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Online "Public" Spaces Don't Guarantee Rights
mikesd81 recommends an AP piece covering a lot of examples of the ways free speech and other rights don't exist on the private Web. One case featured was that of Dutch photographer Maarten Dors, who had this picture deleted by flickr. Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. While Dors eventually got the photo restored, after the second time it was deleted, the case highlights the consequence of having online commons controlled by private corporations. "Rules aren't always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider's discretion. Users get caught in the crossfire as hundreds of individual service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies, sometimes imposing personal agendas or misreading guidelines. First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child." Reason.com has some more analysis on the issues brought up by the AP story.
A corporation, by definition is an Artificial Legal Entity ( ALE ). Which means, that is is CREATED not by Natural Persons, but by another Artificial Entity. ( The State )
Given our State Constitutions, it's CREATED by The People of the Great State of whatever, by way of the Secretary of State's office.
Now, turning to examine the Declaration of Independence, we see that RIGHTS COME FROM OUR CREATOR.
So, we have a situation where the "rights" of an Artificial Legal Entity are *EXACTLY* what the Secretary of State's office ( their Creator in the context of "rights" w.r.t the Declaration of Independence ) gives them.
Now, with all this in mind, answer the following question:
Since the Secretary of State's office is limited by constitutional prohibitions, can that office confer on its own creation *more* authority than it, itself has?
I offer that , SoS > ALE , and therefore ALE's are automatically bound by the constitutional prohibitions of its creator.
I see NOTHING in the Declaration of Independence OR any Constitution saying otherwise. Anyone have citations to support the counter-argument?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
But the lines (tubes) that the content is travelling across is privately owned. If ISPs don't want certain kinds of content travelling over their private networks, are they, by the same logic, allowed to block it? I'm a net neutrality supporter, but I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here. Why would a service provider like flickr for instance, be within their rights to remove sites they didn't like, and the ISP not be within their rights by blocking access to the same site over their network?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Here's the chicken-and-the-egg problem I see with this... it's up to Flickr to decide what gets posted on their site, right? They own it, after all. Or, that is... they paid a registrar the $10/yr or whatever that it costs to register a domain name and a hosting company to host it - or they hosted it themselves, but paid an ISP to provide the upstream bandwidth... so, they "own" it right? Or... does the registrar own it? Or does the hosting company own it? Or does the upstream ISP own it? If the Dutch photographer in the story wanted to host his own "children smoking cigarettes" website and registered with "GoDaddy", GoDaddy might very well shut it down (like they did in another case in TFA). Or the upstream ISP might shut it down (like they did in another case in TFA). Who ultimately gets to decide what's inappropriate content, and who ultimately gets to decide what's actually OK?
I actually agree with letting Flickr remove whatever they want to remove (although in this case it was way stupid), but this starts to get a bit more complex than it seems when you start thinking about it.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property.
except theyre renting it out to individuals for the express purpose of their own expression, whether it's for directly paid fees or advertising revenue from traffic.
Their interference/censorship at any point in this process is equivalent to a landlord entering your house in the dead of night and ripping down your kids rap posters because he doesn't like that "negro music".
You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
According to court precedent, this is not the case when serious constitutional rights are abrogated. Companies are not allowed to cam the lady's restroom, nor are they allowed to engage in discriminatory polices on premises.. in the regular world the government has sued again and again for violation of constitutional rights based on this (think the civil rights era). Yet you say it's perfectly OK for webhosts to be capriciously discriminatory.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place.
And If I rented it to you and tried the same thing you'd put me in garnishment until my great grandchildren were too old to reproduce.
Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
false dichotomy. I am not opening my house and advertising it as a public forum like these web hosts are.
Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it.
And nobody is forcing you to visit the websites or view the pictures hosted there, but they have an obligation to treat people equally and not discriminate on them based on political views or aesthetic tastes.
Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
Yes more. If your press is for hire, like the server, you are not allowed to turn people who like the conservatives away because you support the liberal party.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
Apparently you missed the memo at the turn of the 19th century. In the times of our forefathers, royalty also controlled the economic markets, as their estates were the megacorps of the day. In industrial and post-industrial global economics, nationals and multinationals hold equivalent or greater power than governments, and need to be held to the same accountability.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It's not even the always propagated anarchy. It's a collection of tiny little dictatorships.
