Expanding Net Neutrality (1 Viewer)

[Cephus]

Under the theory that the little people can be driven to UTOPIA by controlling the conversations, by power deciding what ideas are kosher enough that people can be allowed to explore them.

It you can control the narrative, you can control the war. And make no mistake, this is a culture war that the left is winning because the left has control of the pieces.

 

[Cephus]

We seem to be in the minority these days, because people have gotten stupid.

EDIT: I rarely have seen the right supporting free speech, they long ago became cucks to Victim Culture, which argues that speech must be controlled to save the victims.

I don't think we're in the minority at all, we're just having our outlets controlled. If we can't speak freely, we can't make our presence known. And a lot of the crap with the alt-right are coming about specifically because of this. The left have tried to shut them up so they're becoming more vocal and the far left is becoming more violent to shut them up.

 

[Hawkeye10]

So you want the elites in government to decide what speech private business will spread? I thought you did not trust or like the governmental elite

Just as we decide what prices private businesses charge and how much they must invest in infrastructure when their well operation is important enough to the country, yes. Once these meeting places and internet hubs get big enough they need to be either be regulated or broken up, for the greater good, since they obviously cant do the right thing on their own.

 

[Cephus]

Facebook, Youtube are not restricting anyone's right to free speech. The ability for every group in the US to spread their speech is the same as it was 30 years ago. They can make printed news letter, and put them in mailboxes, stand on a street corner and say what they want. They could not go to CBS or the NYT and demand that either provide that group an opportunity to spread their message. No more than any group has the right to force Youtube or Facebook to allow their message on their website. If groups are prevented from putting their message on Facebook, they can create their own version of it, if Youtube is stopping their videos from being hosted on Youtubes website create their own. If the hosting company is no long hosting their server, create their own. Private business are under no obligation to provide a medium for any group in the US to spread their message.

Then you're not paying attention because Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all actively silencing conservative voices. Google has announced that they will just stop having conservative voices show up in search results. You can find examples of blatant hate speech that comes from the left that never gets touched, even when reported, but the second anything they don't like comes from the right, they shut it down. And while I'll agree that in general, private businesses aren't beholden to the Constitution, these are so powerful and have such blatant monopolistic control, that we have to step in and either shut them down or break them up or apply some kind of control over them because their bias is absurdly blatant.

 

[Cephus]

Do you believe DP should do away with their rules regulating free speech on this forum?

It DP was the only forum out there, if the majority of Americans had no choice but to use their services, then yes. But that's not the case for DP. It is for many of the services Google provides. There are no effective alternatives. They are a monopoly.

 

[Hawkeye10]

I don't think we're in the minority at all, we're just having our outlets controlled. If we can't speak freely, we can't make our presence known. And a lot of the crap with the alt-right are coming about specifically because of this. The left have tried to shut them up so they're becoming more vocal and the far left is becoming more violent to shut them up.

Power has worked hard and long to control the conversations of all as a manipulation technique on the road to UTOPIA, it was out of hand abusive long ago, we best get on with fixing the problem. However, the Right has failed us on this just as much as the left has...this is not about L/R partisanship, this is about all power agreeing to attempt to drive the little people to UTOPIA through abusive means.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

I don't think we're in the minority at all, we're just having our outlets controlled. If we can't speak freely, we can't make our presence known. And a lot of the crap with the alt-right are coming about specifically because of this. The left have tried to shut them up so they're becoming more vocal and the far left is becoming more violent to shut them up.

Newscorp (Fox news)
Brietbart
Daily Caller

and so on are being controlled?

How about Clear Channel, or as it is known today iHeartMedia

Conservative Victim Cuckculture

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

Then you're not paying attention because Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all actively silencing conservative voices. Google has announced that they will just stop having conservative voices show up in search results. You can find examples of blatant hate speech that comes from the left that never gets touched, even when reported, but the second anything they don't like comes from the right, they shut it down. And while I'll agree that in general, private businesses aren't beholden to the Constitution, these are so powerful and have such blatant monopolistic control, that we have to step in and either shut them down or break them up or apply some kind of control over them because their bias is absurdly blatant.

Facebook has competitors that are easily accessed, Youtube just posts video's any website can do that, Google is search engine. There are plenty of search engines, Bing, and Yahoo come to mind.

All of the websites you mentioned have competitors that can easily be accessed through the internet. The only way conservative voices would be silenced is if the ISP that provided internet service to conservatives prevented conservative voices from reaching the end user

 

[Cephus]

Power has worked hard and long to control the conversations of all as a manipulation technique on the road to UTOPIA, it was out of hand abusive long ago, we best get on with fixing the problem. However, the Right has failed us on this just as much as the left has...this is not about L/R partisanship, this is about all power agreeing to attempt to drive the little people to UTOPIA through abusive means.

