Anyhow, Joyent has every right to shut down their hosting services to anyone they feel...and no one really says otherwise on that point either. The sticking point is, are we headed down the right path on this issue? Are we setting the right precedent, because while we all likely agree that things like Daily Stormer and Gab are platforms for truly hateful people...are we emboldening them by driving them underground?
Likewise, as cloud providers beginning to show too much discretion over content? Let's take it outside of politics and into copyright. What if AWS hosted a new video streaming service, and some corporation XYZ claimed a (false) copyright violation. Amazon has a large contract with corporation XYZ because of Prime Video and kicks the video services off of AWS with short notice. Would that be acceptable, essentially putting that company out of business? Sure, it would legally not be a problem but would it be a moral problem?
Back to politics. Let's say GCS hosted DailyCaller or something, and employees internally find out and force it off because they find it as morally outrageous as the pentagon contract. It sounds crazy, but it could totally get to that point.
That seems like a bit of a leap from where we are now, but with cloud providers starting to show more and more discretion of what they host, I don't rule out that we could slip our way to things like that happening. It also seems increasingly likely that the more politicized the major players become, the more likely political disagreements could effectively ruin alternative platforms.
Gab might rightfully deserve being kicked off, but we do need to tread carefully on what type of precedent we are setting going forward as things like this become normalized.
> If you're not a courageous and principled defender of free speech, you should get out of the cloud business.
This is a great deal more resilient than relying on any one hosting provider.
I choose to not engage with sites like gab and voat, but I also vehemently defend their right to exist. Hosting providers, payment processors shouldn't discriminate except on the basis of the customer's ability to pay or illegal use of the platform. That doesn't mean they should be forced to serve those they don't agree with, but we as a culture should avoid companies that discriminate.
I saw posts in favor of PayPal's choice to refuse service to Gab, and honestly the whole thing made me want to use PayPal _less_. I don't appreciate censorship at all, though I respect people's right to censor.
> Gab might rightfully deserve being kicked off, but
> Free speech as an American ideal, that's
> all people are really saying.
Yes. No.
I don't find the slippery slope argument compelling. As a society we can decide what is and isn't within the realm of reasonable debate and discourse. Whatever the lines are, the discussion of racial supremacy and systematic oppression and elimination of others seems like something we should all be able to agree is outside the bounds.
I would argue that it is possible that cracking down on public platforms them gives them a platform in and of itself that once did not exist. It's similar to a Streisand effect. People become even -more- radicalized because they feel "oppressed." It sort of reminds me of how the ATF raid on Waco unwittingly played into their cult's idea of the apocalypse and has since bred people like McVeigh.
THAT is the slippery slope.
Here's an HN discussion of Joyent ending lifetime hosting accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669
I also knew someone who was using BingoDisk and was left hanging when it was sold to another company.
- Have a neutral platform to facilitate discourse and mutual understanding. This is hard as it requires a largely informed populace.
- Complete segregation of groups having different opinions. This proves to be also hard because of incidents like this.
[1] https://paradite.com/2014/11/11/internet-polarized-society/
If you're not a courageous and principled defender of free speech, you should get out of the cloud business.
This is exactly the same as if I told you to get off my porch.
Twitter has made lots of mistakes, but they've also stood on first principles many of times when it comes to free speech. Cloudflare is another great example.
Straw man arguments like this really lower the quality of discussion.
Asking because people in these kinds of threads often seem to get suspiciously selective about when and why they decide to argue for stripping the right of free association -- and disassociation -- from others.
If Gab were strictly a child porn site, would it be okay if Joyent stopped serving them? If yes, then your absolutist statement isn't actually what you mean and it's just a question of where to draw the line. If not (which has yet to have been the case when someone initially stated such a trivial statement), then I disagree with you and maybe there's some interesting discussion to be had.
https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent
This should be really interesting in days to come.
From this perspective, a few observations. Joyent should be able to do business with whomever they want, period. So long as they don't commit fraud or infringe on the rights of others in so doing, then they are within their rights AND within their moral prerogative to not do business with Gab. Note also that there is no moral obligation of Joyent to give Gab a platform and they're not doing so is not censorship: Gab's right to free speech cannot rightfully compromise Joyent's right to speech or association. The only way Joyent would be in the wrong here is if they represented to Gab that their business was acceptable/welcome and they did so with fore-knowledge of that business; and even then they'd only be in the wrong due to the short notice of termination given and the resulting damage to Gab's business, not because of the change of heart. To suggest that those that think like me might think otherwise is to speak without the requisite education to comment or is simple intellectual dishonesty.
Regardless the degree to which you hate Rand and those that think like me, the ridiculous and ill-informed hyperbole that your message contains is unwarranted and leads to the very state of affairs in which we find ourselves. It doesn't matter toward which "team" you express unmitigated hate, it only matters that you and those that shout disparagements (regardless of which side they sit) advocate acting on raw emotion rather than reason... indulging in hate over disagreement and debate. The facts, the truth, and the legitimate back-and-forth of competing ideas tested by reason seems to matter not once that's done. It may play well to the home team, but it does nothing to advance the discussion in the more general sense.
Very sad.
Oh, and "Free speech" has nothing to do with forced hosting for assorted terribles. This is one of the most persistent and irritating misinterpretations of the first amendment. "Free speech" covers the government and the government alone.
> The People will defend freedom against tyranny as they always have and always will.
> God bless you all and God bless...
These comments are kind of partisan, no? A neutral company would just say “hey, we’re going to a new service because of X, back soon!”. Let the users cry “free speech, god bless”.
Hosting providers policing things like this is akin to vigilante justice vs letting it go through the legal system where there is actually due process for everybody, not just the people that the mod likes.
Sure, you don't need shared server space, just setup your own co-location facility. Until someone decides not to give you backhaul...
Or until someone decides they won't provide you with DNS. Or DDoS protection. Or Payment gateway. Or... or... or...
The reality we are facing is that some political opinions (even relatively benign ones) aren't allowed access to the same resources as others.
Gab is benign, they started based on people getting kicked off Twitter - because you don't need Twitter, just start your own. So they did. And now they find themselves being booted around, because of virtue signalling tech companies.
The term "safe harbor" is typically used to refer to the provisions of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), not the Communications Decency Act you're discussing. OCILLA protects hosting and network providers from liability for copyright infringements committed by their customers, so long as they aren't aware of the infringement and don't directly benefit from it, and so long as they comply with the DMCA takedown process. This is, obviously, completely irrelevant to this situation.
The CDA actually does the exact opposite of what you are claiming here. It explicitly indemnifies service providers for blocking content, regardless of whether that content is constitutionally protected or not -- it reads in part:
> (2) Civil liability: 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 […]
However, for everyone looking to host at Joyent: Beware they might cancel on you, too. And giving a company 2 days notice is far beyond comprehension. I wouldn't want to deal with this. I think it's really poor business standards.
Please try to actually understand the law before commenting on a legal position.