Basically, every server is owned by someone who can make his rules. I can create a server and dictate that you may discuss anything but pink socks and frilly dresses, because they scare me (and clowns! Nobody discusses clowns on my page!). I needn't publish the info that discussing such things is a nono. I just delete your submission and you can't do jack about it. Why? Because it's my server. My house, my rules, you don't like it, get lost! You wanna talk about those scary clowns that will eat me in the night, do it on your own server!
That's, on the other hand, the benefit of the net over the real world. YOU make the rules on YOUR turf. You don't like my position, you can very easily move away, something you might not so easily be able to do in reality. If your country bans the discussion of certain topics (it does happen, people. And I'm not talking about Iran or North Korea), you have no choice but to accept it. Moving away isn't always so easy. But it's easy on the net.
This is also the reason why servers with tight and outright silly restrictions (like my "no socks, no dress, no clown" example above) don't survive for long: People avoid them. So yes, I do consider such information important, to make people aware of such practices and give them an incentive to move their "business" elsewhere, where the ideals of free speech and expression are held in a higher esteem.
But complaining about it, or even outright demanding that something has to be allowed on a sever, is silly. The server is owned by someone, and he has the right to impose his own rules. You don't like it, move away, choose another server or, if free speech is offered nowhere, create your own.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
and you don't see something fundamentally wrong with that?
The whole point of the US constitution was to remove the burdens of feudalism, and yet the above post describes exactly that.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
In the days of our forefathers, The estates of the nobility were also the primary economic units.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government. To do otherwise is to erect half a fence, and put a sign on the other half saying "it would be nice if you didn't enter", all the while claiming airtight security.
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Yes, but that all was only needed in the first place because of prior government restrictions. In a truly free market, people wouldn't have to pay taxes, there would be no patents, copyright, etc. In those conditions racism, sexism, and etc. don't fly. We would also have virtually 0 monopolies, and some things would progress at a faster rate.
I suggest you read the journal entry in my sig if you think no monopoly would arise in a "truly free market"..assuming such a thing actually ever existed in the first place (hint: the last time it did we didn't have metal tools).
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If they suck and censor stuff that doesn't make sense, they go out of business.
Citation needed. When has that ever happened.
I was wondering how soon tfa would hit slashdot.
On the internet, there is ease of exit. As a great man once said, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
There's been a recurring pattern in the time I've been online.
1. Somebody sets up a site that enables free exchange of information. 2. Once they build it, people come. More people come, discussion flourishes.
3... Profit! , when site builder sells out to Yahoo for lots of money.
4. Yahoo, conscious of its image, decides to impose censorship. When egroups bought onelist (or the other way around?) and then yahoo bought it, yahoo dumbed it down. You could exchange files any more, then people couldn't see images unless they registered, then text was limited by sundry rules...
So people left. I don't know anybody who uses yahoogroups anymore.
Php forums (and blogs) seemed to be the next place to host free speech communities Since they are decentralized, yahoo can't just buy them up.
The cycle repeats; a virtual space offers a good package of civil liberties, people "vote with their feet", then the big guys want to gobble it up, dumb it down, so people move on...
The article makes the basic mainstream journalism mistake that used to happen when some reporter would confuse AOL with the internet. It's easy for a big player to buy a popular site and gut the things that made it popular. It's hard for the big player to keep people from leaving for greener pastures.
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Not the example parent post was looking for, but, many slashdot users use firefox instead of explorer, in part because of concerns about microsoft business practices interfering with online freedoms.
Because you are making a statement about the world: that censorship can cause companies to go out of business. Your justification of this fact is baseless claims. In the real world, I posit this never happens.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This is what net neutrality is all about. Anything inconvenient can be made painfully slow to use. This has already been handled by giving users shitty upload speeds and dynamic IPs, which forces users to host their data, which makes it easier to remove from the mainstream cluster of websites.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
Private property leads to improvements and democracy not tyranny. When government controls all property then you have tyranny.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government.
