Blagnet.net

A glimpse of anarchic rights, laws, and socioeconomic organization in online communities

This is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking news articles I’ve read in a while: Rights like free speech don’t always extend online. It is about the different rules and restrictions established and enforced by online companies (Yahoo!, YouTube, MySpace, GoDaddy, etc.) and the consequences of their actions, their policies, the good and bad publicity, and their reputations. This issue is fascinating ground for political and social philosophers, especially libertarians, because of its potential for insights into the nature of non-Statist, customary, decentralized law.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services—from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video—become more central to public discourse around the world. It’s a fallout of the Internet’s market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

I don’t see what remedies need to be applied other than what already occurs: filing complaints with web hosts and service providers, reporting on their blunders in the press, and ceasing to do business with them if they adopt odious policies.

Never forget that this is the greatest weapon free citizens have against companies and organizations that no one has against the government: you can always at least attempt to take your business elsewhere; in democratic states, we are all always subjugated to the will of the majority and their elected criminals; secession and self-governance are not options.

But in the online world of web space, internet communities, and content regulations, choices abound and so, therefore, do opportunities to learn about how the matrix of choices made by billions of people begins to take shape as a marketplace of rules, cooperation, order, trade.

There may be legitimate reasons to take action, such as to stop spam, security threats, copyright infringement and child pornography, but many cases aren’t clear-cut, and balancing competing needs can get thorny.

“We often get caught in the middle between a rock and a hard place,” said Christine Jones, general counsel with service provider GoDaddy.com Inc. “We’re obviously sensitive to the freedoms we have, particularly in this country, to speak our mind, (yet) we want to be good corporate citizens and make the Internet a better and safer place.”
[...]
While mindful of free speech and other rights, Yahoo and other companies say they must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities—ones where minors may be roaming.

Guidelines help “engender a positive community experience,” one to which users will want to return, said Anne Toth, Yahoo’s vice president for policy.

Companies have an economic and social interest in pleasing the most people that they can, and customers have an economic and social interest in patronizing companies whose prices, products, services, rules, bylaws, judgments, arbitration methods, and reputation are most agreeable to them.

Heather Champ, community director for Flickr, said the company crafts policies based on feedback from users and trains employees to weigh disputes fairly and consistently, though mistakes can happen.

Exactly. This is better than elected “representatives” writing and enforcing society-wide rules based on their self-interest, special interests, their personal whim, or their desire to pander to the majority of voters.

The anarchist-libertarian model of establishing societal rules more resembles this market for online content provision, self-interested security, good reputations, child protection, family-friendliness, fair contracts, and non-coercive arbitration than it resembles the democratic method of majority-rule and State fiat. The anarchist-libertarian law behind all this is negative, not positive: it prohibits people from doing things; it doesn’t tell them what they must do. It consists of: do no harm; do not initiate force against anyone’s person or property (which includes fraud); use force or threats of force only in self-defense. If the non-libertarian thinks this sounds all fine and dandy but it simply wouldn’t work that way, it simply wouldn’t happen—gangs and individuals and companies would have free rein that they don’t currently have to initiate force against anyone and answer to no one—then answering that objection fits in with the goal of the rest of this post, which is one of the two main goals libertarian writers have. One of our goals is to delineate libertarian morality, explaining why our code of non-aggression is the only true, just, universal human morality. The second is to explain what a society dominated by that non-aggression principle would look like.

The stateless, free society would probably seem a little more chaotic than a democratic one, at first glance, but this is only because of what we are used to. It would be less hierarchical and more cooperative, though nothing approaching classless. There would be no “law of the land,” only economic and social constraints against coercion and fraud, indecency and abuse, corruption and bigotry, with nearly everyone recognizing what could and should already be obvious to everyone: the non-aggression principle must remain sacrosanct. Reputation would be paramount. Community action and opinion would be instrumental in effecting positive change in society, instead of frivolous lawsuits and peremptory legislation. People would be more responsible for their own and their neighbors’ well-being, and nothing fosters responsibility in people like the necessity of being responsible. As Herbert Spencer observed, “The ultimate result of protecting people from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

