Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem.

A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in my life may be nearly priceless. I've paid a low triple digit sum for Blizzard games, yet the time and social investments I have made in those games make them a couple of orders of magnitude more valuable to me, now.

The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending.

The situation we're in now is one in which political thugs apply pressure to private companies to hurt individuals, in an attempt to chill free speech.

Free speech is expensive and valuable, and defending it from those who would wish to destroy it requires commensurate resources. We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world.

To my view, Blizzard is like a store clerk who gives up the store's money to a robber. It would be nice if he was a hero, but he's not equipped for it. Nobody is paying 7-11 to stand up to violent crime. The problem is too big and expensive to ask individuals to deal with. Society paying for police and courts is at least a response on the right scale.

The mechanisms we have for protecting individual rights are antiquaited, and need to be rethought to deal with the current situation. Perhaps a model like the unified response to patent trolls could work? I think, if we want free speech to exist in the current environment, it will have to be something that big.

Mostly playing devil's advocate here:

When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own.

The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication circuit between me and those who I want to communicate with.

So lets say I have 10 wires coming from my house to other houses, and someone I know has 10 other wires connected to a different set of houses, that I'm not directly connected to.

I can rely on my own self and build new wires (expensive) or I can work with this person to forward my communication (probably cheaper but he/she can view/hear my communication).

If I want to communicate with someone else beyond my network, then a third party is carrying my speech, and we're really no longer in realm of free speech. This third party has rights and should be able to refuse to carry my speech for the same rights and reasons as me, unless entered into a contract beforehand.

I think your real question is should corporations be treated as legal persons to the extent that they have the Constitutional right of speech.

It seems pretty strange to me that individuals with the right to free speech and the right to assemble and freely associate would lose those rights if they chose the form of a "corporation" as the manner of assembly and association. So I don't think the problem is that the law treats groups of people as legal entities with substantially similar rights to the individuals.

I would expect that crimes associated with speech (slander, defamation, fraudulent representations, incitement to violence, threats, etc) would be applicable to individuals and to corporations equally.

I would agree that the control that a handful (relative to all corporations) of online companies wield is something quite new (historically speaking) and our laws, regulations, and even legal principles are playing catchup. We may need some original thinking to help us evolve our legal systems to meet the challenge.

Bigger philosophical question for the US Stage: When a corporation kills someone through their negligence, why does the punishment differ so much from what happens when a physical person does the same?

Are corporations trying to pick and choose when they are treated like a person? Does that place them above people?