Who owns the internet? Serious question. But I believe registrars and hosts are most likely owned by corporations and they have constitutional rights.
If websites and server farms can act as editors they are (or should be)liable for slander or libel. If they are merely conduits or bulletin boards for others to use they can’t be both immune from libel laws and responsible for the content. It has to be one way or the other.
I see internet providers as utility companies.
They are necessary in this age for our society to function efficiently and are every bit as important as water, sewer and power utilities.
Facebook and Twitter not so much.
It is distressing how many of us are being silenced on fakebook and twitter but if they have to bake the cake then we will have to as well. I appreciate having a safe space here where I’m not attacked for my beliefs. I live in the heart of enemy territory as you will know if you look up my registration information.
I deactivated fakebook because I don’t want to associate with people like that. It’s just another leftist hive of insanity. They believe all the propaganda put out by MSM and occupy democrats is the gospel truth.
I understand we are supposed to get the message out there and whatnot but the other side is a very stiff necked people and utterly unreachable IMO.
Who owns the internet? Serious question
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Well when it comes to domain names and registrars, there’s a bit of a gray area, as I would say they are tenuously considered closer to public than private, although ICAAN has transitioned from government from US Government control to a private corporation recently, you’d have better grounds to dispute lack of choice and competition for that then you would with web hosting. However, individual registrars (Godaddy, Namecheap, etc) are private entities and each one could cast you to the wind at their own volition.
So it seems to me, the problem (as it often seems to) goes back to media pressure on private entities to censor or boycott those who they politically disagree with, and if someday, as you have suggested, that just being a god fearing, freedom loving website is enough to get these private entities to blackball you, what help is the first amendment going to be?
If your situation was dire enough, you could go to off-shore hosts and covert to a foreign TLD, but the individual ISPs who host the DNS records that all their customers do look-ups against could basically censor you from being visible within the U.S.
All this because a small group of powerful media and political organizations have become arbiters of how and who to apply subjective politically correct assessments of proper speech to.
Yes it is.
At some point Big Government interests and their Crony Capitalist allies could monopolize all the choke points.
We are seeing signs of that now.