It has nothing to do with left/right partisanship, it has to do when the balance gets out of whack. The right would, and demonstrably has, gone every bit as authoritarian control-freak as the left is right now. This is what happens when you become ideologically deadlocked. There can be no conversation, there can be no compromise, because both sides are completely convinced that the other side is evil. People have lost the ability to talk and reason and come to common conclusions. It just can't be done right now.

 

[Cephus]

Facebook has competitors that are easily accessed, Youtube just posts video's any website can do that, Google is search engine. There are plenty of search engines, Bing, and Yahoo come to mind.

All of the websites you mentioned have competitors that can easily be accessed through the internet. The only way conservative voices would be silenced is if the ISP that provided internet service to conservatives prevented conservative voices from reaching the end user

Not with the reach that Facebook has. There are competitors to Twitter, but not with the reach. There are competitors to YouTube, but not with the reach. That's like saying that company towns had competitors, they were just 50 miles that way and you have no way to get there, but they exist, therefore company towns are just fine.

 

[Hawkeye10]

It has nothing to do with left/right partisanship, it has to do when the balance gets out of whack. The right would, and demonstrably has, gone every bit as authoritarian control-freak as the left is right now. This is what happens when you become ideologically deadlocked. There can be no conversation, there can be no compromise, because both sides are completely convinced that the other side is evil. People have lost the ability to talk and reason and come to common conclusions. It just can't be done right now.

It has to be done, and so long as the Elite have their heads up there asses it is going to have to be the long abused Little People who drive it. Putting Trump in the POTUS chair was but a first move of rebellion.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

Not with the reach that Facebook has. There are competitors to Twitter, but not with the reach. There are competitors to YouTube, but not with the reach. That's like saying that company towns had competitors, they were just 50 miles that way and you have no way to get there, but they exist, therefore company towns are just fine.

The reach is meaningless, accessibility is

A single gas station for 200 miles has no accessible competitors. A website has dozens, all that is required is typing in the web address to access it. The barrier to reach any competitor to Facebook is only limited to a persons ability to type. I expect conservatives have the ability to type in Bing.com, heck typing Bing.com is even easier than typing google.com.

Free speech does not include the requirement of anyone providing an audience to read, listen to or watch it.

 

[Cephus]

It has to be done, and so long as the Elite have their heads up there asses it is going to have to be the long abused Little People who drive it. Putting Trump in the POTUS chair was but a first move of rebellion.

I honestly don't think he's going to do a damn thing.

 

[Verax]

If ever there was a sure fire way to kill net neutrality it would be to saddle onto it this ludicrous idea of forcing everyone to accept and host all content.

There is no monopoly on hosting. I can open a port on my router, setup a web server and tada I'm now a host in under 5 minutes. The only thing that would stop that would be the loss of actual net neutrality, the thing that is happening right now. If my ISP decides they don't want to let my web server traffic through, I'm done, I don't exist anymore. THAT is the problem.

Forcing companies to accept and host all content would open a can of worms the size of Jupiter. It is so unfathomly insane I don't think anyone that actually understands what they are suggesting would support such a thing.

 

[Hawkeye10]

I honestly don't think he's going to do a damn thing.

What Trump does was never the most important thing, the little people defying instructions and siding with him was. I said this last year.."Anything Trump can get done in The Swamp is gravy, just getting him there was a substantial victory for The Rebellion (paraphrase)".

 

[The Mark]

I’m not convinced it should be treated under the same banner, not least because the whole concept of Net Neutrality is already confused with its own layers of political and financial bias, adding in something else with a whole load more would just create a single big mess that wouldn’t benefit anyone.

I question the concept of there being “near monopolies” here. There are certainly companies and platforms who have established large market shares but if anything this is a field where competitors can be relatively easily established and, with effort, luck and the right offering, succeed. After all, that’s exactly what Facebook and YouTube did.

Hosting is very much not a monopoly, it just seems that none of the mainstream hosting companies wanted their business. I don’t think there is much government or the law can do about that. On that side though, it wouldn’t be restrictively difficult for an organisation to self-host their own material and thus be free of any third-party influence.

In general, I’d suggest “extreme” minority views have inevitably always struggled to find a mainstream voice. The internet doesn’t real change that other than making it much more widely visible when it happens.

ISPs with localized monopolies are an issue, though, because the services they provide require physical infrastructure investment in order to compete.

 

[HonestJoe]

ISPs with localized monopolies are an issue, though, because the services they provide require physical infrastructure investment in order to compete.

It is but that’s a separate issue again, about individual customers accessing the internet rather than organisations (or individuals) hosting sites and data.

 

[Cephus]

It is but that’s a separate issue again, about individual customers accessing the internet rather than organisations (or individuals) hosting sites and data.

