Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The point is that Amazon has no business locking even racists out of their Amazon account.



Why doesn't freedom of association extend to Amazon? I'm pretty sure they argue they have the right in the EULAs the racist accepted.


There need to be reasonable limits as companies are not actually literal people, and their rights should be inferior to those of literal people. Treating companies as people and anything they do (eg in the lens of speech) has caused so much damage and has obviously just been an excuse for lawmakers to not have to make tough decisions.

An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.

Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.

This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: