Freedom of speech is a pretty fundamental value. It's not surprising to expect it beyond where it's legally required.

Freedom of speech was a pretty fundamental value. A couple of generations ago.

Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be racist etc.

If you want to preserve free speech, you need to defend hateful speech. This is not a new problem:

https://www.aclu.org/report/1978-aclu-pamphlet-why-american-...

No you don't, not even close.

Freedom of speech is being distorted by some actors in bad faith that want the freedom to be anti-Juche counterrevolutionary etc.

You are not understanding.

We already have many laws that effect companies.

For example, power companies cannot just turn off your electricity because they don't like what you say.

These are called common carrier laws and they are completely uncontroversial.

We live in a society, and it is perfectly OK for us to put limits on what major monopoly type companies can do.

Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything? Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with, or would it just open up a whole new front in the culture wars, of endless, highly-politicized and ham-fisted control over, say, whether or not twitter has a block function or not?

> Private property rights are not absolute, sure. But is regulating media companies going to solve anything?

I am not sure if you were aware, but this article is about ISPs and we currently have laws that already regulate them and make the behavior described in the article as illegal.

So yes we do regulate them. And these laws are called common carrier laws. And those have have existed for decades and uncontroversial, and yes they work.

> Are there any regulations which both sides could be happy with

Both sides are indeed already happy with our existing common carrier laws that apply to ISPs, yes. Common carrier laws are not controversial.

Your point about common-carrier regulations already existing is very well taken.

What's not so clear to me is whether (A) the allegations against the ISP have any merit (the article itself states it has no confirmation), or (B) even if they were true that they would run afoul of the common carrier laws. As far as I understand, these regulations do not prohibit the carriers from selectively promoting (and, ipso facto, selectively suppressing) the content they carry.

Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The capacity of the carrier is always going to be finite, therefore, tough choices are always going to have to be made as to who gets priority access.

Civil rights legislation can happily co-exist with a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" sign on the shop door.

How about, "no company shall refuse access to essential infrastructure to anyone because they engage in lawful activity." That's what I think the bar should be on this issue and should include banking and internet services.

Sounds good to me, but (as another perceptive commentator wrote) we do already have common carrier laws on the books; don't they pretty much cover what is intended here?

Yes, but I was mostly responding to the "no shirt, no shoes.." portion of the comment, and don't think that common carrier status goes quite far enough in terms of ensuring access. I also think that the status should include banking, and possibly internet hosting providers and services, not just client access.

I think the Telephone company model is fine. Have you ever had the phone company disconnect your call or cancel your services because they didn't like something you said?

> "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"

That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.

Sure, pretty much everyone except extreme libertarians agrees that there are limits to private property rights that can be overriden in certain circumstances. However, if we (rightly) force businesses not to discriminate on the grounds of race, then it seems logically consistent to also allow businesses to refuse to associate with racists. I am not sure how someone could be ok with government intervention to prevent "whites only" restaurants and yet not ok with the government merely refraining from interfering with businesses that voluntarily choose not to associate with racists.

I'm not saying it's a great policy, but it makes sense to me.

Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist.

In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.

Yes, I suppose there is a logically consistent space there, but not one that seems either appealing or consistent with the way the legal lines have been drawn in the US. For example, as it is not illegal in the US to express hatred for people of a particular ethnicity, should bakeries therefore be required to bake 'Ethnicity X sucks' cakes? That seems both absurd and inconsistent with the eventual outcome of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.

Why would you not take horseshoe theory seriously? There are countless examples of opposing extremists converging on similar beliefs.

Only at a very superficial level.

like Stalin and Hitler

oh yeah, 10s of millions murdered sooo superficial

Yes, that would be one such example of superficial, high-school level analysis - "they both killed people".

oh wow youre so enlightened!

Unfortunately progressives have been acting like ancaps on these issues for a while. I've long since stopped being surprised to see someone with "socialist" in their bio saying it's a good thing that unelected corporations have de facto control over online political expression, or that employers should be able to threaten people's livelihoods for supporting the wrong party, and acting like it's anathema to suggest regulating a private company in any way. Very short sighted, both forwards and backwards

// progressives have been acting like ancaps //

chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)

But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?

Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.

But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.

There is a very bright-line difference in the case of the civil rights-related curbs on private property privilege: Those actually were effective in solving the problem! Because the solution to the problem was very clear: everybody should be able to ride the bus, eat in a restaurant, etc.

The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.

In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.

You start off with a very clear solution, but don't explain why that very clear solution doesn't apply Everyone should be able to use the bus, eat in a restaurant, use a water fountain or a post office bathroom Everyone should be able to use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Uber, Shopify, Reddit. It's the same problem in both cases. Why is it different now so we should apply an exclusionary standard?

Great question, which made me think about how they are more similar than I had originally thought. In both cases we're talking about carriers, quasi-utilities, network effects and (alas) real potential for abuse. But wouldn't this very similarity tend to strengthen our intuitions about the need for community standards?

