Problems like this were litigated in the railroad era. See
Memphis News Pub vs. Southern Railway (1903).[1] Could the railroad transport one newspaper, but not another? The Supreme Court of Tennessee ruled, "no". That was even before the US had Federal antitrust law.
Railroad law and regulation from a century ago is worth studying when trying to figure out how to deal with monopolies with strong network effects. Railroads had even stronger networking effects.
Difference being that the railway was the only practical mean of delivery back then and is an actual utility. Also one couldn't sideload newspapers to circumvent restrictions.
Tagging everything as a "utility" and demanding they be regulated as such is as far removed from the conservative ethos as the altright apparently.
I think Google, Facebook and Amazon have far bigger network effects than railways. Also, the network effects are different making Google and such exponentially more powerful.
So, Where do we draw the line between a company rightfully refusing to host inappropriate content and a company "abusing" its network effects?.
Where do we draw the line between a company "abusing" its network effects and a company avoiding being abused by other companies? (e.g. Imagine a app store that distributes only free software backed by a big corp, then a small proprietary app maker complains that they don't want to accept their app because its proprietary).
Is the size of the company the criteria that decides if they are in the right or in the wrong?
> So, Where do we draw the line between a company rightfully refusing to host inappropriate content and a company "abusing" its network effects?.
I don't think the app description of Gab is an appropriate content. Google seems to assume that the content of the Gab app will be innapropriate. Given this is about freedom of speech I'm not sure they should be the one deciding this. Are they also removing Gab from their Google Search results?
"Network effects" are people's relationships with their products, which they justly earned.
They ran atop the same network that everyone else had access to and achieved, the accurate analog to the railway example is the ISPs and not these companies.
Interesting to consider vertical integration questions in light of this.
Were Google just one of many available app stores for Android, would this be a weaker case? (Or: would railways have been regulated as common carriers were there several parallel railways next to each other, or if the track owner was not the only person operating trains on the line?)
What if OS + Store integration was done at the cell phone manufacturer level? What if they all ended up settling on the same default store (say, Google's?)? Would it depend on why they had selected that one? Would it depend on how many others existed? (And same question if OS + Store integration was done at cell network operator/phone reseller level.)
What if there was a plethora of app stores that various phones came with, but they all or almost all independently decided an app was not representative of them, or distasteful, or inappropriate?
What's the parallel here? There was no app store back then, I'm guessing you're referring to IE, but again, that was Microsoft integrating two Microsoft products together. Similar with Windows on top of DOS.
What if Microsoft had never made a browser, but 90% of manufacturers chose to make Netscape default over Opera, and Opera sued them for it?
Not all Android devices come with Google's app store, and some manufacturers have their own. On the other hand, it's also not a simple per-device decision of the manufacturer between Google and the alternatives (afaik manufacturers either ship Play with all of their devices or with none).
Actually this is a bit different as google is not blocking their app from being installed on Android just not allowing them to use Google play. In other words google is not stopping them from using the (railroad) train tracks just not willing to transport them in their locomotive.
> In a statement, Google described the lawsuit as "baseless," and said it would defend its decision in court, if necessary. "In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people," Google said. "This developer is welcome to appeal the suspension if they've addressed the policy violations and are compliant with our Developer Program Policies."
This is going to be fun. I hope they're forced to clarify what exactly they mean by "sufficient level of moderation". If that's going to be their angle I have to say it sounds wobbly. I'd be more comfortable with a, "It's our platform, get bent!" approach.
It would be trivial to establish strong countervailing precedent using the Twitter app. Specifically "including for content that encourages violence", as Twitter has been rife with completely unmoderated calls for violence against "Nazis" over the course of the last year.
My point is that Gab will easily be able to demonstrate that Twitter is in violation of the Play Store's own policy - the very policy which is the ostensible cause of the Gab app's removal.
Not being a lawyer, I don't know what the legal consequences of proving capriciousness of policy enforcement would be. Maybe nothing. But IF it's legally consequential and actionable, then it would be easy to prove.
When you read contract language, you don't get to ignore words that you don't like. In this case, the key word is 'sufficient'. Google's position doesn't need to be that twitter is free from hate, but rather that it does enough to curtail it.
If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.
"Hate speech" is not prohibited - nor is it even legally defined - in the United States, where Gab is based.
> If Gab.ai is built upon the premise that it does exactly ZERO curtailing, then it isn't going to get very far by trying to throw twitter under the bus in order to claim it is being treated inequitably.
This is the assertion I was challenging - Gab does not promise "zero curtailing" as they censor content that is illegal in the jurisdiction in which they reside.
