Much as Paypal has shown that it can stop providing services to customers for what appear to be political reasons, the domain name registrar GoDaddy stopped providing services to Gab, resulting in their web site disappearing from the internet.
Recently they found an alternative registrar, Epik, who have written a blog post about why they decided to accept Gab as a customer.
De-platforming a haven of free speech is not about left or right. Anyone who remembers studying civics is familiar with the concept of inalienable rights — rights that a worthy government can only protect but would have no moral authority to take away. The idea of Natural Law and Inalienable Rights dates back to Ancient Greece, if not before. Tolerance for competing views — including those protected by Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Press — is not an American concept even though the Founding Fathers of the United States built a prosperous nation around the concept.
Refusing service to a customer does not violate the non-aggression principle, but when you need a service provider to help you speak to people it is very useful to find one who thinks that freedom of speech is a good thing. Epik should be commended for their stance, and more importantly, their stance is a reason to use their services.
To make sure there are service providers who take your business, it is helpful if there are plenty to choose from and that at least some of them have friendly policies. For this it helps if there are low barriers to entry and minimal state interference in the policies of service providers. Points of centralisation can be a problem. About this, Epik say:
In the domain name world, we often talk about domain ownership. The reality is that we are mostly leasing domains from registries, who in turn is often regulated by a regulator ICANN. Recently I have been a vocal advocate for Forever domain registrations whereby a domain is free of ongoing expense. At the moment, this is possible through Epik though there is still more work to do to make this a risk-free industry norm. The danger of not proactively embracing digital sovereignty, in all its forms, is that the digital world will inevitably find a way to achieve it, with or without domain names.
Various government bodies are in charge of various parts of domain registration, depending on where you are in the world. Technology to decentralise this would be helpful. Perhaps something like Namecoin could be the answer, or perhaps there is another way yet.
Something really needs to happen, sooner rather than later. Either these companies are responsible for content, in which case they can censor as they please; or they are not, and they are forbidden from censoring. Currently, they want to be able to censor what they don’t like but remain unaccountable for what they publish (or assist in publishing). This is like a telephone company deciding it can block phone calls which discuss certain subjects; there are good reasons why this doesn’t happen, and those same reasons should be applied to tech companies. Sadly, governments like things just as they are, outsourcing censorship to tech companies and saying “nothing to do with us, it’s a private matter”.
“Either these companies are responsible for content, in which case they can censor as they please; or they are not, and they are forbidden from censoring.”
Or they need to drop barriers to entry to make it trivial for anyone to set up in competition, or someone needs to circumvent the censorship issue entirely by developing an easy-to-use, mass-market distributed crypto/stego platform that can’t be censored.
It’s not generally a good idea to ban things, not even censorship. Enabling competition is usually better, if it can be done.
Uhhh, domain names are a particular solution to the problem of identifying servers on the internet. Prior to that we used “bangs” to generate routes to particular people. Thus, before pizza.com was a thing, you might say: “…!NOAA!UniversityOfCaliforniaIrvine!pizza” where the pizza named machine was located in terms of feed. This was handy as there could be multiple “pizza” machines. Plus it meant that nobody could prevent you from naming a machine you owned anything you liked.
There were a lot of routing schemes and it could get quite messy, thus the domain system with a centralized control system.
That was the dialiup era, I’m sure a domain registrar independent naming system could be devised, perhaps on top of torrent technology.
Personally, I could barely configure a uucp file when I was in my 20’s, so that is all left as an exercise to the reader.
But my point is, you needn’t live in an internet dominated by government domain registrars.
-XC
I think that there are a lot of good points here. So just to toss in my two cents worth. There are two free market solutions to these problems. First of all is that these companies are responsible to their shareholders and they executive team have a fiduciary duty to run the company in the best interests of the shareholders. There is no reason why shareholder pressure can’t be brought to bear on the executive team to stop this nonsense.
However, I think that solution is difficult. A better solution is to simply provide alternatives. To me there is a pregnant opportunity for a free speech oriented service providing search, email, videos, tweeting, and so forth. There are bits and bobs of that, but what needs to happen is a critical mass needs to be created. So if libertarians and conservatives would stop whining and simply use the alternatives it would solve the problem both by giving an alternative platform plus pressuring the existing systems to be less arrogant. I honestly have a hard time understanding why this isn’t happening more broadly. It may well be the case that google/apple/twitter aren’t censoring enough to push people away.