Children would be educated according to the wishes of their parents and/or the norms of their neighborhood—no mandates from on high. Free trade between any two people anywhere, with no legal barriers and no price restrictions, would enrich poor people at a greater rate and promote more specialization, more industry, more agriculture—no “managed trade” agreements and no artificial barriers to trade. People would choose which insurance, crime-prevention, and adjudication companies to subscribe to the same way that they choose which church to go to and which stores to shop at—no monopolistic, virtually unaccountable justice systems. Individuals, organizations, and companies would be kept in check by what is profitable and what is socially acceptable—not by legislation passed by ignorant and disinterested politicians and enforced by armed agents of the State. I could go on, but it is probably more enjoyable to simply envision the comparisons between the vibrant freedom, the ordered chaos, the ready exchange of ideas and goods, the individual autonomy, and the independent judgments (economic and social) that flourish on the internet and the analogous societal structures that would characterize every aspect of the free society.

If the market for web space, service providers, and content providers is so vibrant and robust, the market for adjudication/arbitration, insurance/property protection, quality inspection of consumer goods (like what the FDA does), schools, and numerous other things would be even more robust because those services are in such higher demand and the potential losses are so much greater. As a rule, increased competition yields higher quality at lower prices, not more corruption or less accountability.

If the skeptic is inclined to object, “But people can’t be trusted to take care of all those things themselves,”—what makes you more qualified to govern our affairs? If not you, then why elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats who can’t possibly know our situations and our desires better than we can? If the skeptic would reply, “I don’t suggest that a few people govern everyone in an authoritarian manner; those politicians and bureaucrats are chosen by the entire populace, so democratic government is how society governs itself,”—why are majority-rule and coercive, mandatory, one-size-fits-all government chosen by “the people” better able to govern society than the social choices and economic transactions made voluntarily by “the people”?

The article continues with more interesting points:

But that underscores another consequence of having online commons controlled by private corporations. Rules aren’t always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider’s discretion.

Users get caught in the crossfire as hundreds of individual service representatives apply their own interpretations of corporate policies, sometimes imposing personal agendas or misreading guidelines.

To wit: Verizon Wireless barred an abortion-rights group from obtaining a “short code” for conducting text-messaging campaigns, while LiveJournal suspended legitimate blogs on fiction and crime victims in a crackdown on pedophilia. Two lines criticizing President Bush disappeared from AT&T Inc.’s webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. All three decisions were reversed only after senior executives intervened amid complaints.

I am not a customer of Verizon or AT&T, so their irresponsibility and incompetence don’t affect me (directly). If you are a customer, and you are dissatisfied with their contract violations or inconsistent judgments, why are you still their customer? I sort of have a livejournal, but I’ve never had any complaints with it, and if I did, I would simply eliminate my account. (They’re not getting any money from me, anyway.) If Hostmonster.com, the excellent web host of Blagnet.net, ever even attempted to censor or remove our content, we would move our blag to another web host in no time flat. The lesson is: we can decide for ourselves when an insult or error is too egregious to continue patronizing a certain company; no one can ever escape the all-encompassing grip of the State.

“Yeah, but the State is worse,” true though it is, is a poor argument, so I try to avoid it, or, when I can’t avoid it (as demonstrated by half of this post), I try to supplement it with good arguments about why voluntarism and capitalism work. Companies must please their customers and deal with them voluntarily. If competitors are allowed to arise in a free market and web companies keep pissing off their customers, they will lose money. If there aren’t enough options, blame the State, not the market. The State’s regulation, taxation, and inflation keep small companies small and keep potential companies out of the market.

By the way, think on this for a while: If, say, a cellular phone company violated the terms of its contract with you by, say, censoring your content unjustifiably, how do you think a lawsuit against them would turn out? You probably wouldn’t even bother, would you? Even if a fair amount of money were on the line? Why not? Perhaps because the State and its courts, which have helped prop up that company and facilitate its growth while stifling the creation and growth of smaller companies, will support the ability of that large company to violate its contracts to a certain extent? Would you rather patronize a company backed by a court system that always allows large companies to violate contracts and take its customers’ money, or by a court system that promotes individual rights, property rights, enforces contracts, and has a reputation for being fair to individuals instead of partial to big businesses?