For what it's worth, I think Google has every right to put in place whatever policies they want, so long as they are equally enforced. The complaint here seems to be that the rule that Google is accusing Gab of breaking is not enforced against other customers. I have no idea if that's legal or not.
A private contract does not attract protection from the first amendment, which is a bar upon the creation of laws, not a bar upon the contractual behavior of private parties.
I think you've skipped the key point here.
>Google's position doesn't need to be that twitter is free from hate, but rather that it does enough to curtail it.
The implicit premise of Gab and it's explicit stated position is that it will not curtail hate speech. Absent other indications, words in contracts are interpreted to have meaning. Accordingly, significant has a 'non-zero in some context' meaning.
Zero =/= Non-zero. Accordingly Gab is in breach.
Trying to compare them to twitter and other platforms that do moderation isn't a like-for-like comparison in the contractual framework this is being analyzed under.
tbf, the social media puts "hate speech" in quotes, implying that it disagrees with Google's definition (or rather, their perception of Google's definition).
I guess the important part is whether they, in their terms of service, police hatespeech in the legal sense. Which I'm unsure of.
You think an app store should be a common carrier? Should WalMart also, then? Why wouldn't a store get to pick what they carry? Everything they carry affects their reputation and appearance, after all.
The difference is that many phones come with the the Google Play store on them, and "Allow installation of apps from unknown sources" locked off. I don't know what the metaphor would be; if a good chunk of cars were somehow locked where you couldn't drive to other stores than WalMart, and WalMart were involved in the production of those cars?
This is a good point, but also suggestive of the needed remedy being something other than "force the play store open" more akin to "ensure the underlying platforms are more open."
I have much more problem with forcing someone to distribute things than I do with forcing them to allow other distribution methods.
There are interesting aspects there, but the idea of protected classes vs unprotected ones and restricting discrimination based on that isn't one I have a huge problem with. I don't believe that a cake store having to serve minorities needs to imply that they have to be willing, say, to create cakes with arbitrary recipes. Could be an issue that comes up in the future with food allergy stuff, though, but as it is today that's not protected, and I feel it would be ludicrous to force shops to be "common carriers" that have to cook whatever the customer wants—of course, there are significant level-of-market-control differences here too.
as far as I know, every modern android phone. To enable sideloading involves going into your security settings and toggling the option to allow unknown sources. It'd likely be a legal viability if they didn't do this, as a consumer can complain about getting a virus and that they were not proper measure taken to ensure that they were protected against this.
You jest about WalMart but actually if they are a monopoly then yes they could be though of as common carrier. A much better solution is to break them into pieces.
"Could be" is not "should be." I would argue that neither should be thought of as a common carrier. There's no natural barrier preventing you from distributing code through other means to run on Android devices, or from setting up your own store to compete with Walmart (probably Amazon is the better parallel here). I don't think "remove any editorial discretion" is a useful answer to any of these scenarios. Decentralization and lack of control is not the panacea that the the-internet-should-be-radically-open crowd thinks, for reasons that a brief history of (mis)use and tragedy-of-the-commons type scenarios illustrate.
But maybe I should hedge this position by learning to write malware so I can have a leg up when the floodgates open. :)
EDIT: Animats makes a great point above in his comparison to railroads. Very apt-sounding comparison. Slides my thoughts around to consider that the difference today is how low the stakes are for would-be content creators - in the past you were much more likely to need a business case to justify, today things are so cheap you might just write an app to troll. If there are policy changes needed, seems like that shift is where they would come from, and that we haven't really talked about it from that side much.
The difference is that by default, Google's app store is the only option on Android devices and Apple's one is the only option on iOS devices. This means being banned from one basically means your app or service can't become popular on those platforms, especially with the mainstream user (who doesn't root their devices).
Walmart and other large retailers have alternatives available in most areas, and it's incredibly easy to choose to shop in one of these alternatives as well.
"Anyone" can sideload applications on Android in the same way as "anyone" can change the drive belt on their own car. Your statement may be true in the literal sense of the word, but that that is not the standard by which antitrust is decided.
Microsoft was convicted on an antitrust charge, while "anyone" still could install Linux on their computer, or buy a Mac.
Yes. Tech VCs hate to hear it, but things like Facebook are really pieces of telecommunication infrastructure, and they have a moral duty to carry their users' communications reliably and without interference, regardless of their opinion of those communications. Google's Android store is slightly different, but this applies equally to many of Google's enterprises too.
Something has to give. Ideally it would be the CFAA and copyright synergy that makes online incumbents virtually impossible to beat (right now, the oft-cited "network effect" has little to do with the difficulty of competing with a major player, as there are much more significant legal barriers at play).
