Net Neutrality , White Supremacy, and Baking Cakes
I was thinking about these two stories in the context of net neutrality (the theory if not the practice)
- GoFundMe shuts down campaigns for Charlottesville suspect
- GoDaddy dumps white supremacist site 'Daily Stormer'
The folks who are cheering this on seem to be the same folks who support net neutrality (Venn Diagram, Professor Perry?) Look, if I had an Internet business, I would not want to serve or subsidize these folks. But then again, I have always opposed net neutrality rules. I suppose that one could argue net neutrality is narrowly about ISP's, so this stuff is not relevant, but what if Cox Communications decided the same thing? Do they not have the same rights of association that GoDaddy and GoFundMe have? And if every registrar and web hosting company refuse to serve a certain person or viewpoint, does net neutrality at the ISP level even matter? This is part of the hypocrisy of companies like Google, which demand Cox act as a common carrier for its YouTube traffic (because Google does not want to foot the full cost of the amount of bandwidth they use) but act as anything but a common carrier in its core search business.
And while we are on rights of association, am I legally required to bake a cake for James Fields?
Postscript: I wonder if people on the Left, which dominate most of the calls for net neutrality, would be demanding net neutrality if they thought most ISP's were controlled by folks on the Left? Google and Facebook are known to be controlled by the Left, and thus no one on the Left demands neutrality of them -- in fact the Left likely would oppose calls for neutrality at Google and Facebook as their hope is that opposing voices to theirs will be disproportionately screened out by these companies.
jdgalt:
Before you make the mistake of buying any more deeply into Antifa's story of what happened in Charlottesville, here's what the biased media are NOT telling us.
August 15, 2017, 11:47 amThe_Big_W:
No, but soon you will be forced to identify anyone you know who could possibly agree with his politics. And if you can't do that well then, comrade, maybe it is you who agree with his politics, please come with us.....
August 15, 2017, 12:00 pmRichard Harrington:
You might have to bake a cake for the Arizona Coyote's and the various other stadia.
August 15, 2017, 1:25 pmArtemis:
Sadly it is perfectly consistent for them (the left). They *do* want to discriminate on viewpoint. They object, not to censorship, but to the idea that you can buy preferred access. They have no problem with GoDaddy censoring wrongspeak, they just don't like the idea that someone may be able to buy a bigger pipe just because they have more cash. It's kind of a leftist take on a scarlet letter community where you are branded for wrongspeak. They want communism, not freedom.
August 15, 2017, 6:57 pmPeabody:
My opinion is those in power on the left don't care at all about the "neutrality" that the rank and file are clamoring for. Those in power just want government tools to force compliance with their preferred behavior and opinions.
August 16, 2017, 6:44 amwreckinball:
I've seen that report of events on a few sites. Even a few liberal sites have the same accounts. Government should not take sides in this manner. Enforce the law. The first escalation of violence, e.g. the first poop bomb, the first pepper spray you arrest and rinse and repeat as necessary.
August 16, 2017, 7:17 amAssault is still a crime as far as I know. Law enforcement needs TO DO THEIR JOB!
cc:
There is a repeated pattern of cops standing down when the mayor or university don't like the people/ideas at the protest. Someone is also paying to fly these antifa hoodlums all over the country. It is a form of warfare against ideas. It began in earnest with attacks on Trump rallies over a year ago. This is law-breaking by politicians, a form of covert rebellion. They ignore event after event of antifa beating people and breaking stuff and stopping speakers, and when one guy with his car goes too far (and they might have been attacking his car) they want free speech revoked for whites (don't believe for a minute it is just about KKK types). The media and left politicans are playing a very dangerous game. At some point massive gunfire will erupt.
August 16, 2017, 8:10 ammarque2:
I find it interesting that a group that dresses like armored ninjas with bats is somehow the good guys because they are against Anne Coulter, Trump rallies for merely disliking their reasonable ideas. But yeah once in awhile instead of beating up women, children amd old.men who merely want to hear someone talk - they go after folks who are labelled White Supremecists. I hear some BLM folks.were there just as armed - lighting aerosol cans to spray at the other side.
It is just luck for the media that the poor girl who was killed was killed by a supremacist rather than having someone on the pro statue side killed first. Of course even if the person wasn't part of the Supremecists and merely wanted to save.history the press would ignore the incident.
August 16, 2017, 3:02 pmrandian:
Google and GoDaddy are treading on dangerous ground here. They aren't hosting Daily Stormer, they're only providing domain name registration. That's a higher order of speech suppression, since you can't host a site anywhere in the world if you can't register its domain. Domain registrars should not be in the business of policing the political viewpoints of their registrants.
August 16, 2017, 7:11 pmJonCB:
Lets be honest here. If ISPs actually gave a crap about people using too much bandwidth, they'd just put some form of metering(or even an acceptable usage policy) in and be done with it. It's a simple procedure, service providers have literally been doing it for 20 years. No, ISPs want to go back to pre-net neutrality because then they can get all the benefits of capping bandwidth and the extra revenue stream of preferential treatment with all the plausible deniability of blaming the upstream content provider for the problem so they don't have to come clean to their customers.
Now i don't want to say google is lily white and net neutrality isn't overreaching (neither of these things are even remotely true)... but considering America is going through a phase where the chances of getting justice from a company acting in bad faith are quickly reducing to something indistinguishable from zero... I don't think net neutrality is completely bad either. Hell if you want to throttle bandwidth, my reading says that throttling based on over-usage is completely legal so long as you do so without taking into account protocol or source/destination (i am not a lawyer, yours or otherwise, and this is not legal advice). So you can't throttle Youtube, but you surely can throttle any connection using bandwidth at a sustained rate that just so happens to be set just below that of Youtube.
August 17, 2017, 3:56 amMondak:
"...demand Cox act as a common carrier for its YouTube traffic (because Google does not want to foot the full cost of the amount of bandwidth they use) ..."
I never understood this argument. I am paying $85.00 a month for internet to my home not to mention the $100+ for internet to my cell phone. There is a data cap on my cell traffic per month before they start charging me more and a sort of phantom one on my home traffic where they will cut off heavy users (undefined) who use too much bandwidth. So why can't I use that bandwidth as I see fit? Isn't it reasonable that Google not foot the full cost of the amount of bandwidth they use since I already am paying for it? If google is asked to pay for it, shouldn't I get my internet for free?
While I live in a densely populated area in Southern California, I have basically only once "choice" for internet in my neighborhood on a network that was HIGHLY subsidized by my own tax money anyway. There is NO competition.
August 18, 2017, 6:44 ammlhouse:
I would argue, however, that internet service providers are public accomodations. Hence, they cannot discriminate against anyone.
August 18, 2017, 2:56 pmjdgalt:
I'm not sure what you mean by not taking sides, but all sides are not equal. When (for instance) Antifa starts things by trying to forcibly prevent a speaker and his audience from meeting in a hall they've paid for, law enforcement should be siding with the speaker and audience and against Antifa even if the speaker or audience had to use force first in order to take back their rights. (Not that they should ever need to, since it's the police's job, but recent events have shown repeatedly that the police won't do their job!)
August 20, 2017, 9:23 am