It is notable that one of the benefits of a system like the internet is that it can readily consolidate results. So my search engine, when looking for videos, can look on “liberytube.com and youtube.com” and present both results on an equal footing. So switching doesn’t make much of a loss. (And Google can hardly complain about linking into their site given that that is the whole of their business.)
Something like that does take a bit of money for sure. the software isn’t especially complicated, but the infrastructure and management of it is pretty challenging. However, I suppose you could start out on AWS or Azure.
I’m not particularly concerned with the DNS (that is to say the central system that manages domain names). There seem to be enough alternative registrars that it won’t be a problem. However, to @XC’s point, the DNS is in a service installed on all computers. There is no particular reason that you MUST use the one run by ICANN. Were things to get particularly bad there is no reason why a parallel DNS couldn’t be set up, and people who wanted to use it could simply repoint their DNS resolver to a different IP address. (I’d have to think about it, there might be other adjustments made, but I think just switching your DNS IP address is enough.) Of course people would go nuts about such an idea, but there is nothing particularly inherent in the internet protocols that requires DNS’s to have a single source. (IP addresses are a different matter.)
Also, something I learned here, these companies can’t say “I’m not responsible for the content on my server because I am a neutral carrier, but this content is so terrible I’m going to ban it.” You are either picking and choosing or you aren’t. If you pick and chose you are responsible for the choices you make.
So what you’re saying is that an informal Jim Crow type arrangement where liberals agree between themselves to discriminate against conservatives is perfectly fine and that the proper response of conservatives is to set up a parallel society that allows them to have some limited, lower level access to their rights but which bars them from all the places liberals want to keep for themselves.
I hope your chains rest lightly on your shoulders.
“First of all is that these companies are responsible to their shareholders and they executive team have a fiduciary duty to run the company in the best interests of the shareholders. There is no reason why shareholder pressure can’t be brought to bear on the executive team to stop this nonsense.”
I rather think that such pressure is why they introduce the restrictions. Having the Twitter mob baying for your blood is bad for business.
“I honestly have a hard time understanding why this isn’t happening more broadly. It may well be the case that google/apple/twitter aren’t censoring enough to push people away.”
It’s the Niemoller thing. “They haven’t come for *me* yet, so I don’t care.” Relatively few people actually believe in free speech. The mostly believe in “free speech is an absolute right for decent people like me, but free speech obviously doesn’t include…” and then list categories of banned speech from people they don’t like. Hate speech, bullying, unpatriotic sedition, irreligious blasphemy, pornography, jihadist proselytising, … think of the children. They mostly don’t care that speech is restricted, they only argue that it targets the wrong categories (“… *my* speech should be free, not *theirs* …”).
“So what you’re saying is that an informal Jim Crow type arrangement where liberals agree between themselves to discriminate against conservatives is perfectly fine”
Up to a point, yes. People with freedom of association can choose who they meet with, do business with, and other matters of voluntary cooperation. They can’t discriminate on matters affecting anybody else’s freedom of action (except to prevent harm to others without their informed consent).
Thus, a Christian baker should be able to choose whether to do business with a gay wedding couple. But she shouldn’t be able to stop another baker setting up a shop where gay wedding couples are welcome and Christians aren’t. Customers can choose not to go in certain shops because they don’t like the politics of the owner, or the staff, or the horrible clashing colour scheme used on the menus. But they can’t form a blockade outside the shop to stop other customers going in.
Authoritarians always expect to be able to enforce their norms on other people, but immediately start shouting about “freedom!” and “rights!” the moment other people try to impose different norms on them. If you can discriminate on sex/gender, race, nationality, or religion, then you can discriminate on politics. If you live in a society that enforces its norms on members who don’t agree with them, that logically implies such norms can be enforced on *you*. Cultural fashions change, and what was once done to gays is now done to homophobes, what was once done to women is now done to sexists, what was once done to blacks is now done to racists. If discrimination is allowed, then yes, liberals can discriminate against conservatives. If you want to ban discrimination, then of course you have to put up with all the political correctness needed to enforce that.