----
Reply to sibling comment from majormajor which I typed up but am not allowed to post:
"Because Walmart isn't sitting in your pantry and throwing non-Walmart items off your shelves. Google is doing the digital equivalent of this on Android devices."
Posting this here because HN classifies content critical of running database clusters on Kubernetes as a "flame war". Correspondingly, they throttled my account for holding a professional, calm, and even-handed discussion on that subject, and I can't post replies any more for some hours.
Really kind of appropriate to hit this issue in a thread about lumbering tech monoliths abusing their control over user attention.
---
Triple-edit: it's interesting that comments that point out HN's censorship tank so quickly. Is the intent to get the score so low that they can "flag" it off the page and keep it safe from other readers' attention? You wouldn't think HN would do that, but then, you wouldn't think they'd limit an account for expressing skepticism over Kubernetes either...
1-on-1 or group messaging is close to telecom infrastructure.
Facebook posts are not. They're much closer to print or broadcast media, which has long been regulated differently and not in an "anything goes regardless of the publisher's thoughts" style. And same with digital stores corresponding much more to physical stores than telecom infrastructure.
If you have a counterexample of a business being forced to act as a public distributor of any anonymous person's content, I would appreciate it, because I can't think of one. Having the right to share your opinion is not the same as others having to help you propagate it. EDIT: see above updated comment referencing railroads link from Animats
I consider that more the reverse - do you think Gab would be seen as something to force Google to include because it would make things more "honest, equitable, and balanced"? Requiring a "sufficient level of moderation" seems reasonably aligned to following the spirit of that.
While I agree that Google has too much of a monopoly over Android apps to be able to make the "It's our platform, get bent" argument, they also have a lot of products or services where they should be able to regulate the content. In my opinion, it would be a shame if we applied the same rule to all of their services.
EDIT: Could the downvoters please explain what they disagree with or why this post is low quality, if only for my edification? Is it controversial to think Google's control over the Android app store constitutes a monopoly, deserving special regulation? Or maybe that we should be nuanced about which services should be regulated as a utility? I'm open to persuasion here.
While I don't think Gab will be successful, I'm glad they're suing. Anything you can find on Gab you will also find on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and scores of other apps in the Play store. Google is wrong to treat one app differently than the others for what seems to be purely political reasons.
Gab's founder, the Trump-supporting Andrew Torba, was also kicked out of Y-Combinator's network. It was because, if not officially, probably also for his politics.
Recently a popular thread here discussed a child murderer whom had been admitted to Harvard, but they later renegged. Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'
What should we do about people who are not allowed to participate in society like normal people, but have committed no crime? If we want to remain logically consistent, shouldn't we lock up the Trump supporters with the baby killers?
This is the pretty much why I oppose no-platforming people.
If someone is going to get punished and excluded anyway, why would they care about the fine points of what gets called "racism" and adjust their behavior to stay in line? Once people aren't following the rules, the rules cease to be an effective way to modify behavior. Drug dealers don't pay taxes, and alt-right pariahs don't care about how offensive they are.
There's two sides of this. The too-quick-to-blacklist one you mention, which is extremely concerning to me—I grew up in Evangelical schools watching the people around me become increasingly reactionary and paranoid, dominated by an us-against-them mentality, and if you didn't toe the party line on things like abstinence, swearing (especially in music), and drinking, you were quickly condemned. Now I see the same thing happening to my social liberal friends, and it's worrying, because once you start thinking in such closed-off ways, it's hard to dig out of that.
But there's also the impact of anonymity and zero-cost (dollar wise) widely-spread speech. Both of these are major recent changes compared to how things had been for decades previous. Maybe you're expressing it in the most extreme terms in part just for the reaction—this is obviously generally not productive from a societal perspective, but used to be restricted to a much smaller set of people who didn't mind the public blowback. Now you can do it for free with a throwaway identity. This also contributes to moving people further and further away from each other.
Unless it's your claim that trolling is a political stance deserving of protection, in which case we can all just agree to disagree about our definitions and move on, his support for Trump was not the problem here.
OMG, that's really bad. He does not even try to make a point. He's just repeating "build the wall" and calling other people cucks.
Being proud of "meme"-ing Trump into office, wow. Torba repeats how his right on free speech is violated, but is an outright dick to everyone around him because they have another view on some topic...
I can't use your link b/c I don't have a FB account.
>He was removed for hostile trolling of other YC founders.
Precisely, the words used by YC were "threatening and harassing" comments. To my knowledge this is the exact comment YC cited:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
I certainly see how this speech can be viewed as rude and disagreeable. But I don't really know how you can say that he made any serious threats or was honestly harassing anyone.
