
Private Property Is the Real Threat to Online Freedom of Speech (2015) - CM30
https://artplusmarketing.com/the-biggest-threat-to-freedom-of-speech-on-the-internet-6b528235d356
======
CM30
Or in other words, as I said in my article...

How everything online is private property dependant on a huge number of other
parties.

This causes two major issues:

1\. Your private platform can be taken away at the whim of a large company or
ten, simply because your enemies made a big fuss about your beliefs on social
media. If your reputation gets bad enough (or the false threats to the host or
registrar common enough), 99% of companies will simply cut ties rather than do
the right thing.

2\. All platforms being privately owned means there's no way to get a message
out if it's disliked by either the powerful people that own said platforms or
a large percentage of the population.

Real life doesn't have these issues, because:

A. Public property is mostly unavoidable, allows freedom of speech and
basically comes with a built in audience. Protests in the middle of the street
or a public park have a guaranteed audience and cannot be blocked simply
because one or more groups of people dislike the message.

B. Private property is truly owned by you, with the government generally not
being able to kick you out because people complained about your views.

The internet's real freedom of speech issue is that everything is rented and
nothing is truly either 'owned' or 'public'.

~~~
rvdavis
I agree to an extent, but part of ownership is having the ability to rent it
out. Without the incentive to extract rent, there would be no motive to accrue
the large amount of infrastructure which has given us such incredibly low
costs and high efficiency. This has reduced barriers to entry for the average
individual to operate blogs, personal pages, online businesses, and more. I
can't think of a better time for free speech.

"Real life" is not as different as you think from what's going on right now.
There's a reason that you see the exercise of free speech (peaceful, lawful
demonstrations) in public spaces: private individuals should be secure in
their private property from the intrusions of others into their otherwise
private affairs. You can't just violate someone's private property against
their will or you'll face legal consequences. Corporations are legally
recognized persons (like it or not, established law in US), and are entitled
to similar property rights, including the same right that I use to lawfully
rent out my residential property when I'd otherwise be taking a loss on it
while not living there.

Specifically, though, you seem focused on the rent aspect of the property
issue, and (if I'm reading your argument correctly) are concerned that large
corporations seeking rent are a threat to free speech. It's strange that you
contrast "Real Life" to the one in which corporations don't have similar
property rights. You're making an unnecessary distinction between "online" and
"real life"; ownership rights extend to everything digital, and a corporation
has no less a right to own infrastructure (servers, cables, routers, etc.) or
software than an individual.

And why should they? Individuals can't deliver the scale and efficiency that
large corporations regularly do. Corporations such as AWS have brought us into
an unprecedented time in which there is no shortage of ways for individuals to
exercise their free speech--due entirely to their desire as a corporation to
make profit from seeking rent.

The endgame of your argument is nationalization. It hinges on some cabal of
powerful people doing powerful things to powerless people, which of course we
need the government to protect us from. Some well-meaning, but onerous
regulations are enacted to appease an irrational fear, and smaller competitors
are pushed out while large corporations increase their market share. While you
recognize that there is a "huge number of other parties" in the market, you
fail to see that you are proposing a self-fulfilling prophecy in that even
smaller numbers of "powerful people" will control vast swaths of
infrastructure. Of course, it logically follows for the government to protect
us again from the "powerful people" when they inevitable suffer the back-end
of the business cycle, either by nationalizing the infrastructure outright or
seizing ownership of large portions of it through. Or you could consider a
bailout of some sort, but we are pretty far from the healthy market conditions
that exist if we're discussing bailing out tech companies.

While well-meaning, your argument would result in the exact opposite of its
stated purpose of protecting free speech. I can't imagine that allowing the US
--not exactly considered a bastion of civil liberties by the crowd on here--to
nationalize infrastructure would result in a net positive for free speech
around the world.

------
seibelj
The internet and the physical world are fundamentally different. Anyone can
make a new website to espouse their views, rather than use an existing
website. I think the premise is flawed.

