> Except for platform providers, such as AWS deplatforming customers, duopoly app stores doing the same, and even core infrastructure providers like cloudflare making editorial decisions.

I have absolutely 0 issue with people being "deplatformed" for pushing very obvious messages of hate. These providers have rules you must follow or you get banned. Literally no different than any business with a physical presence.

The exact same thing would happen outside the internet if some idiot decided to grab a megaphone and take up a prime location in your local town to push their hate. In fact in that instance they might actually ended up being arrested.

This really isn't that hard to understand.

> This really isn't that hard to understand.

Then you aren't thinking critically. It's incredibly complex.

Here, simple question then. Define "obvious messages of hate".

I know some people who define that as disagreeing with same sex marriage.

I know people who define it as supporting Israel.

I've also heard CRT and discussion of white privilege described as hateful.

But I'm certain you can do it in a way that effectively balances society's interest in free expression with the interest of all parties to be protected from reputational harm, while protecting the rights of private citizens, owners of businesses and taking into consideration hundreds of years of legal precedent and Constitutional protections.

So it's easy, right? Super simple. Everyone that's grappling with these issues and balancing limits on free expression must be pretty dumb, I guess.

Including the framers and most Supreme Court justices that have been trying to figure it out for hundreds of years [1], I suppose.

[1] https://constitutionallawreporter.com/amendment-01/freedom-s...

Oddly enough, AWS didn't invent the internet, and the old ways still work. Mastadon exists, truth social exists, Gab and voat existed, r/conservative exists, the laptop sitting right next to me serving my website exists. There are PLENTY of programmers who have vile opinions, and they will happily take your money to make a scalable and robust controversial opinion platform. Fucks sake, infowars still runs. If people are too lazy or stupid to search out your platform that isn't on youtube or facebook, that's not youtube or facebook's fault.

You do not have a right to use the most effective means of communication that is owned, created, and operated by a private entity. The government should not be obligated to provide an industry scale PA system for whatever protest you want.

This is dead on. Well said.

I want to just muse a bit though, because while I think the current axe grinding is facetiously bad, I can see things getting worse & do want to at least recognize some threats where I feel like the government might really have a role in mandating service.

Right now I'm at two cases, both of which I can see from different angles & feel differently about.

1. The idea of social media platforms that would filter (or, heavens, modify) conversations between consenting DM'ing folk scares me a bit, and this is absolutely an active situation in the authoritarian countries of the world and it doesn't sit well and right now I feel like some kind of democratic principles have a compelling stake even against private companies (& especially against the government itself, but that's whole nother enchilada).

2. Literally no one being willing to peer/transit you. When CloudFlare or AWS says no to KiwiFarms or Stormfront, I have zero sympathy. These are service providers. They ought not have their name tainted by affiliation, association with folks they don't want to host. I'm fine with that, because those are not critical services to getting or being online: they are convenient service providers, but fundamentally, being on the internet is just having some computers in a rack, and having interconnect and peerage and transit so people can talk to your servers. If we start getting to the place where that starts to become impossible (which so far has never been anywhere near a real circumstance), I start to get alarmed. But also... transit is a service. Being in a data-center with an Internet Exchange (IX) is a service. There's only a matter of degrees between CloudFlare refusing service & these fundamental internet connectivities saying: no, we refuse service. Democracy's/government's ability to navigate what is an essential connectivity service- which must necessarily to a high degree be content neutral- with higher-order providers is a key struggle that I see as enormously difficult. Which is to say, I do think there is a very real case for Hurricane Electric, I do think there is a case for Layer7 to be government mandated essential service providers, who don't get to pick who they carry. There has to be some Postal Service of the internet, someone who is content neutral (or the Democratic government itself- if it wishes to be regarded as an actual democracy- has to provide such) but to me, it is extremely low layer of essential services.

And there's definitely some kind of invisible undefined line where we shut off essential services. It'd be interesting to know some case law about who the post office or other public utilities can claim exception to giving service, where they say, no, you're a proven problem, you're on your own, we no longer will help you.

There is interesting situations I want to consider. Just, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever to me about any of the current whining aggrieved political man-children of politics who bitch & moan & whine & are completely f-ing off their rocker wrong.

There are a few companies that control 99% of the access to information on the internet.

We've been shown recently that both the government and pharmaceutical companies have used these gatekeepers to stifle speech.

I disagreed with it in the 80's when it was the right-wing acting as the morality police for TV and radio, and I disagree with it now that it's the left wing (weirdly?) acting to stifle speech and wholeheartedly embracing cancel culture.

If the active suppression of speech of qualified health care professionals by pharmaceutical companies in partnership with a few tech companies and the government doesn't give you pause, I'm not sure what will.

Maybe when they suppress something you believe in?

To me, the "Twitter Files" releases have been nothing-burgers in extreme. Nothing remotely begins to give me the feeling that the government ordered these companies around.

These platforms have been working for themselves to figure out what to do, what speech is too toxic to associate with. Examples like Bob Iger walking away from a potential Twitter acquisition because so much unhinged activity happened there is a pretty unsurprising example of how fraught these things are. That they have some communications with people who have a political background is not, contrary to what the Musk-Stream Media would say, at all scary or intimidating or bad. It's still seemed to be totally Twitters ball on what to allow.

Society as a whole was resistant to many noise messages. It's hard to have tolerance for those with reasonable complaints, when so many of loudest & most vocal anti-mainstream voices seem like trolls & monsters & crazies. Trying to navigate what anti-vaccine stuff to allow or not is a hard job I don't envy. And I think a huge part of the public finds many controversial things to be ridiculously unappealing & doesn't want to deal with it at all, and it helps the networks & conforms to desires & expectations, makes us feel like we don't necessarily have to wade through shit, every time we log-on.

You might want to take a look at the active debate and court rulings [1] over the First Amendment and public access TV, which is probably the best analogy to the internet we can think about with modern technology.

It's more complex than it seems.

[1] https://www.commlawblog.com/2019/06/articles/broadcast/supre...

This blog seems pretty biased. It's all afraid that... the FCC says ISPs have to have a consistent report to users on what their services are? There's a lot of scare-mongering fear of the government, a definite streak of bias to me throughout.

The pretense that Public Access TV is "the best analogy to the internet we can think about with modern technology" seems absurd. Broadcast television has programming, must select what to show during the air, an enormous constraint, and Public Access TV makes use this limited spectrum and scheduling. Trying to use it to model what we should compel of random private service providers seems absurd beyond measure to me, & wholly unapplicable.

I present some arguments in my own reply to this parent, talking about what essential internet services are. So far, we have seen no instances of people who have been denied access to internet transit carriers, to my knowledge. AWS might kick you off, but that's a very high level service. If you literally can't get your couple of hosts connected, that becomes more an issue, but that doesn't seem to be an real issue so far.