Here is the exact text from the article. It states exactly what I already said it does:
>While Torba paints this as a free speech issue, YC told BuzzFeed that he was kicked out for “for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders” — particularly in this Facebook comment:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
That TechCrunch article cites BuzzFeed as its source for the claim that YC said that they kicked him out particularly for that comment, but I don't see that in the linked BuzzFeed article [1]. It says that he was kicked out "for violating its harassment policy", and that this occurred after the Facebook comment, but I don't see any statement in the BuzzFeed article that YC mentioned that comment in particular. I may be missing it, though.
I think we're talking past each other. I agree that's why YC banned him. I agree that he said that thing on the Facebook thread. But he said other things as well, and, apparently, other things prior to that Facebook thread.
Even speaking as an ardent free-speech supporter, there's some pretty clear evidence out there of Torba being kicked out not strictly because of his politics.
He was doing a pretty good job of not being particularly nice to someone in the screenshots I saw. I won't go out of my way to witch-hunt him or anything but implying he was kicked out strictly because of his political viewpoint is a really tall claim to make without evidence.
Well, we could start by not comparing Trump supporters to child murderers. It's one of those comparisons that might be useful in conversation but ends up demonizing them.
Andrew was kicked out among other reasons for saying "Build the wall" to a YC alum who was expressing concerns about Trump's proposed ban on immigrants (and how the ban might affect their life directly).
Your point is an important one and worth serious discussion. Ultimately, people have always demonized some subset of the population; it's what people do no matter the century. It's certainly traumatic, but what's to be done? Even scientists give up, and they're a stubborn bunch: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
Organized religion is primarily a form of politics though. Before we had the left and the right, we had various religiouns jostling for political supremacy. The concept of separation of church and state is fairly modern and not fully implemented yet.
Case in point: US imagery invokes a lot of God stuff and Germans still pay church taxes. Most religions in most of the modern world are also tax exempt organizations etc.
I don't really see how you could draw that conclusion. No. I'm saying this it makes more sense to shun people based on actions that negatively impact you, than to do so for views that are totally irrelevant.
They're correlated perhaps, but there is a huge variance in political views, at least among the major religions.
This is especially true with economic policy, which really has little to do with religious belief, but even with a lot of social policy its true.
That is, while there probably aren't many devout Catholics who support late stage abortion, the opinions on things like LGBT rights, the environment, refugee and immigration policy, homelessness, access to education, and more will vary wildly between devout Catholics. That second part is also true for devout Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists.
Sure the means might not sit in exactly the same places, but that's very different than the political spectrum in the US, which is essentially bimodal.
Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'
He murdered a child. If Harvard doesn't want to allow a child murder into their institution, it's not a crime against that person. That person can have a normal life, just at Grand Junction State (or I'm sure there's a million other colleges other than Harvard that will accept him).
There are consequences to actions. If the consequence of murdering a child is you don't get to go to Harvard, it's not a tragedy. Go do something useful with your life, other than going to Harvard or killing kids, yeah?
> It was because, if not officially, probably also for his politics.
That's a serious claim to make without evidence. Perhaps you have evidence and you're not sharing it. If that's the case you should ask yourself why you're not comfortable sharing that evidence, and if that discomfort should apply to making the claim at all.
Alternately and more likely, you have no evidence, in which case you should certainly not make such a claim.
Google wants developers to demonstrate that they take active steps against such content. The TOS of the apps you listed prohibit such content and they do remove the content if it gets reported. I doubt if Gab operates that way.
Yes but Google can always decide that because of x or x + 1 you are not in compliance and the real reason is your politics but they will never admit to it. Because Gab has more conservatives one real question is google always going to find reasons to deny when some of the same stuff is happening on twitter etc? Also does google get to decide that something say fails TOS because of support of say someone like Trump just not as famous? Does google get to decide what "such content" is? Does google get to decide who gab bans from gab's network or just which posts are censored?
Hmm? Your comment pointed out that Gab is actually doing quite well: 2k customers paying $6/mo, a million in investment, six employees. If they can get their growth rate up to 5% per week, it would be a meteoric startup. It's a good observation.
Right, they are one of many social networks and forums that cater to niche audiences and I have no doubt that they will be successful by those standards but the parent means that it's unlikely that they will become a 'mainstream' social network.
It depends. Some lawyers might be interested in tackling that "pro bono": Imagine having sued and won against Google in a high profile case that totally changes an industry, that would be a big plus for your resume
Is there a chance of actually getting money from Google? The precedent fear will guarantee that Google will fight this tooth and nail.
