I don't have to reply to every post, only meaningful ones, but if I said what I thought, yeah, it probably would be deleted. And sometimes, I am ignoring the poster so I don't see it.What happened to your response? Did you remove it or did someone delete your freedom of speech?
Enough on this for me, though, back to elk bills.
You’re the one that needs to read the definition of censorship. Suppression of speech or ideas does not have to come from government to qualify as censorship.
All of those seven companies are businesses. The first four happen to be in the business of broad access data transmission in a manner the law has decided to treat as a common carrier. The latter three are in the business of providing broad access content platforms that as of this moment have not been legally classified as common carriers or publishers, but easily could be seen as either if Congress so decides. In the interest of promoting a then-nascent commercial internet congress passed some very unique and favorable rules governing such content platforms/hosts. Now that they are hardly small helpless startups I would expect in the next few years they will be stripped of some of these special rules. Whether in doing so Congress and regulators use old terminology and call them common carriers or they write a whole new regulatory scheme for digital platforms I can't predict, but the "cake and eat it too" days for social media are near an end.
Nope, much more a "Walmart of the internet" issue. It is almost entirely an anti-trust issue and not at all like the common carrier vs publisher issues raised by the social media companies.
I agree with the have your cake and eat it too argument you’re making to some extent. There are 2.8 Billion FB users so it’s kinda impossible to actually moderate.
Server farms are not common carriers, they are infrastructure leasing services. Do you think IBM or Microsoft are common carriers?
I agree with you for the most part.
I’m not saying that they are common carriers. I’m saying that the issue is close to the common carrier issue. We have all manner of laws regarding what sort of rights and guarantees a lessor must provide a lessee in many fields, and I’m suggesting that this is a field that we need to look into. Not every business can provide its own servers right out of the gate, and if the number of server farms that exist is limited and discriminates between it’s customers based on their politcal views, then I’m not sure that protecting the owners of the server farms is in our best interest. I’m not sure that it’s okay for a business to claim to provide a service at a certain price and then say “oh wait, not for you, I don’t like the people you vote for”
Yeah that’s the issue, confusing the person and the office.
I am not ready to convert every layer of internet service and software to some equivalent of common carrier - that would be a huge govt over reach into private markets.
Well, you already can’t deny service over race or sex. Would it be a big overreach to extend that to political speech and affiliation?
To my knowledge no one is denying service over politics.
What about “forced speech” - the web forums have the right not to be forced into speech they disagree with.
They can claim all sorts of things, but that’s what Amazon dropping Parler was over.
It already does, and that’s the point @POTUS on Twitter.
If they want platform protection, then they should not be able to censor political speech by one party, but nothing the other. Furthermore, with Amazon’s servers, it really doesn’t seem like forced speech. If I rent a space for use as a shoe store, and I’m allowed to put a sign on the store front, is it forced speech is the sign says “Trump for President”? I didn’t force the property management company to say anything at all.
It will be interesting to see how the lawsuit plays out.
