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I think it's the perfect exemplification on how muddled the rhetoric has become on First Amendment issues. Ten years ago most conservatives would have said that private entities were private entities and, except in extraordinary situations, the government should allow them to do what they want. This was exemplified by things such as the Citizens United decision and the various decisions about whether private companies have to provide birth control in accordance with Obamacare mandates. Even more recently is the debate on whether public accommodations laws can compel bakeries and such to write messages on cakes that would appear to endorse gay marriage. Again, we all know what side of the fence conservatives came down on.
Then when some companies started taking action against conservative viewpoints—and not just regular conservative viewpoints, but the more extreme end of the spectrum (and even then usually only if harassment or calls to violence were involved)—all of the sudden the state needed to intervene and force these companies to call off their dogs. Things got even more muddled with the net neutrality debate; one would expect that conservatives worries about cancel culture, etc. would have used the doctrine for their own purposes, but instead they all temporarily became principled advocates of corporate speech again. I don't mean to single out conservatives here, as progressives are just as bad for different reasons, but I see a lot more bad conservative takes here than bad progressive ones.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is an old and obvious one: Most people are only interested in principle to the extent that it effects their side. If the Twitter cancellations exclusively involved anti-corporate anarchists, and progressives were complaining, I doubt we'd here any of the arguments about Section 230 etc. from conservatives that we're hearing now. Instead, we'd hear the old line about how private companies have a right to do whatever they want with their platforms and it isn't the government's place to tell them otherwise.
Who is calling for state action against the ISP? All the arguments in the HN comments that mention legality are about whether what is on KiwiFarms counts as harassment or not. I can't find anyone advocating that the ISP be fined or arrested for not peering.
I see a lot of people, here and elsewhere, calling for Section 230 protections to be conditional upon enacting certain speech policies. I glossed over the HN discussion but didn't read it in detail, but OP was asking about what people here thought about it, so I was referring to arguments I've seen here in the past.
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And they lost that fight even further ago. Antidiscrimination laws abolished any idea of private companies being able to freely choose with whom they transact. Defending a principle that will only be used against you, and not neutrally, gains you points for being principled, if in the future your ideology manages to return to power, but it still hastens your demise.
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If national groups were colluding to prevent any bakery that sold to a gay from buying flour, we would oppose that. It was literally in the arguments of the case that a lone bakery refusing to write a particular cake message wasn't making a coordinated attempt to prevent a customer from obtaining such a cake. And would, most importantly, not refuse to do business with the client as long as they themselves were not required to explicitly and actively participate in the client's behavior.
Whereas the leftist position just seems blatantly unprincipled: any powerless individual actor can be forced to do whatever is demanded of them by powerful groups ("wax my balls, bigot"), and those same groups can illegally collude at will on an industry level to silence anyone who says this is wrong. The only rule provided is explicitly who/whom, according to our lovely former contributor /u/Glittering-Roll-9432 on Reddit. You could call that a principle, but it'd take some nerve.
The equivalent would be kiwifarms maliciously suing a particular web host known for having leftist values just for the sadistic fun of forcing them to host content they find repulsive, and the case having to go all the way to the supreme court with the entire media supporting kiwifarms.
(Actually, a closer parallel would be forcing the host to list KF's url and site header message on their own company home page, which just so happened to be "kiwifarms.net: only fags think Hitler was wrong, 13/50420691488")
You bringing up the principle selectively makes it seem like the principle itself only has value as a weapon to hurl at people when it's convenient, or as an excuse to always stay subservient to the most powerful side and safe from their retaliation. Which in fairness is probably true at this point.
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