You can assert all you want that no such adjudication companies would exist and, if they did, no large companies would contract with them even given the favorable PR and immense customer base that it would garner, but don’t deny that it’s a situation permitted by anarchism and precluded by Statism. In our democratic society, big businesses already are favored by the regulatory, legal, and tax systems, so unless you want to make the tenuous argument that a free market would favor large corporations even more, the Statist assertion that non-State adjudication services are unacceptable because they would tend to serve the rich and powerful holds no water; the same is true of Statism and Statists aren’t decrying its unfairness or inefficiency.

First Amendment protections generally do not extend to private property in the physical world, allowing a shopping mall to legally kick out a customer wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a smoking child.

I get the sneaking suspicion that the author of this article understands the nature of private property rights and Constitutional government on a more than superficial level…

With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticized as vague.

Others believe companies shouldn’t police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.

“Vagueness does not inspire the confidence of people and leaves room for gaming the system by outside groups,” said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran computer scientist and Internet activist. “When the rules are clear and the grievance procedures are clear, then people know what they are working with and they at least have a starting point in urging changes in those rules.”

More wonderful material for anarchist extrapolating. Some think a superior, extra-societal body (the government) should write and enforce rules governing the company–customer relationship; some think it should be done with our current system of user contracts and private (sometimes transparent) decision-making; some think companies are better off avoiding policing content in any way, shape, or form, because they believe most people will correctly vilify the user and not the company for any objectionable material (especially if the company is a widely known supporter of the free speech rights of its users).

Let them make these decisions on their own! Companies and customers who think it is better for companies or organizations to be governed by fiat from above by an outside body can organize themselves in a way that meets that desire; companies and customers who think they are doing fine governing themselves can keep doing that; and everyone else can find some alternative or middle ground. It is up to them. The profit motive, good and bad publicity, user complaints, and numerous alternatives will tell managers and executives what their customers want and lead them to new, creative solutions. The non-coercive and profit-seeking nature of market forces will allow for more and better solutions to emerge than legislation and regulation allow for. If the people as a whole—the customers, the executives, the managers, the investors, the lawyers, the arbitrators—cannot be trusted to strike a desirable balance between company policies and customer demands on their own, voluntarily, by free exchange and persuasion, then how can the people as a whole strike this balance better by giving power to legislators to pass peremptory laws and giving power to armed bureaucrats to enforce compliance? Why are monopoly and coercion, endorsed by the public, more effective than voluntary trade and free choices, carried out by the public?

I have heard one Statist answer to this objection that merits mention: “In the natural balance of things in a free society, large companies and business executives hold a level of power over the public that the public finds unacceptable; being more numerous, they elect government representatives to remedy this and serve their interests, protecting them against the predatory practices of powerful corporations and individuals.” This, along with the myth that foreign military action protects people’s freedoms, is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of mankind. The saddest thing of all is that mankind commits this fraud against itself.

But Marjorie Heins, director of the Free Expression Policy Project, questions whether the private sector is equipped to handle such matters at all. She said written rules mean little when service representatives applying them “tend to be tone-deaf. They don’t see context.”

At least when a court order or other governmental action is involved, “there’s more of a guarantee of due process protections,” said Robin Gross, executive director of the civil liberties group IP Justice. With a private company, users’ rights are limited to the service provider’s contractual terms of services.

Well, this is easy. Marjorie Heins and Robin Gross are simply factually mistaken. Service representatives “don’t see context”? I’ll tell you what they do see: red and black ink. They see profit and loss. They see a growing or shrinking customer base. The professional criminal class are the ones who don’t see context. They see nothing but money to be taken, behavior to be controlled, and subjects to govern like sheep. Try explaining to one of them why taxation is theft. Try explaining to them that the illegality of drugs does more harm than the drugs themselves. Try explaining that enlarging the government to the point that it can protect us against all evils at home, and create threats against us all across the world and then go abroad destroying them for us, all the while protecting our liberties, is immoral in addition to being stupid. Try explaining that the Constitutional Convention was an illegal coup against the existing confederation of state governments. Try telling them you’d rather not participate in this government, and to stop pointing their guns at you, thanks. Then we’ll see who can’t put unfair, un-prosecutable practices in context with individual rights.

