[Reelin]

> It's about freedom of Reach, not freedom of speech.

What a snappy cliche. If you prohibit certain people from using the printing press but allow others to do so, then in practice you are limiting their freedom to speak relative to other people. To imply otherwise is either disingenuous or profoundly misinformed.

[dTal]

Everyone has access to the modern equivalent of a printing press. Anyone can buy a domain name and a VPS and "print" as many leaflets as they want.

Publishing on YouTube is more like, well, publishing. There's a middleman. They own their own press, they have a reputation and an audience, they bring the eyeballs, they make the money and they give you a cut. It has never been censorship for a publisher to decline to publish something.

Youtube isn't infrastructure.

[Reelin]

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc (and to a lesser extent search engines) are the modern equivalent of the printing press in terms of the effect they've had on how we communicate. A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

They are not at all similar to publishing. There's no editor. There's no approval process for the typical use case, only a retroactive removal process. They don't have an audience in the traditional sense of people paying someone to curate information for them but rather depend on network effects to maintain a monopoly on their segment of the market. To that end, they have more in common with a dating app than they do with the New York Times. The presence of advertising revenue is the only legitimate similarity I see to a traditional publishing model.

In spite of your claim that YouTube isn't infrastructure, it appears to me to have far more commonalities than differences with it. That it isn't (yet) regulated as such is merely a legal peculiarity from my perspective.

(And the above doesn't even begin to consider the effects that dumping VC and megacorp funded free product has had on the market. Good luck starting a competing platform when there's no viable way to operate a subscription model and your direct competitor has a monopoly on the relevant advertising market.)

[twentydollars]

> A domain and VPS are simply not a viable substitute for access to mainstream social networks; to claim otherwise is disingenuous.

Nobody is claiming this. That's the whole idea of the "Freedom of reach" thing...

Why should you be entitled to post lies on Youtube?

There are dozens of competing platforms that will let you post these things, you actually don't even have to start your own...

[Reelin]

> Nobody is claiming this.

The person I responded to did, in fact, directly imply this. Recall that I had compared the impact of modern mainstream social media to that of the printing press historically. Directly ignoring my central point clearly places your comment in bad faith.

"Freedom of reach" is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on (cultural, not legal) freedom of speech (and liberalism more generally) for the reasons I've already articulated in this and nearby threads.

[dTal]

Original person you responded to here - I did not, in fact, imply this. My thesis is that your analogy is broken. We agree that having a domain and a VPS is a poor substitute for a voice on a major social network; likewise, owning your own printing press is no substitute for, say, a regular column in a popular newspaper. It's incorrect to frame it as forbidding access to technology, when what it really is is a middleman refusing to do business with you. We can debate about the precise nature of the middleman, but the presence or absence thereof is the defining feature. You CAN publish without Facebook. You CAN'T publish (paper) without a printing press.

It also bears noting that the gap in access to publishing technology has radically narrowed - it is WAY easier and cheaper to buy a domain and a VPS and publish your thoughts to the entire world without any content middleman, than it was to procure your own physical press and set up an operation to print even thousands of leaflets, let alone publish something with global reach. You have access to - pretty much - all the same technology that Facebook does.

[twentydollars]

So newspapers should be compelled to print every letter they receive?

[Reelin]

No. Those are the very definition of publishers, not communications providers masquerading as publishers when it's politically convenient for them (recall the dance around Section 230 protections).

If a local newspaper ever somehow became the central point of communication for a significant fraction of the population, posting nearly everything they received by default with very little to no curation, then it would be reasonable to reexamine the expectations placed upon them by society.