If you can't guess my position on business censorship I would be surprised. I am pro-commerce. I love the moral and social benefits of commerce. So what would be my position on business self-censorship?
There are no circumstances in which a sensible business should actively censor anything unless it is forced to by a government or some other power wielding authority.
The object of every type of business, and the object of commerce, is to supply the needs, desires and wishes of consumers. The function of commerce is not to judge or censor those needs, desires and wishes.
There are two recent stories about censorship by businesses that should know better.
* One is by Costco that was accused by Dinesh d’Souza of pulling his books from their many stores at the request of the Democratic Party. D’Souza’s movie from the book ‘America’ offended the Democrats and Obama. Costco denied their motivation was censorship and the book was returned to the sales tables. The book promptly sold out.
* Google on the other hand has two bad behavioral censorship actions. In the first case they acceded to the EU censors demand that Google remove search references that demean or harm a person or business. Google is instructed to remove references to the maligning documents. The original documents continue to exist…. unreferenced by EU Google.
Google had no choice in this case. But I think Google management should have made some public statement that this censorship by the EU is no different than comparable censorship by the Soviet Union, China, Turkey, Iran and other tyrannical governments.
Much worse is Google's own determination to censor its ad placement service, Adwords, from a whole range of products that the Puritan members of Google management have put together. This includes ads on gun sites, recreational drug sites and tobacco related sites. Removing the ad placements from these sites will do nothing to harm the sites because there are other better services than Google. Nevertheless it is an act of censorship that can only harm Google and benefit no one.
There is no earthly reason why any business should be in the role of censor unless they are forced to. Even then they should make it clear to the public that they object to
playing the role of censor.
(Thanks to Hans and Ann for alerting me to the Google evil.)