Tech companies have too much power
The Daily Stormer is finally off the internet. Well, the public internet anyway.
The hate-spewing white supremacist site lost its domain name registration when it was kicked off first GoDaddy and then Google for violating terms of its contracts. After the site’s vicious post attacking Heather Heyer, the protester who was killed in Charlottesville, Va., the domain registrars decided they’d had enough.
Now the Stormer exists only with an anonymous .onion address on the Tor network. Good luck tracking it down. Meanwhile, a Twitter campaign naming the companies that provide the Daily Stormer with various web services has deprived the site of web security, cloud computing and other technology.
The fury of the techies, once aroused, is awesome to behold. Tech companies ranging from Airbnb to Reddit and Facebook have been purging other perceived supremacists from the ranks of their users.
The libertarian part of me ought to be fine with all of this. Apart from the most exceptional circumstances, 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. 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.
Yet I find myself troubled. For one thing, the same companies that have decided they should not serve all comers made the opposite argument 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 are unsettling. The triumphal tumult on social media naturally leads one to wonder which groups that progressives deem wrong might be next.
Libertarians tend to worry about concentrations of power in the hands of the state. But what about concentrations of power in private hands? When they control access to the principal media of communication in the world, the power they exercise is almost state-like.
There’s nothing new in using the refusal to deal as a tool for enforcing social conformity. I’m old enough to remember signs in store windows barring boys whose hair was too long and women whose skirts were too short. The problem is that unlike the social nonconformists of my youth, those who are booted off the web can’t go shop across the street. When the gatekeepers of the internet turn on you, you’re effectively done. That’s an awful lot of power to place in a small number of hands. Those who run tech companies are very smart, and the ones I know are all wonderful people. But by anointing them judges of who should be allowed to use the web, we place enormous trust in their moral perspicacity.
Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, seemed to recognize the problem in an internal memorandum obtained by Gizmodo: “I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.” He added that he was uneasy with his decision, and that the internet was better off if such companies as his remained “content neutral.” After all, to borrow from Salvor Hardin, “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.”
I hope the tumult will die down, and that the bannings stop with the Daily Stormer and its kin, who regularly serve up hatred and vitriol in support of vicious ideologies that cost many millions of lives. I hope, in other words, that we will draw reasonable lines. But where the exercise of the power to shut people up is concerned, that’s rarely a safe bet.
Contact Mr. Carter at scarter01@bloomberg.net.
This story was originally published August 25, 2017 at 4:05 PM with the headline "Tech companies have too much power."