It is like the difference between a private club and the telephone company.
Should your private club be able to expel neo-Nazis? Absolutely.
Should the telephone company be allowed to disconnect neo-Nazis? That's more iffy. What if they are a monopoly? What if there is an oligopoly, and all the oligopoly firms make the same decision? Neo-Nazis are terrible people, but if we set the precedent that one is allowed to deny them telephone services, will less obviously terrible groups be next?
Maybe we should also let the telephone company disconnect the Islamist violent jihad sympathisers, they are obviously terrible people too. But what happens when some Islamophobe starts stretching the definition of "Islamist violent jihad sympathiser" so that Muslims who have zero sympathy for that get labelled with it anyway? (Yes, the classic "slippery slope argument" – but some slopes really are slippery.)
Some websites, such as "Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents", are like a private club. But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club. Different rules should apply to different kinds of websites.
It is a matter of scale, of market share, of user counts.
Obviously, a website with a few hundred or few thousand regular users is more like a private club. A website with tens or hundreds of millions of users is more like the telephone company.
There is no clearcut boundary, but there doesn't need to be. Competition regulators frequently impose limits on market-dominant firms which they don't impose on small players – yet there is no clearcut boundary between a market-dominant firm and a small player. In practice, many individual cases will be obvious, and in the non-obvious cases, all we need is someone with the authority to make a decision–and if someone else thinks they've made the wrong call, there are the usual judicial and political processes to address that.
Should your private club be able to expel neo-Nazis? Absolutely.
Should the telephone company be allowed to disconnect neo-Nazis? That's more iffy. What if they are a monopoly? What if there is an oligopoly, and all the oligopoly firms make the same decision? Neo-Nazis are terrible people, but if we set the precedent that one is allowed to deny them telephone services, will less obviously terrible groups be next?
Maybe we should also let the telephone company disconnect the Islamist violent jihad sympathisers, they are obviously terrible people too. But what happens when some Islamophobe starts stretching the definition of "Islamist violent jihad sympathiser" so that Muslims who have zero sympathy for that get labelled with it anyway? (Yes, the classic "slippery slope argument" – but some slopes really are slippery.)
Some websites, such as "Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents", are like a private club. But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club. Different rules should apply to different kinds of websites.