The Constitution binds the government and the government ONLY.

What did you think I meant by

If Cloudflare or anyone else wants to have a different standard, that’s their right, too. But the First Amendment line is neon bright, which is a nice feature.

?

Because the 1st is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

What if the government reaches out to social media company and asks them to police speech that they don’t like, as was the case during Covid/Hunter Biden Laptop?

And yet it still happened, to the point where thousands died a preventable death.

"hunter biden laptop" was always a distraction tactic, just like "but hillary's emails". It was an attempt to muddy the waters and obscure the republican's long list of shit they got up to. Thankfully, we've gone from "fuck around" to the "find out" age now.

If Biden did a thing then the legal system will take care of it. That is all.

This isn’t even true. The 13th Amendment applies to everybody,

No one cares. This is class warfare. The proletariat needs the right to engage in debate free of interference from the bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie-adjacent. You're not going to win anyone over by saying that the law doesn't provide for that. Hang your laws. The natural rights of the proletariat should not be up for negotiation.

And they ARE free to engage in debate, and they DO - nazis are NOT oppressed in the US. But services like Cloudflare are ALSO free to not platform it. This is the freedom of choosing who to do business with. The "proletariat" can - and do - engage in debate in millions of ways. Else the insurgents couldn't have organized the Jan 6th coup attempt.

Calling people you don't like "nazis" doesn't change what you are doing. They are being deprived of their civil rights and no one is fooled. That's why we're having this discussion at all: you've managed to piss off the right people such that the problem isn't being ignored anymore.

> They are being deprived of their civil rights

No, they aren't.

Freedom of speech is not the right to coerce others into relaying your speech. That is a violation of free speech.

Commerce is not the right to arbitrarily deny people services you have freely offered either, but here we are.

You people built an edifice at law, called it 'public accommodations', went to great lengths to stretch it as far as possible into a concept of commercial neutrality, and now here it is being applied against you. No one will care whether or not your idiosyncratic definition of 'public accommodations' applies here either. The proletariat's sense of justice has been offended. You did this to yourselves. Choke on it.

> Commerce is not the right to arbitrarily deny people services you have freely offered either

Yes, it generally is in the US. Legally, there are a small number of narrow exceptions in public accommodations based in historically widespread societal persecution, but those exceptions would not be necessary if the general liberty you deny were not the rule, and even those exceptions which have been established in statute have not-infrequently been narrowed or limited by the courts for infringing on speech, press, and association rights when applied beyond certain limits.

> Legally

I am not interested in your arguments predicated on what bourgeoisie law courts have said. They have natural rights the same as anyone else, and they are being trampled upon. No one is fooled, and no one is going to get dragged into useless arguments to authority with you.

> I am not interested in your arguments predicated on what bourgeoisie law courts have said.

A nitpick, but "bourgeoisie" is the noun, "bourgeois" is the adjective; it is either "bourgeois law courts" or "law courts of the bourgeoisie".

> They have natural rights the same as anyone else

“Natural rights” are a thought-terminating cliché to avoid justifying one’s view of what concrete legal rights people should have while simultaneously pretending that the moral conclusion on that question one is offering is a material fact.

Outside of use within a community within which there is a non-controversial moral consensus as a shorthand for positions not in debate within that community, it is never productive to invoke it.

And, certainly, the right to compel others in society to involuntarily relay your views is not a consensus position on rights in our society, even if you leave the law courts, of the bourgeoisie or otherwise, out of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debate.

I don't think anybody in this thread has disputed that neo-Nazis have free speech rights under the First Amendment. What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services.

To make it intuitive: the First Amendment is just as much a guarantee of a right to not speak as it is a right to speak. In other words: it is just as much a guarantee that the state is not empowered to make you do or say things. Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.

> What's disputed is whether this entitles them to any number of private services...Expecting the state to require private businesses to carry speech that they otherwise would never associate with is a remarkable incursion on 1A rights.

Freedom of speech is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. It (in theory) protects us from oppression by our government. Freedom of speech is also an ideal that we should strive for in a free society. One would protect us from oppression by forces other than our government.

Private businesses don't have an obligation to uphold people's rights the way the government does, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't expect them to respect the ideals of freedom of speech. Because our country doesn't do enough to protect the people from what are basically monopolies we should apply extra pressure to companies who are uniquely positioned to oppress us.

I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.

Once a single company, or small group of companies, can decide who has a voice that company has become a liability to our security and freedoms. Those companies should either be broken up or others must be allowed and enabled to step into that space to create alternatives. That might mean that certain barriers to entry will need to be dismantled. It might mean changing laws to accommodate newcomers into the market. As long as truly competitive options exist and/or can be created, freedom can exist.

Sadly, right now we don't really have truly competitive alternatives for things like cloudflare or payment processors and there are many places where single entities hold dangerous amounts of power when it comes to the internet. Imagine if ICANN decided to refuse to provide IPs or domains to anyone whose political views they disagreed with. When non-governmental agencies hold too much power, as Hurricane Electric does, we have to hold them to a higher standard, take actions against them, or put alternate systems in place to protect ourselves from them.

I don't think we materially disagree about the civic importance of free expression.

> I personally don't think the government should step in and force companies to carry speech they disagree with. I think they should make certain that no company has the power to oppress people leaving them without reasonably equivalent options.

This maxim has not been violated in this case! HE is one of many ISPs; no evidence has been presented that it colludes with other ISPs[1] to stifle public expression.

And note: the logic of "reasonably equivalent options" doesn't entitle anybody to Internet access, for the same reason that the freedom of movement doesn't entitle me to a driver's license (or a horse). The government may not prohibit my expression; it is also under no particular obligation to supply me any particular venue for expression.

[1]: HE is somewhat famous for having long-standing conflicts with other, larger, ISPs with regards to peering: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mpetach/4031195041

> HE is one of many ISPs

It's one of a very small number of ISPs that form the backbone of the internet (Tier 1-ish) and that puts it in a rare position to censor. The website they are censoring has no direct relationship with HE, yet they are still being silenced by them. That's the problem.

Indeed there is a long history of companies providing services (at inflated rates, of course) to people engaging in activity most are not comfortable with. Think payment processors for porn sites.

Cloudflare isn’t the government and has no specific requirement to enable the use of their platform to further a political agenda. Being a racist nazi advocating for violence isn’t a protected class, and private companies are not required to host content or otherwise provide a platform for any particular speech that’s not otherwise protected by law.

They can host their content on other platforms, or self host.

Cloudflare has issued statements in the past that they desire to provide their service to everyone, but have been put under immense external pressure not to.

Sometimes they cave, sometimes they don’t. But they’ve begged the public, and presumably the customers/investors pressuring them, to treat them as dumb pipes, not editors.

Perhaps, but my point is that the constitutional right doesn’t extend beyond the government. Just like HN can moderate without fear, so can cloudflare. They choose to take a more hands off approach - good for them. But it’s a choice, and there are apparently limits to their forbearance.