Pro-bono I could see firms taking it, lots of press and the chance of being defined as a top tech-related litigation company. Or Google's many enemies could finance this.
Sure. Like most companies, Google settles plenty of lawsuits and only tries them when it has to or believes it has a high probability of winning. Precedent fear guarantees nothing. You could have said that about any number of cases that Google has settled.
There is zero chance that a law firm would take this pro-bono, regardless of the perceived marketing benefits, because it's simply too expensive.
It will not be financed by Google's enemies. If it's financed, it will be by a litigation financing company like Burford or Bentham IMF or something.
It's an important question that might define the future generation of programmers. Hacking used to mean something specific: it meant you were free of channels. It didn't matter if you owned a channel when people were tinkering in their basement on something they owned.
Now it's all interconnected, and questions of ownership are critically important. I respect Stallman, but he was hard to take seriously. Then, suddenly, even his outlandish ideas seem pescient.
Here's an equally important question: where did you land on the court case that ruled a christian cake maker couldn't refuse service to a gay couple based on their faith? The question here extends far beyond the domain of tech. Are people allowed to choose whom they associate and do business with or aren't they? Does having a strong network effect influence that decision? What if that baker colluded with every other bakery in town to make sure nobody would bake that couple a cake? We've seen that behavior recently among web registrars.
In my humble opinion, I don't like the precedent the gab lawsuit is trying to set. I'm for free association, but against active collusion. They're only suing Google and they're not alleging collusion between multiple parties (like Apple).
The registrar thing is a whole other ball of wax. One company has a monopoly on domain registrars. That's going to prove to be a big problem for people who are not on the Right one day very soon.
10/10 A+++ for this comment and the juxtaposition it creates, because it highlights the contradiction that proves this is thorny. I'm a scary far-right kind of guy, and am predictably pro-cakemaker and pro-gab. My well-adjusted and empathetic counterparts are presumably anti-cakemaker and anti-gab. And yet we all seem to be having some difficulty with consistency here.
The cake made for a gay couple doesn't have the stamp of the cake maker on it. And nobody is forcing the cake maker to advertise/display/host the fact that they make cakes for gay weddings. Also, more importantly, the courts aren't making the cake maker put on violent propaganda on the fondant :/.
I'm hoping the courts can see the difference when judging "free association" and just throw this out.
Are you implying that Stallman would support the regulation of App Stores? Has he supported similar things in the past?.
He has critiziced what he calls "extreme capitalism" in the past. But I highly doubt that he would support a regulation that could potentialy undermine freedom (not only economic freedom) and harm not only big companies but also small players.
Of course it's not illegal, its Google's own channel for app delivery/purchase/managing/etc. But if they're going to police it based on politics, then they should say so upfront and not pretend to be unbiased.
Depends a lot on market share as well. Google can now ruin you on Android too, as if G search wasn't enough. With power comes responsibility, tomorrow they'll ban something else.
For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.
One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.
--
Android's Play Store, iPhone's App Store, Reddit and HN are all channels that define our generation. When you point out someone's project to a coworker and they say they already saw it on HN, that means you're both being influenced by the same channels. It molds you far more profoundly than most of us like to admit to ourselves.
Hacking was, briefly, a respite from this. When computers weren't synonymous with business, you had to love it. You invested your time and money into it because it fascinated you, not because it was a good investment.
You also had access to the entire ecosystem. You could see what everything was doing, and how everything worked. If you didn't like something, you could just change it.
In return, you owned everything. You were free to take whatever you needed and to contribute however you could. Ideas and skill alone determined the outcome.
But they could be promoted and they could win against the objection of any higher authority. In fact, it seems strange that any authority could ever have been in a position to decide Emacs' fate.
Yet that is our present world. Apple doesn't like you? Gone. Ditto for Google. These are the authorities you answer to. You obey masters; we all do.
On Android you don't even need to hack anything to install the Gab app, just tick a box in the UI and download the APK. Many gambling sites already do the same.
It strikes me that their argument on iOS might be even stronger given the relative unpopularity of jailbreaking devices these days and the complete lack of sideloading functionality for non-developers.
That's the part I find so weird about this. Wouldn't Apple have been a better company to sue? Gab would have a stronger case and the benefits of getting on the app store would be larger than the benefits of getting on the Play store.
this seems overly simplistic. Surely the concentration of such offensive content is higher on Gab than on tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc. And intent should matter as well, no?
> We don't allow apps that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
Gab is simply a platform, like Twitter and Youtube. As well as a communication channel, like Whatsapp.
