Their web site is indeed being shut down. :/ I hate Gab and all the nazis they host, but I am troubled about the difficulty in hosting the wider category of unpopular speech.
If I'm not wrong, Gab was cut off by pretty much all payment processors and had to launch its own to survive. There was a moment in which, if you wanted to give money to Gab, you had to either mail them a check or do a bitcoin payment to their wallet. They technically survived, but dissenters were - and are - greatly hindered at every step.
I agree it probably won't matter. I wish it would, but it won't.
However, I will be moving a handful of domains to Easy DNS because I appreciate them taking this position. I looked at Gab once a while back and was mostly disgusted, and never looked back, but I don't like this trend toward censoring and deplatforming. I don't worry about my speech being censored because (at least for now) it's relatively popular. But popular speech isn't the speech that needs protecting, the unpopular speech does.
I don't have any particular affinity for Gab, but TFA pretty clearly addresses your concern: namely, they never claim that free speech compels SV companies from associating with Gab, rather that the lack of cooperation makes it difficult for Gab to police illegal speech. I don't know the extent to which that claim is true, but it's a different claim altogether than the one you are perceiving.
I find it interesting the process that seems to have taken place here. There is quite clearly no monopoly on payment systems on the internet. There's bank transfer, visa, western union, paypal, a million different bitcoin exchanges.
So for Gab to not have access to funds either one of two things can be true. 1: There is a large conspiracy of banking organisations to stifle Gab for reasons we can speculate about. 2: Each of these organisations have seen Gab and made individual decisions about whether they want to associate themselves with Gab.
What boggles my mind is how many people think that it must be 1.
It seems like the common thread of gab members is slime, but regardless I am rather disturbed at them being kicked offline by their domain registrar which seems a bit removed from the content business.
It is however hilarious that the dns registrar in question is those mega scumbags godaddy!
Obligatory reminder, that this has EVERYTHING to do with freedom of speech. Being a private company does not excuse this downright vicious attack on one of the only few platforms of freedom of speech on the internet today.
First it was Microsoft severing ties and now Joyent & Paypal. And what a coincidence this starts happening just around the time an in-house Google presentation leaked naming Gab as one of their direct competitors.
Gab is only the first to be targeted, what's stopping them from destroying every platform of freedom of speech that competes with their plans for "The Good Censor"
Not without the old taking measures to keep that from happening.
Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
There was no government involvement in this. Microsoft made a business decision that hosting Gab would subject them to business pressures from other customers/potential customers not wanting to use a service used by hatemongers.
That's not censorship. That's the free market at work. Gab is free to host their own website; and if necessary their own DNS servers. Hell, they're free to go Tor-only.
Payment processors similarly prevented right wing sites from accepting donations and payments. Gab as one example had to create their own server farm and payment system in order to operate since they were shut out of every other provider.
It's actually pretty hard to run an online platform that sets the bar at "free speech" and not have it kind of suck.
Trolling is free speech, being a jerk is free speech, hate speech is free speech, pornography is free speech. Any forum that sets the bar at "free speech" is going to be filled with the dregs with depressing speed. There's a reason why Gab never really gained serious traction.
What's interested about Gab is that it wasn't content hosting on another platform (Facebook/Twitter). It was their own platform, that people wrote and built.
What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive!
I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and I still think it's more relevant today:
Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software.
At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API.
The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do with hate?
I'm sorry, I'm having a very hard time connecting the dots from Gab finding it can't get FRAND access to hosting to "the entire Internet has to be destroyed". Since the entire Internet is (checks notes) not actually being destroyed, it feels like your argument is self-refuting.
Don't understand the whole "how awful it was for Godaddy to pull out". That's their choice, and Epik have decided to take Gab on, isn't that how the internet works. Freedom of association?
I would however prefer that we live in a society where no one would "welcome" Gab, but we sadly we don't yet; something to work towards I guess.
I assume it means the mass of people might stop using those services (like paypal) because they don't want to support sites that talk about racist things like happens with gab. gab is different than say reddit to me because while reddit might have some people posting racist things or threatning to kill someone or rape them, but reddit will ban them or the group - but allowing for that kind of speech ends up appearing to be the main reason for a site like gab to exist.
I don't know what Gab is, or what its typical content is like, though I'm getting an idea from the replies to this tweet. But the principle of free speech has nothing to do with the right of a company to use Paypal's services. It's to do with the right of individuals to say what they like without government incarcerating or otherwise harming them or their ability to speak.
Medium's actions seem particularly bizarre and insidious. I can understand why people might believe that Gab should be shut down, even though I disagree (not very strongly - Gab, like Voat with Reddit, was capable only of attracting the worst of Twitter). But Medium appears to believe that defending the existence of a free speech platform is so fundamentally indefensible that it should be impermissible!
It also disturbs me how complete and total these lockouts tend to be - if you get put under the wrong spotlight, it's clear how completely and totally the corporate sphere will coordinate to shut you down. You won't even have a platform to defend yourself on, and the situation is getting worse, not better. Short of laying your own fiber cables and creating your own Internet, there's nothing you can do. This makes me very uneasy.
I think the NPR interview with the founder of Gab is worth listening to. [1] It strikes me that just a few years ago, most people would have been in support of their position. The world has changed dramatically in just a few years.
However, this seems to be drifting off topic. Gab’s web site didn’t get shut down, they just got cut off by a payment processor.
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