It’s a valid way to point out the hypocrisy of authoritarian liberals who discriminate against conservatives while at the same time saying discrimination is wrong, but not if you fall into the same trap.
Given that that’s the exact set of freedoms I want for myself, it would be churlish to deny them to others, so, yes.
‘Refusing service to a customer does not violate the non-aggression principle…’
But it would be a ‘hate crime’ if the refusal involved someone from one of the officially anointed victim groups.
Free market economics is the antidote to all discrimination.
Interesting post – and interesting comments.
There is a wider problem – the culture produced by the schools and universities and reinforced by the media (especially the entertainment media) massively influences what and how Corporate managers think. The do not suddenly shrug off all the Collectivist brainwashing when they leave college – those incredibly expensive colleges that Mom and Dad paid for them to go to so they could “network” and get a good job (sometimes without even staying for a degree – for it is the networking that is important).
When there is a only a small group of companies among service hosts and payment processors (and so on) this problem becomes obvious – if you go against their collectivist politics they try and DESTROY you, and this is spreading into such things as a banking.
It is already “you are a gun shop – you can not bank here, OR ANYWHERE ELSE in the banking cartel”, how long before “you are against Gay Marriage – so you can not have a bank account, anywhere and no one will employ you”.
There is a CASTE of leftists who control most of American big business these days (and it is getting like that in Britain as well – dealing with Lloyds Bank means dealing with endless leftist agitprop, they seem totally uninterested in banking, only in spreading Frankfurt School of Marxism stuff) – and they are getting bolder and bolder, and they are joined at the hip with GOVERNMENT (local, State and Federal bureaucracy – and local and State and Federal Democrat politicians).
And there is an incredible contradiction at the heart of all this – as the Collectivist “Social Justice” doctrine of so many of the rich and Big Business will lead to their own destruction (indeed that is obvious in the doctrine itself).
“Appeal to the shareholders”.
You mean a bunch of New York Times reading fund managers? They are the de facto “share holders” – most shares are owned by institutions, and even individual share holders are often leftists (see above).
It is the CULTURE that is the problem now.
@Mr Black
So what you’re saying is that an informal Jim Crow type arrangement
I think it is interesting that you chose the word “arrangement” here when in fact the normal phrasing would be “Jim Crow laws”, because that is exactly what it was, and that is exactly the point. It was not an arrangement, it was a set of criminally and civilly enforceable laws that didn’t just allow segregation but demanded it on penalty of law. Were there no Jim Crow laws, just a racist culture, the economic demands of the South would have quickly wiped out discrimination. Racists businesses could not have handled the competition (violent mobs notwithstanding.)
So I’m not in favor of laws on this matter either. People who advocate for them must surely have lost all sense of history. When things go into the realm of government it does not end up favoring individual liberty. Better to find solutions where individuals control their own choices rather than asking the government, and the majority, to decide for everybody.
I hope your chains rest lightly on your shoulders.
Recently as I have been discussing politics and the recent American election with people, and as I have read what has been written about these subjects, I am struck by the fact that we are not just divided in our opinions, we are divided in our realities. Lefties and righties don’t just disagree in opinion they see the world in completely different ways. (And of course libertarians are on a different planet.) If you read, for example, a liberal and a conservative view on the Kavanaugh hearings it is almost like the left and the right have two entirely different sets of facts.
Your comment here reminds me of this. I am baffled how you think that being free to choose somehow weighs me down with chains. There are people who think that way — who think choice is a burden that should be taken away by government and made by “experts” on your behalf. But it is not a view I would have thought to find here.
Frankly having a competitive alternative, preferably several, to the hegemony of Google is something that the Internet desperately needs.
BTW, @Nullius in Verba above makes some excellent points on this too.
Excellent comments from Fraser.
@Paul Marks
“Appeal to the shareholders”.
You mean a bunch of New York Times reading fund managers? They are the de facto “share holders” – most shares are owned by institutions, and even individual share holders are often leftists (see above).
