> It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted.
Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally.
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate.
One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.
If you have freedom of commerce, but no individual freedoms outside of that, like freedom of speech, then you basically have China. So it's a very reasonable trade off to make: give up a little freedom of commerce to ensure more basic personal freedoms.
The recipe for boiling the frog in introducing totalitarianism is the same: First you go after the least popular people and get tacit approval. Then you extend that to someone else, then someone else. Eventually, you get to a point where everyone is at least a little leery of speaking up. Then you turn it up just a little more. Rinse and repeat.
This is where we are now. We are in the middle of the process above. It doesn't matter how idealistic the people who are implementing it. Control thought and speech, and you lock in absolute power, and absolute power corrupts. All of the worst totalitarian regimes throughout history had idealistic, flowery sounding language to justify their actions. All of them.
>> ... types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business.
Isn't businesses deciding what they want exactly less regulation?
The line they are walking is pretty thin at Patreon but my image of the company is mostly supporting general content creators in the non-ideological spectrum of content. If these people do not fit with their point of view (specified in general in the terms) they may simply be polishing up their image to what they want to look like. It is their choice as they throw away some, at this point still marginal, income. Though as stated in the article, the people leaving could use it as a rallying point and maybe even get out better in the end (subscriber/monetary wise).
> One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.
For the little guy there is no practical difference between a government service and a homogeneous oligopoly. I believe that given enough time these services would get regulated as infrastructure and hence banned from refusing customers, just that our legal framework is too rigid to adapt to the fast pace of technological progress.
Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally.
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate.
One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
1: https://qz.com/1381708/twitter-finally-banned-alt-right-cons...
2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/