Very unpopular opinion.
The internet should be free for everyone and no provider should have the ability to cut off services.
The problem is not the platform but the people, hate the player not the game.
You should be legally required to do business with any customer?
At some level does a person not have the right to say, "I don't like you and won't take your money?"
Sure, the US and others have protected classes that limit the reasons you can refuse to do business with someone but those are more to do with people in those classes being unfairly burdened and facing difficulty living tier day-to-day lives.
> You should be legally required to do business with any customer?
No you shouldn't be. But this should also be treated fairly.
Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 allowed platforms to not be held liable for user generated content. But it did not allow publishers to have the same freedom.
Notice the very important distinction between "platforms" vs "publishers".
A publisher like a newspaper can be sued for content they put out. A platform cannot be sued for the same. When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230. We should be allowed to sue them for content they carry.
Right now, they are enjoying the benefits of both - platform and publisher.
Your statement about Section 230 is a little unclear, so to clarify - what you are expressing is what you want the law to be, not what it actually is.
“Platform” vs “publisher” is not part of the actual Section 230, which allows platforms to keep the protection while doing all the active censoring and moderating that they want. There’s a good summary on Wikipedia.
> When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230.
That's ridiculous. Every single platform, perhaps excluding 8chan, moderates their content. Whatever reasons for that moderation are really dependent on the platform.
What separates a publisher from a platform is authorship; Cloudflare, Facebook, etc claim no authorship over their content. But a newspaper is exactly the opposite, they proudly proclaim their authorship since that's the point.
With cloudflare, it's even less relevant because they aren't moderating content at all -- they're simply choosing their customers -- and that is different again.
I don't think dropping someone as a customer on your platform meets the bar for exercising editorial control over content. CF specifically dropped one customer because they were trying to imply that being hosted by CF was an endorsement of their views.
This would be an unproductive outcome. There's really no point in allowing CDNs to be sued for the content they distribute except as a mechanism to force them to take unsavory customers to maintain their ability to not be sued. Why is it a problem that in your view, platforms can 'enjoy' the benefits of both?
Why can't a platform not endorse the content of their customers while also not doing business with people they don't like? It doesn't seem to be a contradiction -- a freelancer who refuses an offer to build a neo-nazi site is not suddenly endorsing the content that lives on all the other sites they built.
And you refuse him based on what? The Axiom of Choice? Because if you refuse him for being Asian and you are consistent you have to refuse all Asians. Because if you refuse 8chan because some killers used the service you will have to refuse Facebook, Twitter, All major Hollywood Studios, the Catholic Church, the GOP, the DP, the Saudi Arabia government and thousands of more organizations which directly or indirectly had a role in many crimes.
You don't seem to understand. You can refuse to do business with someone because you don't like the color of their tie.
In many countries, there are specific protected classes and you can't refuse their business just because they are a member of that class. Confusing these concepts does not help the argument.
> You should be legally required to do business with any customer?
Ceteris Paribus? Yes, absolutely, this should be a foundational rule of society. And here, Ceteris Paribus means paying your hosting bills on time and obeying the law.
Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 allowed platforms to not be held liable for user generated content. But it did not allow publishers to have the same freedom.
Notice the very important distinction between "platforms" vs "publishers".
A publisher like a newspaper can be sued for content they put out. A platform cannot be sued for the same. When companies like CloudFlare start banning people for political reasons, they are stepping into the "publishers" market and should be stripped off of the protections from the CDA Section 230. We should be allowed to sue them for content they carry.
Right now, they are enjoying the benefits of both - platform and publisher.
That is not what CDA 230 does. It even allows a website that mostly publishes its own content (like a paper) also publish user comments, without being held liable for them.
> This "publisher" v. "platform" concept is a totally artificial distinction that has no basis in the law. News publishers are also protected by Section 230 of the CDA. All CDA 230 does is protect a website from being held liable for user content or moderation choices. It does not cover content created by the company itself. In short, the distinction is not "platform" or "publisher" it's "content creator" or "content intermediary." Contrary to Coaston's claims, Section 230 equally protects the NY Times and the Washington Post if it chooses to host and/or moderate user comments. It does not protect content produced by those companies itself, but similarly, Section 230 does not protect content produced by Facebook itself.
The section is actually quite clear if you take the time to read it:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected".
An interactive computer service means anything that smells like a website, and here it says they may block or filter anything at all they find objectionable. It's quite explicit. It does not restrict its protections to "platforms", but to any provider of internet services that host third-party content.