Although I agree that appealing to the shareholders is a difficult road, I don’t think it is impossible. And in many ways a successful attempt to do so would reclaim territory traditionally the preserve of the ownership class that has been taking over my the “gimmie, gimmie, gimmie somebody else’s stuff” class.
Were someone to organize all the non liberal shareholders into a “stop the bias” group (much as shareholders have pressured large corps into, for example, refusing the business of gun companies or logging companies, or recently US military contracts — though Chinese censorship software is apparently perfectly OK), and that group could make a legitimate threat to sell all their shares in Google, I assure you that that would certainly move management, even if that group consisted of, for example, 10% of the shareholders (or better, holders of 10% of the shares.) It isn’t as if Google stock is doing all that well over the past couple of years. Its lack of growth is pretty much coincidental with its emergence from tech disruptor and innovator to socially aware, part of the landscape, corporation. (I am not proposing here a causal relationship, though I am certainly not rejecting such a notion, just observing a coincidental relationship.) I say this as a disappointed shareholder myself. And FWIW, were such a movement to be organized I’d pledge my tiny group of shares to the cause. Frankly I’d do it not even to “stop the bias” but to get a healthier web ecosystem.
I do have to say though that I actually don’t think that Google is as guilty as some people say. Certainly in the arena of selectively banning content their behavior is reprehensible, and as has been said by the ever perceptive @bobby b among others, probably illegal. However, I actually think bias in search results is a second or third order effect. It comes from a dominance of the news media, as highly regarded sources, something algorithmically reasonable, and that media’s utter bias against libertarianism, conservatism and especially Trump. So as I say I think the search result bias is a second or third order effect. Is this a flaw in their algo? Since I don’t know their algo I’m not sure. It does get down to the definition of words and what “relevant” really means. I think if there is bias in the algo it isn’t liberal/conservative bias so much as bias as to how to determine relevance at a meta level.
In a sense were Google to be treated as a public utility then the algorithm they use for ranking relevance would surely be demanded as being open and transparent rather than some dirty secret manipulated and changed at the whim of their soft-dev team. But I would never advocate for such a solution. Rather I’d much prefer to have a healthy eco-system of competing search engines where I could chose what I mean by “relevance”. After all, it is my search and what I think is relevant should be paramount. I am old enough to remember a time when there was such an eco-system of competing search engines. Google ate them all for lunch by being much better. By giving me search results according to my definition of relevant. There is very little reason for that not to be the case here. One of the great benefits of the web is that a service’s hold on their customer is extremely light. Switching your search provider is far easier than switching your sewage provider. The accounting system I use, Xero, just essentially doubled all their prices and reduced their service capability. However, switching is a nightmare because they hold so much data that I would need were the IRS to come snooping. Google has no such data jail to hold over you, switching to a new search provider costs approximately zero.
There is another way to deal with this. The Swedish ISP Bahnhof has received a court order to block a series of domain names, including Sci-Hub.
So they have. And they have also blocked the sites of everybody involved in the court order, including the court itself.
https://torrentfreak.com/swedish-isp-protest-site-blocking-by-blocking-rightsholders-website-and-more-181102/
Fraser, I believe the difference in viewpoints is that libertarians live in a fantasy world while the real world marches off in a different direction. Postulating solutions that don’t exist and won’t exist to problems that are real and affecting people daily is deckchairs on the Titanic stuff. This whole line of “thinking” begins with “in an ideal world where I could set the rules” and then proceeds to assume this fantasy has some relevance.
“I believe the difference in viewpoints is that libertarians live in a fantasy world while the real world marches off in a different direction.”
Sure. We keep telling the authoritarians of the real world what the solution is, but they don’t want to give up their authoritarianism, so they keep marching the wrong way. It’s like socialism – no matter how many times it’s tried and failed, no matter how many times we explain that it doesn’t work, it can’t work, that it will never work, voters keep on voting for it.
Is the idea that we could just tell everyone once and for all that socialism doesn’t work, they’d all say “My gosh! I see it now! You’re so right!”, and stop trying it a fantasy? Sure! But that doesn’t change the fact that socialism/authoritarianism/protectionism DOESN’T WORK, and is indeed the source of much of the crap everyone keeps complaining about, and telling us to shut up about it not working isn’t ever going to change that.