Thomas Jefferson foresaw this when he warned about the Corporate Aristocracy: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." The fact is is corporations were originally granted their Corporate Charter to improve the common, or public, good. The first corporation to be granted a charter was the Dutch East India Company and the second, two years later, the Honourable East India Company. Both were shipping companies trading goods between Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Shipping was a risky business, pirates could attack ships stealing the cargo and killing the crew or bad weather could cause ships to sink. When one of these happened the owner of the ship was held liable for the loss of cargo and lives. Even someone rich could loose everything they owned, so there weren't many people willing to take the risks. So the Dutch East India Company was granted a corporate charter to limit liability. The only thing someone who invested in East India could lose was the amount of money they invested. This enabled people to invest more in ships which increased trade, which was a common good. The problem, as Jefferson saw, was that corporations became too powerful and are no longer held accountable for improving the public good. If corporations faced the possibility of having their Corporate Charters revoked then they could be held responsible again.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I fail to understand why there shouldn't be rights that protect free speech in companies.
You have a company. You hire a salesman to go out and demonstrate your product. The salesman offends your customers by constantly telling crude sex jokes to them, while he shows your product. Is it his right to say whatever he wants? After all, it's free speech and legal.
You own a preschool. The teacher tells the kids all about her sexual exploits the night before. Is it her right to do that? It's free speech, after all.
Why wouldn't it be right for them to say those things? The companies will probably lose clients and the person who said that would probably be fired... But they still have the right to say it.
The "solution" seems to publish on your own computer in your own home (because there is no public space, anywhere), ... But then you run into the problem that ... an ISP (whose network you use) can decide to not allow their net to be used by people initiating connections to your computer.
Perhaps this is a case where the worn-out automotive analogy is relevant. In the case of travel, I own my own home, but I'm not restricted to that home. I have a car, and I can legally drive it on the roads next to our lot, and on the roads that those two roads intercept, etc. I can legally drive nearly anywhere on the road system. Why? Well, it's because those roads aren't private property. They are almost all owned by government entities (the city or state or national government), and the US Constitution says that government entities can't restrict my travel (with the obvious exception of when I've been convicted of a crime).
The current Internet is unfortunately like the road system that the private-property fanatics advocate. Imagine a road system in which every segment of road was private, and you have to have permission from every owner to drive along a road. There would be a roadblock and a toll booth at every intersection. The person there could decide to not allow you to drive on the next road segment.
This would be clearly unworkable. And it's pretty much how the commercial Internet is now organized. The ISPs are just now waking up to the power they have to "shape" traffic. They see a future in which they can collect unlimited tolls for passage along their segments of the system. They see the power to block traffic by people that they don't like, and to charge extra for access to popular places.
It might be that, in the not-very-long run, the only solution is to "nationalize" the Internet. If its various segments are, like the road system, mostly owned by government bodies, the Constitution will guarantee unrestricted passage by our packets (with the obvious exception of certain types of criminal activity).
I do have the usual suspicions about the competence and good will of our typical government agencies. But they have done a mostly good job of providing a road system that works, without having government inspectors stopping us at every intersection and blocking travel by people that the party currently in power locally doesn't like. Maybe this is the model we should be looking at for the future of the Internet. Maybe private ownership of the comm lines is ultimately just as unworkable as private ownership of the roads.
If you want freedom, at least here in the US, our laws only protect you in "public" places. In private places, you effectively have no rights to even be there, much less do as you like, unless you're the owner.
(BTW, this isn't true everywhere. For example, google for "allmansrätt" to read about the Swedish law on use of private property. Of course, a lot of the hits will be for pages in Swedish ...)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In those conditions racism, sexism, and etc. don't fly.
I disagree. You have conservatives boycotting things like Dunkin Donuts and liberals boycotting something brands like Walmart. Chick-fil-A explicitly refuses to hire non-Christians, imagine if there was no government policy to press them.
For example, I believe that if airlines could get away with it, they'd segregate Arabs from planes etc. Heck, the Fox News and Ann Coulter crowd would love it (Coulter once said she'd love an airline like that).
If there was no government restrictions, how much sexual harrassment would go on unchecked?
Not so. I once hosted my own website. No one visited it, because it sucked. So only those with skill have freedom. How do you propose we fix that one?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
ah, so only rich people are entitled to freedom, how nice of you to betray your elitism.
