is just a regular business is dishonest and you know it

If you don't agree with the laws, emigrate! It's probably easier than completely avoiding Google.

Swedish government asked Google to remove YouTube news channels that was critical of the Swedish state owned media, and Google did.

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

I'm talking about national sovereignty of democratically elected governments.

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

Do you have a source for this please?

So using "foreign" as a pejorative is cool as long as the foreigners are Americans?

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.

> So using "foreign" as a pejorative is cool as long as the foreigners are Americans?

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

You're the one who brought national origin into the thread. The arguments on both sides were made just fine without it.

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.

The vast majority of companies shaping the social discourse are American. You can't conveniently ignore the fact, it's inherently part of the discussion. I'm not drown in Gambian or Afghan cultural bs