Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content

This is the result of out-sourcing juristic work to private companies:

If we treat Android, Window, Twitter, Facebook, as public spaces/goods, then private companies should not have a say in what is allowed/not-allowed on their platforms. This is work for the courts and police to decide and enforce.

If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.

I think we need constituted digital public spaces and platforms with:

- democratic footing (users are in charge)

- public ownership

- division of power (politicians =!= judges =!= police)

- effective policing

In such a system it would be for independent courts to decide which Apps can be distributed and which not. Those courts would be bound to a constitution/body of law, which applies to all parties a like.

Yes, this will be expensive. Yes, you will have to give up some privacy. But you will be a citizen in a society, and not a stranger playing in a backyard.

Maybe the current platforms can be coerced into a system which approximates the above. But I have my doubts. I hope in 200years people will have figured this out, and will look back to this age as the digital dark ages.

A platform isn't public or private. It's a platform. You can use it any way you want. But if it's not your platform, you don't get to make the rules of how it can be used or how it works.

I don't think people realize how ridiculous they sound when they reach this far just to get Google to do whatever the user wants with Google's service. It's a very millennial/zoomer/i-only-know-life-since-Google-has-existed point of view. It implies that people don't think they can fairly live a human existence without using Google (which is the truly disturbing thing about all this).

I mean, jesus. Nobody has forced you to use any of Google's services, you literally do not need to use any of their services at all. And there are alternate service providers. We didn't even go this far with Ma Bell, an actual monopoly.

If this is about "boo hoo I can't make money off of their platform", why not the same complaint about literally any other business? It's a much more reasonable thing to fight for, say, right to repair, than right-to-make-an-app-that-will-be-published-no-matter-what-by-Google.

At the moment, the best comparison I can come up with is food trucks. Say you own a giant empty lot. You offer it to food trucks to come and sell their food in your lot. It's a big success. You make money, the food trucks make money. Then one day, you want to kick out a food truck, for whatever reason. And they say, this is so unfair. We should form a government committee to manage this parking lot because the owner of the lot won't let me sell hotdogs here anymore. Even though they could just, you know, do what they do somewhere else, and still make basically the same living.