Are you really so desparate to avoid the few dollars a month - less than the cost of a couple slices of pizza that it takes to host your own web site where you can say whatever you desire - that you're willing to torture the meaning of the word "freedom" to mean its exact opposite? Your definition of freedom is right out of Orwell. Freedom for you is someone else spending money and effort according to your wishes, instead of according to their own. You're no different than every other lazy tyrant that would wait for someone else to build something before moving in to bleed it to death. I imagine you love Hugo Chavez's brand of freedom - he's right up your alley.
Do you complain that I'm denying you your freedom to drive around by cruelly not buying you a car? Or is it only successful businesses that are mean for not buying you a car? Those bastards, denying you your freedom! I'll bet you've lost track of how many Eeeevil Corporations have denied you the freedom of free food, free mobile phone service, and all sorts of other amenities that you - if you were only free from them - would have for free. Free! Free free free. Other than the whole "someone else actually gets to pay for it" part. It's OK, you're such a superior intellect, and so deserving of having other people toil on your behalf, you SHOULD have businesses making special exceptions to their terms, just for you, because you say so.
Yeah, we all know who the elitist is here. It looks good on you, too. Anyway, I know you're busy. The people you've got chained up in the basement cleaning your clothes and whatnot probably need supervising. Just remind them that it's your personal freedom that's at stake, and to use extra starch.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Common carrier status.
It can be instructive to look into the history of that concept. Google for "common carrier" and "history", and buried in the zillions of hits is a lot of history.
An interesting part is the origin of the concept. Centuries ago, before electronics, messages were generally carried by messengers or couriers, typically a man on horseback. There were some serious problems with the system. Imagine a case in which prince A wants to send a message to prince B about an action (financial, legal, military, whatever) that they are planning against prince C.
One problem was that it was common to "blame the messenger for the message". If B doesn't like the message, perhaps because he's secretly cooperating with C, all too often B's response to the message would be to torture, injure, or kill the messenger. This isn't good for the courier service's business.
But the courier services had defenses against this. The obvious one was that couriers would often read their messages. If a message contained bad news for the recipient, it was likely that the courier would "lose" the message in self defense. Also, in the above case, the courier might make a copy and sell it to prince C. This sort of thing isn't good for the senders or recipients of the messages.
The "common carrier" concept arose as a solution to such problems. It was essentially an agreement that a courier wouldn't open and read messages, but would just deliver them unexamined to their recipients. In exchange, the recipients agreed to not harm the couriers (and to pay their bills even if they didn't like the messages ;-). This sort of agreement, especially with the force of law behind it, was what made long-distance business and political communication possible for the first time. Without it, no communication was reliable, and people were at the mercy of the couriers (who lived in fear of their customers).
Anyway, whether or not ISPs are common carriers seems irrelevant. They are behaving as if they are not. They are reading the contents of messages, they are slowing or failing to deliver messages whose contents they don't like, and they are selling information about message contents to the sender's competitors and/or government agencies. The ISPs are making the Internet unreliable and untrustworthy. They block messages to our friends and sell our messages to our enemies, to put it in Medieval terms.
They are seriously risking the possibility that their customers will respond by "shooting the messenger" sometime soon. But it's also possible that the ISPs might wise up, as did many Medieval princes and merchants, and realize that a "common carrier" service that provides reliable, secret communication is a business necessity.
Or maybe they won't. The analogy isn't perfect. The ISPs seem to think they have an opportunity to control all communication, which would put them at the top of the power pyramid. If this is truly what they're thinking, we might be in for some tough times ahead, as they systematically sabotage all our communications, and the business and political worlds fall into chaos as a result.
But it never hurts to understand a bit of the history of why concepts like "common carrier" arose in the past.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I dunno, places where you make an account and agree to a eula to me are public places. Anyone can sign up, there's no defined user base and there's no boundaries.
Sounds to be you're talking about a gated park that allows anyone to enter as long as they follow established easy to understand rules like, "no dogs, no alcohol, park closes at sundown" type of thing.
You sort of give away your private property status when you invite anyone to join.
If not, i guess i'll start a barbershop, and whenever i see an asian person come in i'll tell them they're not welcome there. I guess that works under private property, right?
Well, that's pretty much my understanding too. So let's hold them responsible for everything that happens over their network until they behave like common carriers! That'll rein in their bid for glory pretty quick. Why should a telco be treated differently than an ISP? (Especially when often they are the same company)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"