With such a high rate of ICO fraud, how can you blame them? They don’t want to be held liable in the numerous lawsuits that are to come. They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud.
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.
IANAL, is this a real risk? This sounds like suing a paper company for a ransom note written on it's paper. You can bring a suit for nearly anything but it feels like there would be a lot of precedent to immediately dismiss it.
Nah, I don't think they're in any legal risk. I'm sure their ToS says they can shut down anyone who uses their service for any reason. In addition, it's not like this is an overnight move or they're deleting people's information -- they're giving them weeks which should be more than enough time for affected customers to migrate to a different service.
They wouldn't be held legally liable. (CDA Section 230.) The real problem is that ICO emails tend to set off spam filters, and this could damage the deliverability of all mail originating from MailChimp.
"They also shouldn’t be burdened with doing due diligence for every ICO to dertermine if they might be aiding and abetting fraud."
Legally speaking you are perfectly right - they can do whatever they want. But morally speaking they can't - if they have put themselves in a position where they are so popular and making so much money that it is in the general public's best interest for them to censor certain scam artists, then they should invest into content moderators. I have no idea how many people they would need to reliably sort through all the content and only block the scams. But it is the price they need to pay for deciding to censor a specific topic. Otherwise the price is being paid by all the researchers, entrepreneurs, publishers, and enthusiast, who have nothing to do with the scam artists.
This issue basically boils down to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mailchimp) being too lazy to do the right thing.
There’s no “right thing” here. These companies will do what they legally can to ensure their bottom line is as healthy as possible. If that means making broad strokes, cutting corners, and inflicting collateral damage on customers that are situated in fraud-laden landscapes, they’ll do it.
What if there were actual Nigerian princes who truly wanted help with currency exchange and were offering a real mutually beneficial business opportunity? Would you expect Gmail to hire a team to weed out those emails from spam? If they don’t, are they “lazy”?
How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince? I bet it is not a very common interest, so Google are not being lazy for not investing more manpower into it.
However, millions of people are searching about blockchain tech and are reading blockchain-related publishers every day. That is why any company which decides to censor them instead of investing resources into moderating the content is being lazy. Those companies' focus should be on their users' trust because without it they would have never achieved their bottom lines.
> How many people do you think there are who are genuinely interested in hearing about opportunities to transfer wealth out of Nigeria for an unknown prince?
Depends on whether they’re doing it on the blockchain!
There are no legitimate Nigerian prince emails. There are legitimate coin emails.
Blocking all coin topics like Facebook and ICO emails like MailChimp goes beyond “spam filtering” into big brother territory.
These companies are free to do as they please - and I’m going to boycot and avoid them. There is a line between “we’re helping!” and censorship and Silicon Valley is definitely crossing it.
FYI, MailChimp is based in Atlanta, GA. Maybe you mean to use "Silicon Valley" as a catch-all for tech, but I don't think it's fair to associate SV with anti-ICO attitudes in this way. The anti-ICO sentiment is coming from everywhere, and I think it's pretty legitimate.
You don’t think Google, Facebook, Amazon are setting the stage for what is acceptable? Ok, replace with Big Tech if you want.
And yea, I get it, you can’t possibly understand something that doesn’t directly effect you - yet. When something you consider good is censored maybe you’ll get the idea of acceptible precedent? “First they came for <x>” and all.
FWIW, I hate ICO and consider crypto commodities a waste in general; but I know “nudging” when I see it.
I bought a fair amount of crypto to flip in the short-term, but on the other hand I don't believe the technology has proven itself to be anything more than a fad. I'd like to see a lot more regulations put on it.
They don't have a moral obligation to use their infrastructure, brand name, and legal funds on something they think is risky or unethical. This is much the way UPS can decline to transport whatever they want to.
If it bothers anyone, they can use one of the many competitors or send the emails themselves.
It’s probably temporary until there is some regulatory guidance in place.