It's not really a separate issue, it's about companies having undue influence over their customers and the customers not having a lot of alternatives. For example, and I know this is an extreme example that isn't likely to happen, but what if Google decided tomorrow that they would no longer index the GOP website. It will simply never show up in any search results ever again. What do people do? Because many other search engines use Google's algorithms so it won't show up in their searches either. What options do regular people have, especially since they might not even know that anything nefarious is going on? Google could easily start tampering with search results, just like they are already doing on YouTube, where if you search for something they don't like, they will only direct you to videos that attempt to debunk what you want to see.

Where do we draw the line?

 

[jamesrage]

Given these stories and the near monopoly of some tech companies.

Should Net Neutrality be expanded to cover content providers and hosting, in terms of legal content?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevl...al-media-controls-what-we-see/2/#32430ef12845

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/youtube-is-censoring

https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-daily-stormer/

GoDaddy pulls support for neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer over Heather Heyer post

No.Net Neutrality means that your ISP can not throttle speeds to certain websites. It basically means that if you pay 60 bucks a money for 100MPS then that is the speed you ISP provides you(assuming the site you are visiting can handle that speed on their end) regardless of website you visit. They can't say well if you visit https://www.debatepolitics.com then we'll cut your speed to 10MPS because we want you to pay extra for that. Your ISP has nothing to do with websites getting yanked or removed because they are not the ones hosting those sites.

 

[Taylor]

Private business are under no obligation to provide a medium for any group in the US to spread their message.

They're only obligated to bake cakes and take pictures?

 

[HonestJoe]

It's not really a separate issue, it's about companies having undue influence over their customers and the customers not having a lot of alternatives.

That’s like saying corporate fraud and mugging old ladies on the street are the same issue. They both involve stealing money but the consequences are obviously vastly different and significantly, the measures to prevent them are vastly different too.

I’m not saying the topics of this thread aren’t important, I just think falsely lumping them under “net neutrality”, a term already widely misunderstood and misused for political purposes, would only serve to add to the confuse and create more scope for politicised opportunism actively preventing real solutions to the real problems.

By all means identify actual problems (or potential problems) and present practical solutions to address them. Just don’t start tying different problems together or start unnecessarily politicising them.

 

[jdog21]

Wasn't there a court case that decided whether a gay person could put an add on the dating site Christian Mingle? If so, would that not apply to your question?

I agree with the notion of net neutrality as normally presented, but I don't support the idea that companies should be required to host or provide access to content that content that defies their stated TOS. You seem to be suggesting that all providing/hosting entities use a TOS written by a court that exists to arbitrate what defines "legal" content. I don't agree with that, if that's what you are indeed suggesting.

Its things like this that go to the heart of the matter. When the government and the courts decide that a website (christian mingle) and a wedding cake baker are forced to due business with people or ideas they dont agree with, the left say they businesses cant discriminate. But when google, or ISP drop nazi websites the left stand back and say businesses can do what they want, nazi's cant find an alternate source.
We are failing to see that both are the same. We either have a society that can force businesses to do business with gays & nazi's or we have a society that allows business to decide who they want to do business with.

 

[HonestJoe]

Its things like this that go to the heart of the matter. When the government and the courts decide that a website (christian mingle) and a wedding cake baker are forced to due business with people or ideas they dont agree with, the left say they businesses cant discriminate. But when google, or ISP drop nazi websites the left stand back and say businesses can do what they want, nazi's cant find an alternate source.

The key distinction is between treating an entire class of people differently because of what they are and treating an individual differently because of what they do. A business can’t refuse to provide a service to all white-run websites or all same-sex couples but they can refuse services to individual customers who break their terms of service.

 

[jdog21]

The key distinction is between treating an entire class of people differently because of what they are and treating an individual differently because of what they do. A business can’t refuse to provide a service to all white-run websites or all same-sex couples but they can refuse services to individual customers who break their terms of service.

I think they still are one in the same.
A nazi violates googles terms of service due to saying things that google considers hate speech.
A gay person can violate a bakers terms of service for committing things they consider outrageous sins

 

[HonestJoe]

I think they still are one in the same.
A nazi violates googles terms of service due to saying things that google considers hate speech.
A gay person can violate a bakers terms of service for committing things they consider outrageous sins

First, the bakers have no such terms of service, their refusals were decided on the spot. In fact, it could be said that the anti-discriminate laws of the jurisdiction are an implicit part of terms of service for any business subject to them. The hosting services have published terms of services the website owners will have specifically signed up to (even if they didn’t bother reading them).

Secondly, no reasonable terms of service can include factors that have nothing to do with the actual service. The websites weren’t closed because of what the owners have said elsewhere but because of what they actually published on that site. The bakers can’t refuse to serve a couple because of what the owners imagine (fantasise?) what the couple do behind closed doors.