Common carrier also applies to phones and electricity and so on, it is what prevents your phone service provider from deciding who you can call or what you can say. Imagine a world where your phone service provider could beep out all your swear words, or if they prevented you from calling certain people, that is what common carrier prevents.

So the equivalent of Google banning anyone talking about Covid is the same as a phone service provider ending service for anyone mentioning covid on their phones. Nobody but the most extreme authoritarians thinks phone providers should be allowed to do that, so why not apply this to Google as well?

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amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago | parent [-]

This is essentially the free speech maximalist position: allow any legal content.

If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation. Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.

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Jensson 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation.

Did people leave Google in droves in favor of a competitor that censors out all porn from search results? No, people had no issue that you can find porn on Google, they still used it. Youtube providing porn to those who want it does not cause problems for anyone, just like it doesn't for Google search, and Google even run both so they can easily apply this same feature on Youtube.

> Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.

The internet is overrun by spam and porn yet people still use it, so you are clearly wrong. Google already manages as search engine over the internet that is capable of not showing you porn when you don't search for it, but you can find it if you do, so Google has already solved that problem and could just do the same in Youtube.

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amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Note that we are having this conversation on a site with heavy moderation. I doubt removing this moderation would in any way make the site better.

You might ask yourself why you are here, instead of another website with less or no moderation.

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Jensson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The only reason we need moderation is that we have discussions, youtube videos doesn't have that feature, you can't attach a video to another persons video, but you can attach a comment here to another persons comment. I am all for moderating youtube comments for that very reason, but not youtube videos.

I would prefer if discord / reddit and similar became common carriers of forums, not messages. So discord and reddit can't control what a subreddit does and what its moderators do, but the moderators can control what the people posting there can do.

By having a common carrier forum provider anyone could easily make their own forum with their own rules and compete on an open market without needing any technical skills, and without the forum provider being able to veto everything they say and do on that forum. That is where we want to be, in such an environment HN wouldn't need to depend on ycombinator, you could have many independently moderated forums and you pick the best one.

Discord and reddit today aren't that, both ban things they don't like, it would be much better if we removed that power from them. Both reddit and discord admins allows porn and spam, their censorship adds zero value to the platform, the only thing it does is kick some political factions out of the platform which doesn't add any value to it, as I wouldn't visit those discords / subreddits anyway so they don't hurt me.

So it isn't hard to imagine how to draft such laws where all our favorite usecases are still allowed while also adding much more freedom for users and making life easier for these content platforms since they are no longer targeted by takedown request spam, it is a win win for everyone except those who want to censor.

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amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You are welcome to set up such a forum provider today. You probably won't be able to get sponsors for it though. Reddit used to be much more lightly moderated, but they wanted to be able to run ads/make money. 4chan is much more lightly moderated than the big platforms.

Unless you make a law preventing all moderation, the users and advertisers are going to migrate to the moderated forums.

	▲	Jensson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You are welcome to set up such a forum provider today. You probably won't be able to get sponsors for it though. Reddit used to be much more lightly moderated, but they wanted to be able to run ads/make money. Thanks for answering why the law is needed, as you explained a private solution cannot solve this. Advertisers wouldn't be able to push reddit to ban things if reddit weren't allowed to ban them, so you would still be able to run ads with such a law, it just reduces the power those ad companies has over you. And no, the ad companies doesn't really care if you show porn or show terrorist propaganda on your site, you can both watch porn and read terrorist propaganda on Google without leaving the site yet every advertiser I know is happily spending a massive amount of money on Google ads. If they actually cared they would leave Google, instead they just care about bullying those who can comply, if they know the target wont budge due to a law then they would just continue to advertise like they do with Google. These kind of regulations are needed when the free market results in oppressive results, there are many such cases where regulations do a good job and I don't see why these internet companies should be an exception.

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nradov 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps. But another approach would be to give users better filtering features so that they wouldn't see content they consider objectionable, even if it's not censored and still readily available to other users.