
Ask HN: Do Domain Registrars and Web Hosts Need to Be Treated as Utilities? - CM30
Because I&#x27;ve seen a lot of comments about Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and other sites censoring users, and that&#x27;s certainly worrying.<p>But I feel what&#x27;s worse is how domain registrars, hosts and companies like Cloudfront also seem to be doing the same thing. They too seem to buckle under pressure from social media mobs and censors, and seem to be a worse threat to freedom of speech in the process. See what happened to the Daily Stormer with Cloudfront for instance, or how controversial sites often get booted from hosting companies.<p>There&#x27;s no argument those are private communities or what not, they&#x27;re closer to the telephone company refusing service based on political beliefs or a landlord throwing people out for personal disagreements.<p>So yeah, anyone else think those should be subject to similar laws? Perhaps even have something akin to net neutrality forced on them?
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hluska
This one is a slippery slope and I don't know which side I fall on. On one
hand, this badly restricts free speech. On the other hand, sometimes the act
of simply hosting content can create unintended victims.

I was in a similar situation when I published a magazine. We had a fellow come
in and offer us big bucks for a full page ad. Unfortunately, the full page ad
had some nazi imagery. My partner and I were personally offended by the
imagery, but we knew we couldn't only dress ourselves in the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms when it was convenient for us, or we would lose credibility.

In the end, we chose not to take the (business changing) sum of money because
we knew that we couldn't possibly survive the backlash we would face from
publishing it. It sucked because we were in publishing and no publisher wants
to say no to any ad revenue because how do you ever offer any sort of
editorial/sales separation again?

The sad thing is that, as individuals we agreed that we couldn't turn down the
ad without losing credibility. But, we had a fiduciary duty to protect our
corporation from a massive backlash, including the real possibility of
vandalism (cyber or otherwise) or a massive exodus of paying clients.

If we were regulated as a utility, we wouldn't have had to make the decision.
But, we also wouldn't have been able to publish 95% of the stuff we published
and never would have reached a scale where we had to make those kinds of
decisions.