Without a doubt more 'hate speech' passes through Whatsapp and Twitter each day than appears on Gab's platform so it's hard not to see this as unjust and inequitable.
Yeah, it's complete bullshit. They've got no problem with hate speech against whites (ignoring ethnicity, because the people who like to rant about white people usually don't care about actual backgrounds), people who say hateful stuff about Christians, or people who hate guys because, well, they're guys.
You don't gotta feel persecuted or fit into any of those groups to see the obvious double standard there.
I'm a white hetro male. If people have a go at us I'm not fussed it's not going to achieve much. Things like saying let's gas the jews or beat up gays are more problematic because those have been problems.
Do you have any idea how many 'whites' fled poverty, oppression, and worse, to come to America?
The measure of offence is not based on how 'fussed' you, an individual, feel. Nor is it based on a myopic view of history in which 'whites' have never been victims and everybody else has.
Yeah, and Jews tend to be white, so when people get in their jabs about white people, it's really ignorant and hateful. You can't tell by the tone of someone's skin what they and their family have been through. We could start discussing things like where the word Slav comes from and how much the Irish were despised in the US for a couple centuries, but those are just white people, right?
You tolerate hatred because it's against the right people, and one day some innocent person is gonna die because that hatred is no big deal. Hate is hate, let's be done with it.
On Twitter and Youtube I can find infinite amounts of content that advocates "against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity."
Jeez, you'd probably find all that in a single rap video. In addition to that, have you ever read Youtube comments?
There's clearly bias against Gab in this instance.
"In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people,"
Is the same standard applied to Twitter and Facebook? How long does it take for Twitter and Facebook to take down such content?
Should browsers be required to censor the web to meet this standard?
Apple was applying this standard to Web Browser software in iOS in what had the affect of being a deliberate ploy to exclude all non Safari web browsers from the iOS App Store.
So it's just another platform. It happens to be a platform people flock to because they are 'no platformed' in another service.
The big companies are really limiting speech. You can't have separate black/white bathrooms, in many places your business can't allow indoor smoking, you can't limit employment based on certain things if you want equal opportunity employer benefits, yet we have no protection for speech.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody) can't be hosted by any major or minor providers. No one will give them space to speak. When that many companies gets to control all the platforms, when Google can fire a guy for a well thought out opinion, they effectively censor dissenting idea.
I'm not saying I like gab. It's seriously full of voat type users, but they should have a place where they can speak.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody)
If you examine the Nazi ideology, it really is at a psychotic level of cynicism. They don't care if you are a true believer, or if you're doing it for the lulz, or if you're a psychopath whose incentives happen to align. So long as you go along, it's fine.
If you go far enough left on the political spectrum, you arrive at the same place. (The rapists and murderers were made into bosses in the Gulag.) However, for some reason, speech that is almost as vile from the left is given a softer treatment.
Both far extremes are identitarian. Both far extremes advocate violence. Both the Postmodern Left extremists and the Nazi extremists reject logic. Both extremes are collectivist in that both extremes reject the classical Liberal formulation of individual rights. All of the above are facts that you can cite in the writings of thought leaders of both groups.
It's true that it's a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and Antifa. But crapping on individual human rights in one's political interest is wrong either way, and both groups do that. It doesn't matter if steam is at 220 degrees or 440 degrees. It's going to scald you either way. It doesn't matter how bad, so much as that both are bad!
I agree completely. The alternative is that the bad ideas get hidden away, and not seeing the light of day, they begin to fester sort of like social rot. Or worst, people turn to violence. Free speech is not only about being heard, but about weeding out bad ideas.
A great book on the subject is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. He can explain the importance of free speech much gooderer than I ever could. :)
A webapp will inherently lack some optimizations that a native app could provide. Wouldn't this suggest some uncomfortable analogies with net neutrality "slow lanes"? Certainly not a one-to-one mapping, but there's enough similar shape to give me pause.
To me, not providing services to those who spout hatred and violence, is also an expression of one's free speech. Having free speech doesn't mean you're free from consequence.
Funny part about this is that Daily Stormer has hosting, DDoS protection and DNS service even a registrar now (Bulletproof.ai), but they can't find a TLD that won't censor them.
Google isn't saying it that content can't exist in an app -
they're saying the app doesn't have a sufficient level of moderation for dealing with issues that do occur.
What’s a sufficient level of moderation? I’m seriously asking. Would love to see some self reported and also verifiable stats from all the platforms being discussed here.
Any moderation would be a start. Gab's whole raison d'etre is to be an unmoderated social network where you can post the hate speech which would get you kicked off more mainstream networks.
