When your host, domain registrar, payment processor, credit card company, and every social media channel decides to ban you, it is more or less equal to being banned from the Internet.
We have a term for this already: the chilling effect.
It’s akin to having your restaurant banned from being within city limits. Sure, you can still set up a stall in the desert outside the city walls - no one is stopping you. But when 99.99% of the population is in the city center, is this a meaningful distinction?
Again, you know this analogy is wrong because it implies a relevance to proximity that doesn't exist on the Internet, and yet you continue to put it forward.
You are being either disingenuous or fundamentally misunderstand what a right to speech is (namely, it is not a right to be heard, only a right to speak freely).
Additionally, you are forgetting that the Internet does not exist independent of physical reality. There are plenty of ways to get attention in physical reality that directly translate to traffic to your voice on the Internet.
Proximity on the Internet absolutely matters. If you are banned from social media and your page is on the 1000th page of google results, you have no proximity to centers of attention.
And just a tip - leave out the “you know you’re wrong, you know you’re lying” comments. They’re unnecessary, condescending, and don’t help your argument.
I'm angry that people like you continue to willfully misrepresent how the Internet works, and I'm having a hard time controlling that anger. I'm sorry about that.
Proximity on the Internet matters if you're trying to start the next Twitter. It does not matter if you're trying to exercise your right to freely speak. There are plenty of ways in which you can make your voice very vocally heard that don't involve the Internet at all.
To put it another way, you don't have to advertise an Internet location exclusively on the Internet. In fact, you have no right to advertisement or audience on the Internet at all.
It isn’t anyone else’s problem that you can’t control your anger.
Yes, clearly places like Speaker’s Corner exist in real life. That is not up for debate. The issue is that an extremely small amount of American corporations are allowed to decide what is deemed acceptable to discuss online. If deemed unacceptable, you are relegated to the outskirts and often denied access to say, credit. (This has actually happened.) Do you not see the issue with this?
It’s precisely like my city center example. Yes, in literal terms you are free to start your restaurant outside the city. No one is preventing you. In practical, real life terms that actually affect real culture, it absolutely matters. Especially when you decide to exile so many people outside the city that they become radicalized and start attacking you. Creating more echo chambers doesn’t help anyone.
"The issue is that an extremely small amount of American corporations are allowed to decide what is deemed acceptable to discuss online."
This is simply not true. This is not what's happening, and again I am trying to understand a reason why you think this is the case.
"If deemed unacceptable, you are relegated to the outskirts and often denied access to say, credit."
I'm sorry again, but this is also not only untrue, but betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works. Any Internet accessible website is accessible from any browser at any time from anywhere in the world (excepting actual censorship taking place in some countries, e.g. the Great Firewall of China). This is what your "freedom of expression" guarantees, not access to the popular pages on the Internet.
The city center example is completely wrong because it imposes a false difficulty at visiting a restaurant outside of the city center that the restaurant cannot overcome. This is precisely the opposite of true, since any browser in the world can visit any Internet accessible website with the same level of effort. Your restaurant can still be walked into at an instant, anywhere in the world. Accessibility is a fixed value, and it's nearly zero.
Discovery of your speech is not a human right, however. I'm sorry if that violates your expectations, but it's true. You aren't guaranteed a right to be heard, only a right to speak, and on the Internet you will always have that right, again due to how the Internet works. It's a global network of interconnected computers, there will always be a place to express your thoughts and provide them to the world, one URL away.
I'm trying to give this more thought as our argument gets longer, as per HN guidelines, but I'm having a hard time keeping that goal clear. I would appreciate it if you tried to meet me somewhere in the middle here, to try and understand why I'm explaining things the way that I am.
Yes, you are not wrong that the Internet is a network of computers and that it is essentially impossible to “kick someone off” if they are technical enough.
That isn’t the point. The point is that free speech is both law and culture. Clinging to the notions of what is “legal free speech” is ignoring the cultural consequences of restricting it. Society is not a computer program that runs on laws.
When Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple all decide that you shall not be heard, you’re locked out from the 99.99% of the population that has zero understanding of how to access things via the URL bar. Remember that a huge portion of people just type in “Facebook” on Google and click the first link. Facebook itself is “the Internet” to billions of people. The percentage of people that are capable of setting up their own server and website is quite small.
Maybe this seems academic to Americans, but these same social media companies actively encouraged the uprisings in the Middle East a decade ago. Do you understand that if they had instead said, “Nah, we are banning this”, political opposition would have been essentially impossible, because the average person can use Facebook and Twitter but sure as hell isn't going to type in some obscure URL and organize a protest that way.
This is not about the letter of the law or how the internet works. It’s about democratizing technology so that the people have a fighting chance against those with power.
It is objectively false to say you are locked out of 99.9% of the population if Twitter, Amazon, and Google remove you from their platforms, and I think the fact that you believe such to be the case so unwaveringly means this conversation has come to an end.
We have a term for this already: the chilling effect.