There should be laws that force anyone who owns a platform without any perfect replacements (which includes all two-sided markets) to allow any legal and non-fraudulent content, products, businesses or people on it at non-discriminatory costs.
Amazon should be forced allow selling anything legal, Apple should be forced to allow any legal apps, Facebook should not be allowed to ban people, Paypal should not be allowed to freeze accounts, Google should be forced to allow anyone to use AdSense and allow anyone to advertise on it, Airbnb should be forced to allow anyone to list properties, etc.
Without these laws, our freedom and our ability to participate in the economy is at the mercy of whatever company wins the lottery and becomes the owner of the dominant platform in a niche.
Should Amazon be forced to sell Confederate flags if they find them immoral?
Curated app stores are a good thing for users. Should Apple be forced to compromise the quality of their user experience because of random laws?
And Airbnb being forced to allow anyone to list properties seems like a major safety issue.
There will always be competitors to Amazon, and it's ridiculous to suggest that them not selling something means you're freedom is being compromised. Neither Google nor Apple will suffer from this move, and people can buy those products from other reputable vendors.
Besides, one of the barriers to competing with Amazon was a good payments system, and that has largely been solved in recent years.
Being forced to sell something is quite a bit of moral distance away from being forced to allow anyone to set up a stall in your bazaar, regardless of the products they may be selling from it.
If I wanted to buy a Confederate battle flag, it shouldn't be any more difficult for me to do so than buying a 50-star US stars and stripes flag, or a pirate jolly roger flag, or a UK union jack flag, or a North Korean flag, or a rainbow hippy peace-sign flag. A meta-merchant based out of the US should simply not be able to discriminate based on content, unless it also wishes to assume legal responsibility for those things it does allow to be sold in its marketplace. Someone, somewhere, will want to sell what I want to buy, and it is no more Amazon's place to prevent us from doing business on their general-purpose e-commerce platform than it is AT&T's or Verizon's place to prevent us from talking over their phone networks.
The instant you pull CSA flags from your marketplace, everything else becomes a de facto Amazon-approved product. Like ISIS propaganda magazines. Whoops, better ban that, too. Eventually, it reaches the point where some employee has to decide whether a fill-in-the-blanks legal boilerplate form can be sold by a merchant that is not a licensed attorney in the buyer's state.
Because if Amazon removed some offensive or illegal products, customers may rely on that when shopping, and assume that anything else bought from Amazon must therefore be legal and non-offensive. If Amazon wants to do that, fine. But do it on curated.amazon.com or only.amazon.com rather than the main www.amazon.com site. Maybe I'll go there if I only want to see stuff sold directly by Amazon without having to check that box in the search results every time.
Curated marketplaces are fine, but only so long as there is a free, uncurated alternative. I think Apple should be forced to allow uncurated stores (like Cydia) or curated-by-someone-else stores (perhaps a Google Play for iOS) for those who wish to assume the additional risks posed by such offerings. They are certainly allowed to preload their own store, and make it the default, but if I want to take my property out of the walled garden, they had damned well better unlock the gates and let me leave.
In my opinion, the extent to which the platform is completely neutral is inversely proportional to the responsibility the platform operators have for the things that make use of it. Of course, by this theory, if Silk Road had not policed its black market listings at all, it could not have been shut down for promoting commerce in outlawed goods and services.
Cherry picking. Each flag is its own thing, with its own baggage. They are, most of them, devices to convince people do horrible things without feeling personally responsible for doing them.
The French flag now is the same as the flag of the First Republic, and the one that flew over the Reign of Terror. The Turkish flag, as the flag of the Ottoman Empire, flew over the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides. The Soviet flag flew over the genocides of Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Chechens, and the mass deportations of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians. The 24-star US flag "Old Glory" flew over the Trail of Tears.
If you banned a flag every time something horrible happened under it, all of our flagpoles would be empty, not just the people from the American South. But then, the next time a group wants to come together and do something horrible without bearing a burden of guilt afterward, they will just hoist an all-new flag to shield them from their shame.
Or maybe they will do something great, and share that glory through their shared standard. It has happened, at times. Digging the Suez canal. Digging the Panama canal. Landing on the Moon. Establishing institutions to support the common welfare. Building transcontinental railroads. Universal literacy campaigns. Some of those things were made possible by a manufactured sense of ideological kinship.
Let us not forget that flags are just symbols, and identifying marks, whose meanings are interpreted entirely in the eye of the beholder. The flag that is placed on Memorial Day, on the grave of a man who died under it, may look the same as one that is carried at a white supremacist rally, but only one ought to be offensive to a descendant of Confederate-owned slaves. We do not have a duty to shield others from emotional distress, by attempting to prevent the latter from being sold.
If you ban one flag, you either have to draw a line around acceptable levels of offensiveness that originated under any given flag, or you have to ban them all. Deciding where that line goes is very difficult to do fairly.
As some have said above, things get awkward with gray areas. Would reddit be prevented from banning the many unethical but legal subreddits? I will bite that bullet, but many will not.
Amazon should be forced allow selling anything legal, Apple should be forced to allow any legal apps, Facebook should not be allowed to ban people, Paypal should not be allowed to freeze accounts, Google should be forced to allow anyone to use AdSense and allow anyone to advertise on it, Airbnb should be forced to allow anyone to list properties, etc.
Without these laws, our freedom and our ability to participate in the economy is at the mercy of whatever company wins the lottery and becomes the owner of the dominant platform in a niche.