E.g. You are sitting on a bus, and a venerable person comes aboard and launches into paean to Bolshevism, urging the present company to rise up and seize the means of production. Certainly protected speech. You might find it entertaining. You might even feel a pang of nostalgia for a lost world and its simpler problems.

But after a few hours of this, would you really feel like a free speech abuse had happened if the bus driver asks our comrade to give it a rest; or, if he feels honor-bound to continue, would he please go do on somebody else's bus?

But you asked how I thought they were different, and I do think they are very different, because human attention is limited in a different way than the number of busses, or ISPs are. If you can't fit one more person on a bus without kicking another one off, you can just buy more busses.

Human attention is not like that. No matter how many clones of twitter there are, I can't doom scroll for more than 24 hours a day. If some content is promoted on my feed, the means other content is inevitably excluded from my feed. And isn't this really what people are unhappy about? Not just that their views are not stored in some database somewhere. No, they want people to pay attention to what they are saying.

Can that problem be solved by additional regulations? I really don't think so. No matter what regulations we put on carriers, there will be media winners and media losers. And the losers will always feel like the system is systematically excluding them. And no wonder they feel that way--they are right. Moreover, they would be able to point to specific line items in specific regulations which were having the effect of suppressing their speech, perhaps even unconstitutionally suppressing their speech. But the conundrum is that this would be true for any set of regulations. The regulations can change who gets attention and who gets ignored. But I have a hard time seeing how it can actually solve the problem.

> But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?

Yes! That's what it's going to take. If you want checks and balances, this is how you get them. Ultimately capitalism is supposed to benefit society as a whole and when it doesn't it needs a kick in the ass.

> The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!

That's correct but as soon as you're "open to the public" the rules, necessarily, change.

What, exactly, do you think these regulations should be? What kind of regulation would solve this problem?

E.g. contrast with, say, regulation of pharmaceuticals by the FDA. Certainly a curb on private property rights, but, its also pretty clear what the regulations should do: allow companies to sell only drugs which have been proven to be both safe and effective.

Is there such a very clear idea of how these proposed regulations should be written? Where do we draw the line? Does anybody really have a very clear idea let all what the solution would look like?

This sort of questioning just supports maintaining the status quo even if that benefits nobody.

I don't know what the regulations should be but that doesn't mean regulations shouldn't exist. Businesses are under perhaps thousands of regulations and I can only name a few. How many can you name? What problems do those regulations solve? Do you think they shouldn't exist as well?

// This sort of questioning // chuckle Surely you are not trying to suppress my right to ask questions? :-) We are all frustrated here and know things have got to change somehow. It's just not exactly obvious how, not to me anyways.

But suppose we actually did have a concrete proposal, something we could legislate. No matter what the legislation was, there would still be media winners and media losers. And the media losers would still feel they are being systematically excluded.

Here's the kicker--they would be absolutely right!! Moreover, they wouldn't have to appeal to vague dissatisfactions about "corporate abuses"--they could point to specific line items of regulations which had the effect of suppressing their speech. There would be endless, highly politicized fights about what the regulations should be, but no matter what they were, the regulations would inevitably have the effect of promoting some points of view and suppressing others.

I.E. I really don't how regulations could provide any sort of solution to this problem.

Winners and losers exist now -- it's just that whatever is the status quo is the assumed baseline. It's just how humans view things but it's not logical.

I don't really think this is as complicated as you're making it in this case. The regulation should be that ISPs are to simply pass along data that comes their way. If they fail to do that by impeding certain traffic, they should be fined or in egregious cases jailed. No different from how you'd fine or jail something like a restaurant owner for violating health codes. You would expect a restaurant to serve you clean, un-tampered food; likewise, you should be able to expect your ISP to serve you data and to not tamper with it.

> * The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!*

Be careful here not to conflate personal property and lucrative property. The first (like a home) is what you say. The second (like a factory) is a way to tell others what to do on your turf, for your benefit rather than theirs.

Private companies are of the second kind: more freedom for shareholders, fewer freedoms for employees… and if they’re big and inevitable enough (like YouTube), that’s fewer freedoms for users as well.

Even if we didn’t distinguish the two kinds of property, I could easily twist your sentence into meaning that the whole point of property is to make sure rich owners have more freedom than the poor. Which is probably not the point you were trying to make.

Freedom is a tricky thing to balance.

Owning a factory doesn’t give you the right to tell people what to do.

Having employment contracts with people gives you that right.

Freedom is certainly a tricky thing to balance, and private property rights are not absolute. But neither are freedom of speech rights.

Here's a way to cut the Gordian knot: publicly-owned services and utilities. E.g. NPR as a way to check distortions which privately-owned news organizations. We could have a national public twitter, a national public chatGTP, etc.

So those of you who are now thinking of all the drawbacks typically associated with publicly-owned companies (real or imagined), well, the more you let the government regulate the private companies, the more the private companies will behave like public companies anyways.

Instead of getting the best of both worlds, you'll get the worst of both worlds: heavily-regulated, inefficient companies which still control the public discourse, which deliver profits not to the public but to private interests.