[jayess]

'Censorship by whom? A bunch of websites that are completely separate entities from ISPs that are monopolies for all intents and purposes?'

Yes, those same web sites that are breathlessly telling me today the repealing NN is a mortal threat to my very existence, who then turn around and engage in censorship themselves.

[simplify]

Anyone can create their own website. Not everyone can create their own ISP.

[jayess]

Under NN ISPs were free to censor content.

Edit: Downvoting a simple, verifiable fact? Nice. That about sums up this whole charade.

[orthecreedence]

Ok, you just destroyed any of your credibility. I'm not even going to bother arguing with your other posts.

[jayess]

It's not me, it's the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that you have a quibble with, then.

Look up US Telecom Association v FCC (2016)

https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/heres-why-the-obama-fc...

https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/06F8BFD0...

What? The break the internet movement didn't mention that part? That censorship by ISPs was ok under net neutrality?

https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/consumer-broadband/the-surpr...

[AFNobody]

> What? The break the internet movement didn't mention that part? That censorship by ISPs was ok under net neutrality?

1) You are in favor of censorship without clear disclosure.

2) You believe its acceptable such censorship should be controlled by government granted near monopolies.

---

You are talking about a ruling that mentions as an unrelated aside about the editorial right of content curation being legal and that right being more powerful than Title II due to the existence of the First Amendment. However, if its exercised, you are required to clearly disclose it to consumers before they purchase from you.

Without Title II, that requirement to clearly disclose no longer exists with a clear history of case law.

So...I'm really uncertain why you feel a requirement to disclose censorship before a purchase is made was an unfair regulatory burden.

I'm glad you have made it clear you were being disingenuous about your earlier complaints about censorship publicly.

> That would be true of an ISP that offers subscribers a curated experience by blocking websites lying beyond a specified field of content (e.g., family friendly websites). It would also be true of an ISP that engages in other forms of editorial intervention, such as throttling of certain applications chosen by the ISP, or filtering of content into fast (and slow) lanes based on the ISP’s commercial interests. An ISP would need to make adequately clear its intention to provide “edited services” of that kind, so as to avoid giving consumers a mistaken impression that they would enjoy indiscriminate “access to all content available on the Internet, without the editorial intervention of their broadband provider,”

> It would not be enough under the Order, for instance, for “consumer permission” to be “buried in a service plan—the threats of consumer deception and confusion are simply too great.”

And now, you've legalized the "buried in a service plan" option. Congratulations.

[simplify]

Thanks for the links. What you say is true, but not the whole truth. According to your third link, ISPs can censor as long they clearly disclose it to customers.

[danjoc]

We can build our own ISPs. I've read many good posts today that dispute your statement. Here's one,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926261

[simplify]

From the post you linked:

> The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire.

(I didn't downvote you)

[danjoc]

That's not a large amount of money for a startup. Silicon Valley VCs threw away that much on the Yo app.

[AFNobody]

I would suggest you could create your own replacement for the sites that offend you.

Free market competition exists for websites and there is probably a market for it if you are upset about it.

[jayess]

You're completely missing my point. Today everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs that because of the repeal of NN, ISPs will begin censoring speech, while these campaigns are being financed and propagated by the very entities that engage in wholesale censorship of speech.

I actually laughed out loud today when I saw a tweet from twitter saying that NN will allow for censorship. Twitter is a festering den of opaque censorship. No one sees the irony?

[wpietri]

You don't quite understand censorship.

Let's suppose I put up a website where I accept articles about model trains. You submit articles about how to grow anthrax at home. I pass, in that they are not about model trains. Am I a shocking censor? No.

Or let's suppose you submit an article that is about model trains, but I don't think it's very good. I refuse it. is that censorship? Also no.

Twitter gets to decide what goes on their platform. If you don't like it, you can post it on some other platform. Or just make your own platform, one equally available to every Internet user.

If Comcast, on the other hand, decides to block a site because it's critical of them, then many millions of people will not be able to see it, and many of them won't be able to switch to a different ISP. That is censorship.

[iamnothere]

Is Comcast not a private company too?

This feels too much like a similar argument that people have been making lately, where silencing voices can only be considered "censorship" if it comes from the government. I'm so tired of seeing this! It's part of a larger trend, where people arbitrarily narrow definitions in service of their argument. It's disingenuous, to say the least.

(For the record, I'm AGAINST censorship whether it's Twitter, Comcast, or anyone else who provides services to the masses. Small private "clubs" like your model train website are a different animal. And yes, obviously that means that there are grey areas that cannot be cleanly resolved. Such is life.)

(Edit: toned down my response a bit.)

[wpietri]

Comcast is not your average private company because they hold a monopoly or oligopoly position in many markets.

In effective marketplaces, we trust the choice of purchasers to do most of the necessary work of making sure companies really serve the public. If some ISP in a competitive market decided to shut off access to all Republican-leaning news and commentary, we'd expect many people to switch to an ISP that didn't censor. But if Comcast did that, many people would just be screwed.

I agree that censorship is the pervasive silencing of voices. I disagree that Twitter can do that. Twitter may kick some people off their platform, but the Internet's open nature means those people can set up their own website. ISPs in noncompetitive markets, on the other hand, can indeed censor material, because many people will have no easy way to get that material.

That's why common carrier regulations predate the Internet by decades: some societal infrastructure is too important and too prone to capture to leave it up to the whims of individual executives. You could make the argument that Twitter is that kind of infrastructure. But given that only 20% of Americans use Twitter even once a month and a much smaller number use it daily, I think it's hard to say it's in the same category as the telephone or the Internet itself.

[iamnothere]

Ok, I can see where you are coming from, but I guess we fundamentally disagree on this. I see any company that provides a de facto public "square" as being equivalent on some level to a public space. (Much as malls were deemed to be a form of public space in the courts a while back, not that it is completely settled law.)

In my opinion, when a company's platform becomes one of the largest and most important venues for public discussion, they can no longer be considered a purely "private" entity in the same way. Corporations exist at the leisure of the public, as the public allows their charters to exist and defines (through law) the powers granted to the corporation. Expression of fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech defeats corporate concerns in this case. The public square must be open to the public, or democracy cannot function.

[Terr_]

> Is Comcast not a private company too?

An utterly different KIND of private company! A fundamentally different situation which does need regulation due to the differences that exist.

How the heck can we be this deep into the discussion and that's somehow unclear?

[rtx]

Because we are not being honest. You want a private company to act as a public company. Nothing wrong with it, just that public should first buy them out.

[jayess]

Then you might be shocked to learn that net neutrality actually permitted ISPs to engage in viewpoint-based censorship.

This whole debate has been so completely hijacked by utterly false premise arguments.