Robin Gross is right about one thing: we are guaranteed to suffer through “due process” while the government violates our rights very systematically under rules it wrote that we object to. And what happens when innocent victims of State predation are tried for murder for defending themselves against uniformed thugs, defendants are screwed over by being coaxed into plea bargains, or jurors are kicked off of juries for questioning the glorious State? Is anyone punished? Is anyone disgraced? Do they lose any money? Do their competitors gain any advantage? Do their policies change? No, they keep right on with their systematic, legal process of depriving people of their money, liberty, and property while assuring us they do it all according to “due process”!

If reputation, customer service, etc. are so important and effective in the world of government, then why doesn’t anything change? Why don’t libertarians get what they want—to be left alone—and Statists keep their idiotic government to themselves? Why does the State only get worse, not better?

As for the statement, “With a private company, users’ rights are limited to the service provider’s contractual terms of services,” the more pertinent fact is that a private company’s actions are limited to the demands of its customers, and anything outside of this is either unprofitable or subsidized by government. Besides, the issue here isn’t “rights” per se but rather privileges and agreements. Our right is to interact with whom we please in the ways that both of us please, without having to do anything involuntary and without making anyone else do anything involuntary.

Contrast the position that the average person, or even the top-level executive of an internet company, has in this online market of freedoms, privileges, bylaws, and reputations to the position that the average person, or even the powerful Wall Street executive, has in the democratic process. In one arena, the competition revolves around the drive for each person to get what he wants for himself or his company at the best price, and companies and organizations strive to improve themselves to gain an edge over their competitors, producing newer and greater wealth along the way. In the other, the competition is for control of violent, deadly, monopolistic police power, with each side striving to win the legal authority to exert its will over its opponents, and with agencies and bureaucracies dreaming up new ways to increase their revenue, help some at the expense of others, subjugate the citizenry, and simply justify their existence—only taking, never producing any new wealth, ever. The State can only take, not produce; it can only seize in taxes part of what the productive sector of society creates.

All the evils, all the abuses, all the vile, underhanded, greedy practices so widely believed to characterize private businesses and capitalism are due mainly to their collusion with politicians and their ability to get passed, or at least take advantage of, laws that distort the market and benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of individuals, small businesses, and voluntary organizations. To expose evidence of this fact is one of the primary purposes Kel and I had in starting this web page.

Also contrast the means and the ends of the online service provider with the means and ends of the State. The web host can offer its products at a price, low, medium, or high. It can offer more services or it can just offer hard drive space. It can charge for some things and not others. It can give you a longer contract or a shorter one. It can monitor your activities and your content, and delete content that violates its terms or the mutually agreed-upon contract, and it can kick you off of its space, possibly without even reimbursing you for the time left in your contract (though that seems pretty unjust to me, especially when the alleged violation hasn’t been proven, as the above news article points out). The company can and apparently often does judge you privately without your input and makes decisions that you only hear about after they have been effected. Your recourse is to take your business elsewhere, to companies with better reputations and more sensible bylaws and policies, or to challenge their policies to make them change their minds. Or, you can conform to other people’s definitions of decency and acceptability, even if you don’t agree with them.

The State can break into your home and murder you if you don’t submit obediently and comply fully. If you defend yourself, then it kidnaps you and puts you on trial for murder, in a court you don’t approve of, didn’t vote for or couldn’t vote against even if you wanted, to be judged by jurors who are wholly unqualified to judge your innocence, who will be manipulated by State lawyers, who work for a system that rewards convictions, not acquittals.

You can think of all kinds of arguments for why private companies do equally bad things to their customers as the State does, or why private companies are actually kept in check by the beneficent State, or why the State is just as amenable to changes demanded by its “customers” as businesses are, but they would all be completely false arguments. Tell the State to put its guns away and stop forcing us to do anything, and then you’ll be on the right track.