Anecdotally, when I tried Gab, the ratio of violent racist content to normal content was way way higher than on other platforms (even if the absolute amount is much higher on twitter due to popularity, the ratio is lower).
You won't be able to find speech inciting credible threats of unconditional violence against specific individuals that won't be taken down after being reported, no. "Racist speech" doesn't necessarily meet the bar.
i.e. google is setting themselves up as the multi-national censor and nanny state.
I guess we should be glad that Google wasn't founded by militant fundamentalists. Otherwise they would ban mentions of homosexuality, abortion, inter-racial relationships, etc.
Since Google was found on more "liberal" standards, we just get left-wing oppression instead of right-wing oppression.
Google could have not been evil by not bastardizing the idea of a package repository.
Apple Store/play is not a new concept. It's a closed off, propriety version of a Linux or BSD package repo or ports tree.
All either company had to do was allow third party repositories. You get a nice list, choose which companies you trust, have a nice interface where you could download an app.repo file, view it's cert and add it to your phone. 90% of people wouldn't use it, but for power uses and beta testers, it would allow a single easy software update system that could be free for all. I wrote about this a while back in a post I did on OSS philosophy:
Isn't this explicitly allowed? Amazon has an app store for android and there's things like F-Droid as well. Also there are many Chinese app stores. If all else fails users can simply sideload the APK.
Not really, Google Play exists in a privileged position on Android phones because it's a system app. Other 'App Stores' are basically glorified downloaders and require a huge amount of manual intervention by the user. 3rd party app stores can't actually install or update applications.
If you say "most people won't bother" - that's true, but most people will gladly tick the unknown sources box too for pre-release or pirated apps already.
But you should just be able to add a 3rd party repository to the Android update system, in the same way you can add a repo to Yum or Zypper or Debian/apt .. or an overlay in Gentoo or OpenBSD.
Amazon's app store can't do automatic background updates unless you're on an Amazon/Fire device. F-droid can (which I just learned from other comments on this thread) but it takes a little extra work to give it that system privilege.
I'm saying you should be able to add a 3rd party repo to the stock Google system, without needed to root or mod the phone. Even for F-droid to do automatic updates, you need to give it special privileges (which I just learned about from another comment in this thread -- honestly didn't think that was actually possible).
> “Google deprives competitors, on a discriminatory basis, of access to the App Store, which an essential facility or resource.”
Is this a legally sound statement? Specifically the last part about "essential facility or resource." I'm not at all a law expert. I personally don't believe in the implications of the claim, hence my question
That could be the most interesting part of this case; if access to an appstore is essential for a service, can Google/Apple forever remain the "Default Providers" while still enforcing their own rules?
I have a feeling that the Internet Explorer default-browser antitrust fight will have to be had again, although gab might not get that far.
Yes if you regulate Google as a utility. This maybe like the way that cable companies were forced to air public access television. Google may be force to add them to the Play store but with an 'explicit content' warning.
You don't have to be a literal monopoly to be a legal monopoly. Microsoft has never literally been the only place to get an operating system, not even the only place to get a consumer operating system (Apple has been there for Microsoft's entire OS run, at varying levels of health, sure, but always available). But they were found to be legally a monopoly in terms of abusing monopoly power anyhow.
The lawsuit in the US involved bundling IE with Windows specifically to push other browsers out of the market. Google has never really been antagonistic toward other app stores. Lots of phones get sold without the Play Store installed.
> Google has never really been antagonistic toward other app stores.
Sure they have.
* You have to convince your users to go into their security settings and check the scary box with the even scarier warning. If Chrome started only trusting Google's CA with no option to add others you wouldn't be arguing that 'it's not so bad you can still click though by adding a security exception'.
* 3rd party app stores are incapable of actually installing or updating apps -- they're basically glorified downloaders. There's no way to 'trust' another app store so that it can perform these actions on your behalf unless you root your phone.
I don't remember Samsung or Amazon having trouble with that. Google isn't really the "first party" for most phone because they hardly make any phones themselves, even in partnerships.
I would make the same argument if we were talking about Samsung/Amazon branded phones as well. The issue is that users can't put app stores they like/want in that same privileged position.
In my case I would like to put F-Droid there but unless I root my phone the best it can do is download the APK and notify me to install it manually.
Sure, but the Google Play store has a privileged position on users' phones that can perform actions that a 3rd party app store cannot, namely installing and updating applications.
And Google Play only really has that privileged position because they develop Android. I think it's honestly pretty clear cut here.
Unless you buy Samsung phones, which means 25-30% of all Android phones, which come with the Galaxy App store in the same "privileged" position. Or any phone in China, where the Play Store is not available.