The point of telling you isn’t that we truly expect you all to listen (although there’s always hope), but so that when you ignore us and get hit by economic disaster and lost freedoms yet again as a result, that you will at least deserve what you get. We want to be sure you’re making an informed choice. And if you choose the path of authoritarianism knowing to what bloody altar it will lead you, the consequences have at least a little justice and fairness to them. It’s so that when you’re being figuratively loaded into the cattle cars once again, when your 80-a-day smoking habit catches up with you, we can say: “We told you so!”
That’s not meant nastily, by the way. Even though the people of Venezuela (for example) voted their socialist government in, I still feel deep sympathy for them now suffering the consequences. If this was an ideal world and we could set the rules, they wouldn’t be. But it isn’t, and we don’t, and it’s going to keep on happening until people listen.
The problem here Fraser, is thus: People with real convictions will murder you quite happily to impose their will. Libertarians, with no convictions, will allow this to happen because doing anything about it is “not who we are”. It is the pacifism of politics, relying on other people to fight for your right not to. This is why Libertarianism has approximately 0% support, rounded to the nearest whole figure. It is the rights version of Marxist philosophy, pie in the sky theorising with not a single thread connecting it to reality.
Peoples lives and businesses are being ruined by an organised and very powerful conspiracy of people on the left and the Libertarians answer is “well, in an ideal world…”. If your principles are so worthless that you wouldn’t stand up for them with more than idle words spoken softly into an echo chamber then your contribution to the nation is zero, as it deserves to be. Other people will do the fighting, as always, so you can lecture them that they’re doing it wrong.
It’s not that I disagree with libertarian principles, it’s the people that pontificate endlessly about how they’d put out a fire while their house burns that are the issue.
@Mr Black
The problem here Fraser, is thus: People with real convictions will murder you quite happily to impose their will.
I think you are one of the many who are under the mistaken impression that libertarians are pacifists. Break into my house in the middle of the night and you will find out that I am not.
Libertarians, with no convictions, will allow this to happen because doing anything about it is “not who we are”.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Your sentence makes no sense. If these putative libertarians have no convictions why would they express a conviction loaded sentence like “it is not who we are.” I suggest you go find out a bit about libertarianism. Perhaps, were you to clear up some of your misconceptions you might well join us.
Peoples lives and businesses are being ruined by an organised and very powerful conspiracy of people on the left and the Libertarians answer is “well, in an ideal world…”.
I said nothing of the sort. The solution to the google problem is competition, and it is a perfectly viable solution. The idea that we should send the government in to fix the problem is the most extreme form of naivete. All you can do is get the government involved. You can’t control what they do. And what they do will not be anything close to what you want them to do. The government and politicians are chomping at the bit to regulate the internet, but I assure you it isn’t to guarantee that Breitbart can be free to say what they want. It is the opposite. It is to shut up pesky organizations like that that don’t follow the party line. The sort of truth they want is Pravda. Me, I’d rather have Samitzdat (to reference a popular web page…)
The problem here Fraser, is thus: People with real convictions will murder you quite happily to impose their will. Libertarians, with no convictions, will allow this to happen because doing anything about it is “not who we are”.
The “conviction” being power at any cost.
The term I often see about non-libertarians is “principals, not principles”.
@Ted Schuerzinger
The term I often see about non-libertarians is “principals, not principles”.
Or perhaps “agencies not agency.”
I used the term “convictions” to indicate something you believe at a cost to yourself. A muslim will kill you for being a non-muslim because he believes you’re evil. That is a conviction, he’ll follow through even though it will mean he suffers for it. A leftist rioter will get into a fight with police to protect something they value, even though it could mean injury, arrest or imprisonment. A Libertarian will write a letter to the editor from the comfort of their home complaining about the fascists in the street below. Meaningless. A Libertarian is someone who says “Our dictator won the vote fair and square”. A person with convictions shoots him in the face if they have the chance.
Has the willingness of some muslims to kill non-muslims caused a wave of conversion to Islam? No. Has some a leftist rioter’s antics with the cops caused capitalism to collapse? No. You seem to confuse acting out to make yourself feel relevant & important with actually achieving something.