Our inability to peacefully secede and govern ourselves differently, the way our preferences, beliefs, and morals dictate, without interfering with anyone else’s equal right, is what allows monopolistic government to be so monstrous. The monopoly that the State claims on the use of aggression and extortion, prohibiting non-violent non-participation, is what separates it from the private sector and makes it so harmful to its subjects. The most important aspect of the State is its monopoly: We can’t cease our dealings with the State and take our business elsewhere. THIS MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD.

Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor who recently published a book on threats to the Internet’s openness, said parties unhappy with sensitive materials online are increasingly aware they can simply pressure service providers.
[...]
Service providers say unhappy customers can always go elsewhere, but choice is often limited.

Many leading services, particularly online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace or media-sharing sites such as Flickr and Google Inc.’s YouTube, have acquired a cachet that cannot be replicated.

Other sites “don’t have the critical mass. No one would see it,” said Scott Kerr, a member of the gay punk band Kids on TV, which found its profile mysteriously deleted from MySpace last year. “People know that MySpace is the biggest site that contains music.”

MySpace denies engaging in any censorship and says profiles removed are generally in response to complaints of spam and other abuses. GoDaddy also defends its commitment to speech, saying account suspensions are a last resort.

Few service providers actively review content before it gets posted and usually take action only in response to complaints.

In that sense, Flickr, YouTube and other sites consider their reviews “checks and balances” against any community mob directed at unpopular speech.

Still, should these sites even make such rules? And how can they ensure the guidelines are consistently enforced?

YouTube has policies against showing people “getting hurt, attacked or humiliated,” banning even clips OK for TV news shows, but how is YouTube to know whether a video clip shows real violence or actors portraying it? Either way, showing the video is legal and may provoke useful discussions on brutality.

“Balancing these interests raises very tough issues,” YouTube acknowledged in a statement.

Unwilling to play the role of arbiter, the group-messaging service Twitter has resisted pressure to tighten its rules.

“What counts as name-calling? What counts as making fun of someone in a way that’s good-natured?” said Jason Goldman, Twitter’s director of program management. “There are sites that do employ teams of people that do that investigation … but we feel that’s a job we wouldn’t do well.”

Other sites are trying to be more transparent in their decisions.

Online auctioneer eBay Inc., for instance, has elaborated on its policies over the years, to the extent that sellers can drill down to where they can ship hatching eggs (U.S. addresses only) and what items related to natural disasters are permissible (they must have “substantial social, artistic or political value”). Hypothetical examples accompany each policy.

LiveJournal has recently eased restrictions on blogging. The new harassment clause, for instance, expressly lets members state negative feelings or opinions about another, and parodies of public figures are now permitted despite a ban on impersonation. Restrictions on nudity specifically exempt non-sexualized art and breast feeding.

It seems like the market is doing a pretty good job of governing itself so far. To reiterate my point, every single product and service in a free society would probably be “governed” in way similar to that of web companies: user input, reputation, publicity, meeting customer demands, and choice, choice, choice. The companies we’d do business with, from schools and grocery stores to arbitration and insurance companies, would be the companies that came the closest to matching our preferences of decency, family-friendliness, openness, contract enforcement, recognition of civil liberties, protection of individual rights, image, community support, etc., etc.

People can take care of it better than the State can.

One thing that worried the author of this article also worries me:

Community backlash can restrain service providers, but as Internet companies continue to consolidate and Internet users spend more time using vendor-controlled platforms such as mobile devices or social-networking sites, the community’s power to demand free speech and other rights diminishes.

As libertarians we generally oppose the consolidation of any power in anyone’s hands, State or private. We should be careful not to support the actions of any and all private companies just because they don’t (seem to) involve government. We should denounce them as power-hungry and money-grubbing if we deem that the case, and condemn them the way we condemn our elected criminal class. We should continue touting the benefits of individualist ideals like freedom of expression, market-based competition, and respectful non-interference with other people’s lives.

But, we have enough demons to slay in the bizarro world of government, so I think no one will give us much grief if we stick to that and continue to do it well.

Posted in Computers/technology, Constitutionality, Philosophy