This statement is like if you went to someone’s house, and they decided you were being annoying and told you to leave, and you demanded due process before that.
You know that courts are often involved in disputes between two private parties? Especially when it comes to the completely one sided termination of a service agreement by one party.
> This statement is like if you went to someone’s house
You mean like renting an apartment
> and you demanded due process before that.
In case they locked you out without ability to get your belongings or mail a court case may be sensible.
If you were living in an apartment rent-free (with the landlord's permission of course) you would still have the same rights as any other tenant with respect to eviction notices etc.
So I'm not sure to what extent that payment for Vivaldi's email service changes things.
Its important to ask "what was just going on", because very often, conflicts are a result of some trivial misunderstanding. Sometimes people are having a bad day, are intoxicated (booze) or lost control due to some external situation.
Given your approach, wouldn't you loose most of your friends this way?
Jokes on you I barely have any friends to begin with.
My point is that you don’t have an obligation to maintain a relationship with someone. If they are being consistently annoying (even without breaking some consistent rule obviously!) it’s totally normal to just decide they don’t belong.
And you don’t have to listen to reasons. You don’t have to entertain the explanation if you don’t want to. You can of course! But there are enough sociopaths wanting to play the system that there’s a lot of pain in trying to be super open to certain kinds of behavior
An individual doesn't have an obligation. A government does have an obligation, according to western values.
Large corporations, operating at a scale much closer to that of governments than to that of individuals, have been shoehorning themselves into our allowances for individuals to avoid having any sort of public processes or accountability. As we've seen with the evolution of governments, ultimately this will not stand.
Large corporations, operating at a scale much closer to that of governments
Excellent point-- as a company's market penetration (at least in some cases) approaches a significant part of the population, the difference between government (in the sense of a public service) and private company becomes less and less distinguishable for the power held over customers.
Not unlike the situation that occured with Bell Telephone where it became such an essential part of day to day life for most people that the control it had was on par with being a branch of the US government itself. It was a shame about Bell Labs though. They still did some good work after the breakup but that whole organization just seemed to fade away from its former glory. Though maybe they'll eventually flourish again under Nokia.
Public vs Private is not relevant here: A persons house is their personal space. Vivaldi forums is a corporate space.
You need permission to run a business, and the state will dictate how you run it. The same is not so applicable to a personal household. No one will shut down your house for making poor food, or discriminating against guests.
That ejection (for anything other than outright illegal content) makes the moderators “publishers” responsible for what does not get culled. Can’t offer the space as “public”, eject people for opinions, then claim “public space” protections when actual criminal content is found on site.
This is an interpretation that is not so black & white in reality and probably depends on jurisdiction to a great extent. In the US, the courts disagree with you. Your statement resembles how things worked prior to the CDA in 1996.
Now, even moderated outlets have safe harbor protections under the DMCA and similar protections under Section 230 and Section 509 of the CDA which determined that internet services were not (automatically) publishers. Courts have held that outlets are in the clear if they make a reasonable effort to identify illegal content and also take action when something is brought to their attention.
The safe harbor protections address clearly objectionable/illegal behavior, not objective facts and normal opinions. Stating standard political talking points, quoting pleasant poetry, and showing exonerating video of newsworthy events does not remotely resemble actionable “illegal content” (yes, I’m referring to many instances that innocent/reasonable, canceled for diverging from a sociopolitical narrative).
But it is public! At least in the sense of accessibility. It may not be owned by the government, but it's offered to the world at large. I feel like it's more of a train station than a private house.
It's private. It's more like a nightclub, bar, or whatever. You have rules to enter and stay. Thousands go there (you may say it's "public"?) but it's private.
Are you wearing the wrong shoes? If so, you may not enter.
Do you belong to the wrong social class? You may not enter.
Do you like starting fights? If so, you'll be shown the door.
You don't like those rules... The solution? Don't go to those bars or forums.
Mate, I think we all know that there's more than one meaning to the term "public" (resp. "private"). What I wanted to emphasise is that there's a meaningful sense in which an internet forum which can be viewed and interacted with by anybody (by default) can be described as "public". Hence I argue that it would be beneficial for society that it be treated as something more than just the absolute domain of the operator of that website.
Reasonable people will certainly differ on this, but we're not arguing semantics, or about violating the sanctity of someone's control over their personal sphere.
How is this different than a large store like a supermarket where you buy food? The only difference I see is one of geographical barriers, and I don't see how that should fundamentally change the dynamics of how to appropriately deal with inappropriate or disruptive behavior.
>Is the government a special, extraordinary group of people?
The people that work there? No. As an organization? Absolutely: In any democracy it is essentially an organization that is owned by everyone. It cannot (well, should not) make laws that are exclusionary to anyone because everyone owns a piece of it, and everyone contributes in some small way to making the rules.
With private property/companies the group of owners is much smaller, but once again they make the rules. If owners of private property don't get to make their own rules (within the constraints of the law) then it's really now private property.
If I owned a large building and turned it into a conference center and invited people to come discuss things then it seems obvious that I should have the right to decide to kick someone out if they are making trouble, turning meetings into shouting matches, and generally making it harder for my building to fill the purpose I want it to fill.
This seems to map pretty cleanly onto internet forums owned, operated, and paid for by a private group. They're paying for things, they have their own goals for doing so, and people that disrupt those goals have no right to make the owners waste their resources on something being ruined by disruptions under the odd claim that anyone from the public has the privilege of doing whatever they want there.
Preventing a private organization from removing disruptions to its purpose is inimicable to the idea of private property itself.
This statement is like if you went to someone’s house, and they decided you were being annoying and told you to leave, and you demanded due process before that.