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Thank you, this is something I've said for ages now. If a company has an almost defacto monopoly and stops people from talking about something, it's effectively the same as a government doing it. And when about 98% of internet communities are hosted by and controlled by large corporations, the whole 'go elsewhere and start up your own service' thing feels kinda clueless, as if it's deliberately ignoring how powerful network effects are. It's also clueless because it's extremely difficult to run a business or service online if your views/product/service is despised by a large enough percentage of the population, due to every single layer of the stack being controlled by someone that can and will shut down anyone they disagree with. ISPs, web hosts, anti DDOS providers, software providers, domain name registrars, payment processors... all of them think of themselves as the internet moral police, and will boot customers/clients if enough people scream at them to do so (or in the case of things like porn or gambling, because it's 'convenient'). So running an alternative gets more and more costly and impractical the more controversy you bring, to the point you're probably required to run your own datacentre and networking links if people hate you enough. That's not true of a real life business or organisation, which gets services provided by utilities and where (assuming they own the building), only the government could boot them out. |
Well wait a second, is that really censorship? "Censorship" implies to me a small group of powerful and unaccountable people tinkering with the information flow, quite probably in secret. That's not the same thing at all as being hounded out of town because everyone thinks you're a piece of shit.