STEPHEN L. CARTER: Too Much Power Lies in Tech Companies’ Hands: A libertarian case for caution after the Daily Stormer is booted off the public internet.
The libertarian part of me ought to be fine with all of this. Apart from the most exceptional circumstances, such as invidious discrimination, a business should be free to contract with whom it pleases. And I will shed no tears for the Daily Stormer, which fully earned its expulsion from rational discourse. One might protest, correctly, that there is a lot of evil in the world, but history teaches that Nazis and white supremacists are a special case. When their views vanish, we will all be better off for it.
Yet I find myself troubled. For one thing, as tech columnist Will Oremus pointed out in Slate, the same companies currently being told that they should not serve all comers made essentially the opposite argument in their campaign during the previous administration to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. Having now decided that they can indeed pick and choose customers, the tech companies will be ill-placed to reverse field should Congress once more try to crack down on them for hosting sites that make unlicensed use of intellectual property.
It’s worrisome, moreover, that so many activists are cheering the demise of the Daily Stormer not on the narrow ground that white supremacy is a special case but on the more general ground that groups promoting “hatred” should have no place on the web. Given the contemporary left’s broad and wondrously flexible definition of the word “hate,” the implications of that particular slogan (calling it an argument would be too charitable) are unsettling. The triumphal tumult on social media naturally leads one to wonder which groups that progressives deem wrong on the issues might be the subject of the next banning campaign.
This leads to my largest concern. Libertarians tend to worry about concentrations of power in the hands of the state. There is no consensus about the danger of concentrations of power in private hands. But when the private hands in question control access to the principal media of communication in the world, one has to hesitate when they decide that not everyone should be granted entree. For the power they are exercising is almost state-like.
Yes, and their political connections to the state, or at least the Deep State, are immense.