What law would that be? Internet service providers must provide their service to everyone? Great, now it’s illegal to kick people off your minecraft server and the new york times MUST publish my op-ed. Twitter gave orange-julius cesar a platform, they can take it away.
There’s a general anxiety of a big company taking a way a big chunk of your life on a whim. It’s not fun to be banned by Google or Amazon. I’m not doing anything wrong to get banned, but that seems backwards somehow. (“don’t break the law and you have nothing to worry about” gives off the same creepy vibe).
It’s a similar feeling when driving next to cop while doing nothing wrong or dealing with a government bureaucracy. They have all (or a lot) of the power and decision making is never perfect.
So perhaps this is an argument for stronger antitrust or whatever. More competition would reduce this anxiety for the regular person.
Driving in front of a cop is worrisome because of the imbalance of force. Section 230 specifically bars certain force from being applied— it doesn't add more to the equation. Repealing it would, in practice, require Google and Amazon to scrutinize the content they host for you. It would be like if Target could be sued for the conversation you're having with a friend while shopping. Like if you could be sued for someone else's conduct on the sidewalk in front of your house (for the sake of argument, "on your property, without protection").
The only outcome that can invite is more frequent "driving in front of a cop" moments, because companies would need their own cops, and need them everywhere.
I admittedly don’t know much about this space, but there must be a reason these solutions didn’t take off (I don’t know whether it’s fundamental scaling issues, lack of a centralized group driving product design, or just lack of user interest as existing solutions are “good enough” + network effects). But if the market is failing to select for these approaches it seems that the only way forward is to shape the market rules somewhat. Outright banning everything centralized seems heavy-handed to me, so it might be that the only practical outcome is less centralization we have now, but not none.
Decentralized solutions are hard, harder to monetize, complicated for users to deploy.
Historically users who don't care about their privacy much, are incapable of hosting themselves because their isp sucks and they are technically illiterate, and have little chance of being banned.
I am not a lawyer, but I think it depends on if a minecraft server is the kind of space covered by non discrimination laws - seems a bit dubious to me as it feels more like a community gathering place (where you can have e.g. women-only spaces), but i suspect its not been tested ever.