You are a fool, Mr. Black.
Frasor Orr – I doubt that appealing to the shareholders will do any good, but PLEASE DO. It would be good (very good) if I was proved MISTAKEN.
Mr Black – yes, in the end, killing people is the ultimate sign that one is serious. But it is the job of a human being to try and PREVENT things coming to that.
I also suspect (please forgive me if I mistaken) that you have never killed anyone. For non lunatics Civil War will not prove fun – and even much smaller scale violence (such as shoving someone, from behind, in front of a train – because they work for the other side) is not fun. Actually it is SQUALID.
@Mr Black
A Libertarian is someone who says “Our dictator won the vote fair and square”.
What Perry said. Plus Libertarians are the only people who have the balls to call into question the legitimacy of majoritarianism in the first place. We would never say “our dictator won fair and square” we would say “irrespective of what the majority wants, there are still some inalienable rights that can never be legitimately taken away.”
@Mr Black
A Libertarian is someone who says “Our dictator won the vote fair and square”.
What Perry said. Plus Libertarians are the only people who have the balls to call into question the legitimacy of majoritarianism in the first place. We would never say “our dictator won fair and square” we would say “irrespective of what the majority wants, there are still some inalienable rights that can never be legitimately taken away.”
Moreover your view that having a civil discourse about how to conduct government is inferior to using violence to enforce your will on others is certainly a popular view today. However, it is not one I subscribe to, except in the most extreme of circumstances.
“Moreover your view that having a civil discourse about how to conduct government is inferior to using violence to enforce your will on others is certainly a popular view today.”
That’s not quite it. The right-authoritarians commonly say of course they’d like to have a civil discourse, but don’t believe it is possible. And if the way of the world is that you are either a master or a slave, that somebody will always dominate, that there is absolutely no possibility of genuine liberty, if they know the other side will never listen, never understand, then the only choice remaining is which side rules. And if somebody has to wear the boot and do the stamping on the other side, they very definitely want it to be *them*.
The result, of course, is that all the different factions of authoritarians endlessly take turns wearing the boot, and people will never be free. As the wheel turns and they’re each in turn dethroned, they suddenly rediscover ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’, but always selectively. Their philosophy always assumes they’re the ones permanently in charge, so they’ll keep the authoritarian system going until the day they realise they’re not in charge any more and it’s far too late to do anything about it.
But they can imagine no other world. The strongest commands. That’s how it is. And they see anyone who argues that we’d all be better off if we all voluntarily just stopped ordering one another around to be ‘weak’.
“Conan, what is best in life?” …
@Nullius in Verba
if they know the other side will never listen, never understand, then the only choice remaining is which side rules. And if somebody has to wear the boot and do the stamping on the other side, they very definitely want it to be *them*.
That is the natural condition of man, I think. However, a group of slaveholding aristocrats, filled with information from those new fangled “books” and imbued with that subversive trend “the enlightenment” actually came up with a pretty workable solution a couple of hundred years ago. Shame we forgot about that.
Needless to say, irrespective of their present apotheosis, none of that group, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton or Franklin could even win election to a school board today. (And they’d probably be glad of it.)
It is my opinion that one of the most subversive thing any man has ever done was done by George Washington, the day he went home from his eponymous city. Who but he ever put down the scepter willingly? He was a man both a devil for his slave holding ways, and an angel for his public service.
Fraser, indeed.
While I can certainly see the point in the argument that the SJWs are not interested in “having a civil discourse about how to conduct government” and therefore there’s no point dreaming about what if they did, I think the history of the world since the Enlightenment shows massive progress, so there’s a very good hope that it will continue. They persuaded people of the virtues of freedom during much rougher times than these.
It’s just that we can’t see it from our perspective, without the bird’s eye view of history. It’s like technological/environmental progress – we take for granted what we’ve got, and fight the battles we have right now, and see neither the incredible progress we have made, nor in what ways our own beliefs and practices still fall short of the ideal. We need a Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg or Hans Rosling to document how well we’re actually developing on Liberty.
There is hope, and it is working. But attitudes change only over generations. Historically it’s incredibly fast. But from our perspective, plodding through history one year at a time, it’s slow work.