~~~
brongondwana
The article explicitly addresses that response - you can't just "make a new
website" \- you need a domain from a registrar and you need a place to host
your content - both of which are private companies which can refuse to keep
doing business with you.

~~~
nextlevelwizard
You do not NEED domain nor third party hosting service, you just need access
to the Internet. Obviously you are still relying that your ISP doesn't cut you
off or censor you.

Then why does it need to even be a website? IRC has been a thing for a long
time, the protocol is simple to implement and anyone can setup a server, and
once on a server anyone can make a channel. Sure at the end of the day you
still need Internet access or you have to rely someone else doesn't ban you
from their server/network, but if you go down this rabbit hole then you are
relying on the power company to provide you with electricity and your
government not to police/censor you.

There already exists ideas (if not solutions) about distributed ham radio
"dark webs" which would go around the ISP issue, but even then someone could
just blast the air ways with random noise which would disable the network or
at least slow it down to crawl. At some point you have to accept some amount
of "risk", since you literally can not control for everything.

~~~
brongondwana
You don't even need the internet, you can just whisper to yourself inside your
head.

Obviously you're relying on the power company and relying on the government of
your own country to not lock you up - which brings us back to the public
spaces where people can rant on street corners without being locked up - being
heard by random passers by. Those same people can't rant on the internet in
the same way without being banned from the sites where people might be able to
discover them. A dark web site is only useful for speech if you have some way
to be discovered.

------
natecavanaugh
Hmmm, I'm not sure I see this as a problem. Isn't China a good enough example
that having a government controlled Internet doesn't really solve any of these
issues, but in fact makes them worse?

I understand the issue that corporations can do unexpected things, but at
least, in a much shorter span of time, corporations who consistently bad
decisions for their users end up dying, supplanted, or worked around.

But let's imagine we had a totally anonymous, fully sponsored portion of the
internet, what would stop it from being used for child porn, spamming, and
propagating fake news?

And even if we could somehow regulate it and not encroach on anyone's freedom
and/or privacy, that doesn't guarantee that the government won't just change
the regulation rules every 4-8 years.

The upside to corporations is that if one screws up, then at least,
theoretically, there are options.

I guess my overall feeling is that there's no such thing as free speech, at
least not in the sense the author means it (as im reading it, which could be
my bad). As a member of a society, we all agree to abide by certain standards.
So I think no matter whether it's authoritarians in a corporate suit, or a
bureaucrat's, it leads to the same general dissatisfaction, but at least with
a corporation, you can let your dollars (or ad views, membership, whatever)
vote for you.

------
jim-jim-jim
I've been thinking for a while now that there should be some sort of public
access social network, just like with television. It would be a proactive
state-funded effort to promote genuinely free discussion without fear of being
censored (or tracked and advertised to.)

Of course it's hard to imagine a current state being on board with something
like that. Especially the no tracking part.

~~~
nextlevelwizard
It would need to somehow be 100% anonymous in order to get around every last
bit of censorship (because last point is self-censorship, when you see others
with your views being ostracized by rest of user base)

------
hosh
> On the internet on the other hand, that’s not the case. There are pretty
> much no communal or ‘neutral’ spaces. There are no sites which aren’t
> classed as the private ‘property’ of someone or some group.

IPFS?

Though that might only be half of a public space.

------
davout
The OP obviously has no idea of what actual freedom of speech is.

------
voyager2
Usenet.

~~~
stalcottsmith
Exactly what I was thinking. Does this still exist in some meaningful form? We
used to have an amazing thing there... I remember before Endless September.
alt.* was about as free as it gets.

~~~
Animats
Usenet is still up and running. There's a public news server at "news.eternal-
september.org". Serious groups such as "sci.electronics.design" and
"comp.lang.python" get heavy traffic. Eternal September doesn't host the alt
binary groups; too much junk.

Path of a typical post:

    
    
        Path: eternal-september.org
              !news.eternal-september.org
              !feeder.eternal-september.org
              !news.glorb.com
              !peer02.iad
              !feed-me.highwinds-media.com
              !news.highwinds-media.com
              !post02.iad.highwinds-media.com
              !fx01.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail
    

Google Groups is a Usenet node. Posting to Google Groups will result in Usenet
distribution, and posting with NNTP to a Usenet node will show up on Google
Groups.

