Yes, just like we can dictate that eBay can't make a rule that only white people are allowed to sell on it. Operating a business involves being a part of society and society is justified in imposing rules on your business to ensure that your business is not harmful to the general welfare of the public.
So you are advocating for some standard according to which marketplaces should be required to sell anything the public brings to them to sell?
Is there a line, in your conception, between what eBay should be forced to sell, and what they are allowed to prohibit? For instance, explicit pornography is legal. Should eBay be forced to sell explicit pornography? If so, is there anything in your mind that they should not be forced to sell on their website?
Yes! We have this standard. It's called "laws". We elect these people called "representatives" and if we want people to not be able to buy or sell certain things like a kilo of heroin or a machine gun, we have them make a law that prohibits it. This way the public has input on the process and it is not left up to the arbitrary prejudices of any particular corporate drone.
eBay is not selling anything. The users on eBay are selling things and they can choose what to sell or not sell. If Wal-Mart wants to decide not to sell the book, fine. If you purport to offer a marketplace where other people can sell and buy things, you should not be involving yourself in the customers' transactions unless they are illegal.
What horrendous, world-ending catastrophe do you think would occur if someone sold pornography at the farmers market?
If the public doesn’t want to buy porn there, they won’t and the stand will go out of business.
If they do want to buy porn there, why do you think the farmers market owners should be allowed to dictate what adults are and are not allowed to buy?
What if you wanted to set up a stand that sold books exclusively by African-American authors and they told you you weren’t allowed to do that. Is that ok?
Ok, so “racially insensitive” material and explicit pornography are both legal currently. Are you saying that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell both, or are you saying that we enact a new law that says that eBay should be forced to allow their users to sell “racially insensitive” material, but not explicit pornography?
I'm saying that if you position your business as a platform or conduit through which people exchange things, whether those are physical goods, IP packets, fragments of text and images, whatever, you should be a "dumb pipe". Such businesses should not be permitted to abuse their privileged position to impose their own will on the general public. Remember Net Neutrality? Same thing. If you want to sell a stack of old Hustlers or a copy of Song of the South it should not be eBay's place to tell you that you can't.
eBay is not the government. They are not arbiters of what we are and are not allowed to do. Many people have sacrificed their lives to ensure that we are not governed by arbitrary tyrants that we have no say in, and it's frankly shocking that people are now like "Well, they paid a lawyer to set up a C-Corp in Delaware so I guess it's fine that they decide what we're allowed to read now".
It’s not just old Huslters. If eBay were not allowed to prevent explicit pornography from being sold on its website, it would have a much less valuable business, and fewer people would get value from it. Just as an example, it would end up being blocked by “family friendly” web filters that are popular with businesses, schools, and families.
Unless you think that businesses, schools, and families should also be prohibited from blocking pornography, or should otherwise be forced to facilitate access to eBay, your suggestion is untenable from a business perspective.
eBay is undoubtedly blocked by numerous work filters because it is not really relevant for doing most jobs. They manage just fine.
Besides this is a ridiculous strawman. "If you allow people to sell Dr. Suess books, you must therefore also plaster the front page in explicit pornography." Obviously not.
The Internet is increasingly winner-take-all and is controlled by fewer and fewer larger and larger companies. Allowing a handful of corporations unrestricted reign to dictate what we are allowed to say to each other is antithetical to a free society. Reductio ad absurdum arguments are not going to help you when cabal of corporate censors with no accountability decide to eject you from society for daring to question the intellectual fashion of the moment.
I have not made a straw-man argument. Laws must be written precisely, and it’s entirely appropriate to test proposed changes to law by applying them to specific cases of fact.
You may have identified a real problem in society, but you have not proposed a viable solution.
There is a difference between those things, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically support all discrimination that isn’t based on immutable qualities.
If eBay decided to delist all copies of White Fragility we should oppose that too. Ideas need to be freely exchanged and debated not forcibly censored by whoever happens to have power at the moment.
In a free society with free markets, you are free to oppose antyhing that a business does that you don't agree with.
You have many existing mechanisms for expressing that disagreement, including protest, and starting your own business and competing. If people agree with your values, you will succeed.
eBay choosing to delist all copies of a book is eBay exercising their own freedom of expression. Having the government coming along and censoring that freedom seems counter to the idea that "Ideas need to be freely exchanged ... not forcibly censored".
Delisting a book is not an expression. eBay is (should be) a neutral party through which other people are expressing things by buying and selling things. The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech.
Do you think a bookshop should be free to choose to sell books written in German or not? If they have that freedom, what's that freedom called?
> eBay is (should be) a neutral party
There's no such thing as "neutral". People, organisations etc. have values which they try and reflect through their actions and practices.
> The person offering the book for sale is speaking for themselves, not for eBay. If people decide they don't want to buy the book, that's fine, but it is not eBay's speech
Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?
> Are advocating that eBay should be forced to pay to do business that the shareholders, board and employees disagree with? Forced by the government?
Yes, exactly like if the shareholders, board, and employees didn't want to do business with Black people, the government forces them to do so anyway. It absolutely boggles the mind that the justification comes down to "well, some people don't want to do that". Tough shit! If you don't want to deal with all kinds of people from all walks of life with all kinds of backgrounds and opinions, don't run a public-facing business.
So if you were in charge of the government, how would you propose regulating these companies? By forcing them to act as a "utility" that has to list every kind of product?
Do I disagree with the Dr. Seuss delisting? Yes. Do I think government regulations would be more harmful than helpful in this case? Yes.
If eBay was a monopoly, I'd be much more concerned (all the more reason for robust anti-trust legislation). But in practice, if you want to sell a Dr. Seuss book, take your business elsewhere.
And 60-70 years ago there was no such thing as protected groups. Businesses could and did deny service to anyone for any reason. Collectively, we as a society looked at that situation and said "Hey this isn't great that businesses can deny service to whole groups of people based on their religion or skin color, we shouldn't let them do that", and we stopped letting them do that.
Similarly, today we can look at what's happening and say "Hey this isn't great that businesses are allowed to restrict our speech and narrow down the realm of ideas to the least common denominator. It is destructive to the public discourse that a small group of people can claim outrage and shut down whoever they want", so we can decide not to let businesses do that, just like we decided not to let them refuse service to protected groups.
Is public discourse being wittled down? I can buy books from across the political spectrum within seconds. Consider Jim Crow versus not being able to buy a physical copy of an obscure book that can still easily be found online for free
I doubt the same people would oppose it though. Rights of downtrodden groups are constantly shit on without a peep from the “free speech absolutist” crowd.
Neither. It depends on the specifics. Should you be allowed to not serve someone who has anger issues? Does it matter if this anger issues are caused by genetic hormonal imbalance?
