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Notes -
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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