Facebook still banning Trump — for now — despite campaign trail’s’very strong’ support for Internet-bashing mogul
from the it’s-not-about-the-Internet-anymore-it’s-about-trying-to-bully-you dept
We’ve written about this case many times over the years, because so many people love to think that Google is a victim of the Internet, with its ubiquitous access to the web, free search, free e-mail, free apps, etc etc, and that somehow they’ve somehow made a victim of the internet, when all of that is due to Google just offering a free search engine that is open to everyone online.
We’ve argued that Google’s free search engine is entirely due to a bunch of brilliant engineers working on Google’s search engine and its own applications that provide access to Google services, and that there’s no way that all of those people would accept working there if that was the whole story. Now it looks like the whole story is changing, as the company is now looking to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, arguing that the court has no business ruling on Google’s decision to ban it’s political ads.
As you will see, it’s not just that there’s no “victim” at all, but that Google doesn’t understand what the court ruling was saying.
The argument from Google relies on two factors that the court ruling said can be a “lack of a realistic prospect of success” and a “substantial risk” of “chilling protected speech.”
Now, this is all just a rehashing of previous arguments by the company, that it’s the victim of the internet, and that the ruling shows that it must pay its way, and that it can’t be held to account, because it isn’t the victim, it’s the people who use the internet. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how most people like to