Also I don't remember having trouble with the Amazon store keeping apps up to date for me.
> I'm not a lawyer, however one could argue that Android is a monopoly, iOS isn't.
Uh... how? They're literally each other's major competitors. Each is good evidence the other is not a monopoly... and Android, unlike iOS, permits third-party app stores like the one Amazon put together.
Gab could use this as an opportunity to build up an app store of their own. Line has an in app store. Gab could too.
Encourage users to side load gab, then you have a dedicated core audience who wants to support your platform. In app purchases could make them a ton of shared revenue. Apps, stickers, MAGA hats.
If Gab succeeds in replacing Twitter, they could generate further revenue by front running Wall Street with gabs. I can't imagine how Twitter has money problems when they have the POTUS making market moving tweets regularly.
>Is there a utility that makes side loading easier?
Yeah, it's called "The Play store banned my favorite app." Like youtube downloaders and ad blockers. That's a good way to make users ignore the scary "unchecking this box could damage your device" dialogs. Once you get a sizable base off the Play store, that can be used to promote all the valuable things the Play store doesn't permit.
Easy for people in this forum. Not easy for the general population. Also it's terribly insecure. It would be much easier to be say 'I trust App Store' and add it to the known sources and be able to keep unknown sources blocked.
New versions of Android can set that for a single install. Pretty ok and you have to click through an extra security dialog. It is trivial to toggle and just hidden from users who have no idea.
The main issue is not security, but trust - whether you trust the developer and source of the app. Security (via public key crypto) is still enforced. The real security issue there is lack of automatic updates.
If you're not savvy enough a person to do this then you have no business messing with this.
If you can't easily toggle this then how could I trust you were even competent enough to get that app from a source that has not maliciously tampered the app you are installing?
This is untrue. You first need to disable the block on sideloading in settings which is specifically named to scare users into not unchecking it. I've seen that checkbox as the sole reason someone wouldn't install Amazon.
You're also forgetting that for an app store you have to keep that setting off because all the apps that come from that store are still from 'unknown sources' which defeats the purpose of having that security check in the first place.
I really could care less about Gab but I would like to mark the packages from F-Droid as trusted and still distrust others.
They're trying to gain publicity and strengthen the narrative "liberal California is censoring conservatives".
I don't think they care about winning this either. The kind of people who use gab would already know how to sideload an Android app or use alternative app stores. Besides, you don't need an app, the website does the job too.
Breitbart is not a reliable source by any stretch of the imagination, and I cannot see why you linked the personal Wikipedia article of their attorney.
Whatever else you think of Breitbart, in this case their article actually contains some interesting information not included in the WaPo article, including comments from Gab's lawyer about why he thinks the case has merit.
The WaPo article is clearly slanted towards Google and against Gab, and the Breitbart article is the reverse. If you're interested in a balanced view you should probably read both.
Because the largest factor that is always overlooked when criticizing any of these sources is that these articles are not written by the same person. Breitbart is not the source, it's just the host. Each article should be considered on it's own merit, albeit with some consideration to where it is being hosted. Both sites host their own fair share of unreliable articles.
Brietbart has a very negative reputation for reporting on political drama in misleading ways. Search "liberal" on Brietbart and you'll see what I mean.
Unfortunately, the same can be said of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For example, the New York Times featured a piece [0] stating President Trump will "erase from the annals of life on earth" several species of animals, including the Hawaiian Honeycreeper, the Joshua Tree, the Horseshoe Crab, and more. Why? Because President Trump exited a 1 year old environmental accord.
Still other mainstream outlets reported, "Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler's Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government."[1]
That is reporting on political drama in misleading ways.
And there cases of WaPo doing the exact same thing against the right, especially towards our President.
Those posts are easy to spot and even easier to dismiss.
I'm asking about the article specifically - is there something in it that Breitbart is misrepresenting?
The Washington Post includes a quote from Google giving their reasoning, as well quotes from Gab's statement. They also provide background information on Gab.
Breitbart's article is 90% quotes of Gab's press release and statements from their management. Google's pov is completely absent. Instead, they add some speculation regarding Apple in the last paragraph, but it only serves to make a point, not to convey any information.
There are many smaller problems with Breitbart's writing: "suddenly suspended" doesn't make sense, because you can't be "gradually suspended". The scare quotes around hate speech make a cheap political point, the headline adopts Gab's self-aggrandising description as a "free speech social network" etc.
Railroad law and regulation from a century ago is worth studying when trying to figure out how to deal with monopolies with strong network effects. Railroads had even stronger networking effects.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=sU0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA202&lpg=...