i had a brain fart.
while i get what your coming from, it would not be easy to enforce. How can you know a death threat is concrete? For example.
Or..companies would just host everything outside the US and then not be bound by its rules.
But how do you
ever know that? Basic notion: if it's protected by the first amendment, they shouldn't be able to ban or restrict it.
As far as companies outside the USA are concerned: if I were Trump, I'd make "
all US companies always fall exclusively under US law" a hard condition of any tariff/trade deal. (So the EU, for instance, would then be universally forbidden from restricting speech on US websites in any way; if they think anything is criminal, they'd actually have to bring it before a US court. Obviously, as part of the deal, they'd likewise be forbidden from imposing fines on US companies, or from blacklisting US companies.)
Anyway, to clarify, if necessary:
The broader idea here is that normal (i.e.
reasonably sized) companies can all do as they wish; that's a good principle. If the baker on the corner wants to refuse service to certain people, that's his right. There's bakers everywhere. But if there's like five big banks in the country, or five big insurance companies, or five big social media platforms... ostracising people from
those has far too great an impact on individual lives. If you leave those "big guys" free to just censor people, or to deny vital services to people, then the
principle no longer serves the
people.
The greater the concentration of power, the more stringently it should be limited in what it can do to the little guy. Whether the power concentration is formally "public" or "private" matters not one iota to me. So, practical solution: create a separate legal category for the sufficiently large companies, whereby their scope defines them as
automatically becoming semi-public. (At least as far as their role goes; and therefore also as far as their responsibility is concerned.) Which then bars them from denying or restricting service to members the public.
This means that no paying member of the public can be denied a bank account, or an insurance or pension account,
unless a court of law finds that the account is being used for criminal purposes (e.g. laundering money or financing a terrorist organisation). Furthermore, nothing and no-one gets may be banned from major social media,
unless a court of law finds that what's being posted by a given person is actually criminal; and nothing may be reach-restricted or "shadow-banned". And internet service providers may not refuse to host or display any website,
unless a court of law finds that criminal materials or services are being offered on said website.
(And to be clear: it may not be some special 'star chamber' type court, staffed by obliging bureaucrats. If a megacorporation wants to restrict service to any member of the public, they have to get a regular court to okay it, and members of the public can appeal as is normal; and if it's ultimately found that the megacorp was wrong and the little guy was right, the punitive damages must be
substantial.)
armyrotc.army.mil
