I think this is just a special case of “online communication”. It’s illegal for the phone company to arbitrarily suspend your service for what (legal things) you say over the phone.
It’s legal for Twitter or Amazon or Etsy or Twitch or Discord or YouTube.
I recently got suspended by Twitter after using it daily for 12 years and in addition to not being able to send new tweets or DMs (or do data backup/takeout), I also can no longer see even the usernames (or the message history) of the people I was communicating with in DM. For many of them, that was my only contact info for them.
I am becoming increasingly convinced for the need to regulate arbitrary suspensions for communications platforms (including sales/business platforms, that’s just a special case of communication). The current emergency situation really woke me up to the huge dangers involved.
GP lost his business, which is sad and tragic and unfair. I envision that in disasters or emergencies, eventually someone is going to lose their life.
Imagine if the mobile phone or cable company could arbitrarily suspend your connectivity because you left bad reviews online about their service.
I recently did a deep dive on how these sorts of centralized, censorship systems pose an inherent and existential threat to safety and human rights in an emergency/pandemic/war that is non-obvious in peacetime: https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
It’s truly terrifying to me that these systems (among them Amazon, Discord, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) have final say, practically, over who gets to speak to whom in a lot of cases in society, or what is allowed to be said. These companies (and the government in their jurisdiction) are entirely unaccountable for this terrible censorship power they wield, and it is only a matter of when, not if, it will be horribly abused. TFA is just one important facet of this danger.
Can I see the laws that affect phone companies and free speech? That's an interesting observation, and does parallel Twitter/YouTube/etc, so I'd like to see the wording for it.
I think that the relevant laws are those related to the phone/cable companies being public utilities (and thus explicit, by-design, state-permitted monopolies or duopolies). They aren’t allowed to wiretap them (because communications privacy was a bigger deal to legislators pre-internet) and have to provide service to all comers (ostensibly in exchange for being a monopoly-by-design).
From my limited understanding, this regulation forcing them to offer service (as a utility) to 100% of the market is coordinated on a state-by-state basis by the public service/public utilities commission.
(Fun fact, I learned this at a young age because my dad ran a paging/voicemail service out of the basement of our single family, suburban residential home when I was about 10. We were the only house on the block with dozens of trunk lines coming into our little bungalow; but by law they had to do it if you ordered it. Try that today with internet access from a cable company, ha! It’s all but impossible due to TOS to run an internet business at a residential address now. Hosting for-profit services with the internet you pay for or reselling the service in any way means you get instantly unplugged.)
Sorry I don’t have a direct link to the all-comers bit of PUC/PSC regulation, but this should give you a starting point for research.
The not-allowed-to-tap-phones bit is a federal law:
It’s sort of insane how provider-wiretapped has been the all-encompassing default for almost all of the largest DM/1-to-1 communications systems in the world: SMS, WeChat, Facebook, VK, Instagram, Gmail. WhatsApp and iMessage are outliers in this regard. Almost all popular new entrants like Slack and Discord are provider-tapped, too.
This is a relatively recent development in our society’s relationship with electronic communications. Reading content by the provider used to be illegal as fuck.
It’s legal for Twitter or Amazon or Etsy or Twitch or Discord or YouTube.
I recently got suspended by Twitter after using it daily for 12 years and in addition to not being able to send new tweets or DMs (or do data backup/takeout), I also can no longer see even the usernames (or the message history) of the people I was communicating with in DM. For many of them, that was my only contact info for them.
I am becoming increasingly convinced for the need to regulate arbitrary suspensions for communications platforms (including sales/business platforms, that’s just a special case of communication). The current emergency situation really woke me up to the huge dangers involved.
GP lost his business, which is sad and tragic and unfair. I envision that in disasters or emergencies, eventually someone is going to lose their life.
Imagine if the mobile phone or cable company could arbitrarily suspend your connectivity because you left bad reviews online about their service.
I recently did a deep dive on how these sorts of centralized, censorship systems pose an inherent and existential threat to safety and human rights in an emergency/pandemic/war that is non-obvious in peacetime: https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
It’s truly terrifying to me that these systems (among them Amazon, Discord, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) have final say, practically, over who gets to speak to whom in a lot of cases in society, or what is allowed to be said. These companies (and the government in their jurisdiction) are entirely unaccountable for this terrible censorship power they wield, and it is only a matter of when, not if, it will be horribly abused. TFA is just one important facet of this danger.