There are millions of alternative websites but behind those websites are a small number of infrastructure providers who can, and do, completely end a website's ability to operate. Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896051
The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else. The reality is that even though there are millions of websites out there, if one of them starts to become popular and becomes a locus of bad content, if the ~20 or so companies that control the Internet clamp down on them and there's very little they can do about it.
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights?
Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes? Law defines the boundaries of property rights. You can't start a tire fire in your backyard and expect your neighbors to just say "it's his property, nothing we can do."
> Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them
PayPal terminated thier account because they run a digital currency and could not satisfy PayPal's KYC inquiries. This is nothing new.
> The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else
So what? How do you think things should be different? I am personally ok with companies coordinating to shut out Nazis, tens of millions of people died to deafeat them and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to say "you know what, I don't want to do businesses with nazis". I understand the fear of a slippery-slope, but keep in mind that the slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a fallacy, and I see no evidence to suggest that this is actually a widespread problem, with the example of the dailystormer and like two others constantly reused to emphasize your point. If there is enough demand for Nazi website hosting, someone will fill the market need, same as with porn and other things some people don't like.
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes?
What are you talking about? Racial discrimination is illegal in the U.S regardless of how popular your restaurant is. Also, refusing to serve food to black people isn't the same thing as refusing to display nazi ideas on your website.
The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else. The reality is that even though there are millions of websites out there, if one of them starts to become popular and becomes a locus of bad content, if the ~20 or so companies that control the Internet clamp down on them and there's very little they can do about it.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-neo-...
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights?
Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes? Law defines the boundaries of property rights. You can't start a tire fire in your backyard and expect your neighbors to just say "it's his property, nothing we can do."