New comment by adventured in "Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt"

> These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them

That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to make your life online dramatically more difficult.

They can get you at the domain registration (oligopoly + mixture of cartel behavior). Oh, well, you have no right to a domain registration.

They can get you at the ISP level (oligopoly). Oh, well, you have no right to Internet access.

They can get you at the discovery level. Oh, well, Google (monopoly), Facebook (monopoly), Twitter, Reddit, et al. don't owe you any discovery access.

They can get you at the hosting level. Oh, well, nobody owes you access to any sort of hosting, from Azure or AWS to Wordpress or Tumblr.

They can get you at the network transit level. If just a few ISPs or large backbone operators in the US blacklist your site from their customers, few will be able to see you. Again for practical purposes, you're dead in that market.

Google as one example has openly bragged about their potential to conspire with other malevolent entities to tightly control expression/speech. They know their position and exactly how they can abuse it to their political or ideological bias.

In the age of inherently subjective 'hate speech' as The Devil that must be stopped at any and all costs, none of this is far fetched in the least. It's going to get a lot worse yet; the topics covered by 'hate speech' blockades will get far more extensive in the coming years. The enemies of free speech have been wildly emboldened by their successes and the lack of push-back. The entire West is going to end up with the equivalent of a less restrictive Chinese firewall, and that's where liberal Democracy is guaranteed to die.

from Hacker News - New Comments: "WordPress" http://bit.ly/2VeIREv
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