Dear Mr. Kinsella,
I am writing to you from Iran, where I closely follow your work on libertarian legal theory. I would deeply appreciate your insights on a unique digital dilemma here that highlights the messy collision between property rights, state coercion, and a captive market.
Amidst a total international internet blackout in Iran, a privately owned book-review platform has flourished. While it is 100% private property, it is the unintended beneficiary of a state-enforced captive market; because the regime has blocked all global competitors (like Goodreads), this platform enjoys a monopoly privilege it never sought.
Recently, the platform abruptly banned all political speech, using a peculiar analogy: they claimed the platform is a “library,” political discourse is like “eating chips in a quiet reading room,” and the “librarian” has an absolute right to evict violators. They gave users a “comply or exit” ultimatum. In response, hundreds of users launched a symbolic boycott, changing their profile pictures to a bag of chips.
This scenario presents an apparent paradox that requires careful parsing:
On one hand, the owners hold absolute title to their servers and never contractually guaranteed a permanent right to political expression. Furthermore, their sudden ban stems from three overlapping real-world pressures:
- Direct Coercion: Behind-the-scenes pressure from state security forces.
- Preemptive Defense: Mitigating risk to prevent state seizure of the platform and its database (which carries immense risk for users, as accounts are tied to national IDs via SIM cards).
- UX Management: Halting severe UX degradation, as political debates in our deeply traumatized and polarized society frequently devolved into toxic verbal abuse.
On the other hand, because the state has eliminated all foreign alternatives, users face near-insurmountable switching costs. Exiting means entering a digital wasteland. With the regime criminalizing the use of VPNs and enforcing capital punishment for trading Starlink dishes, the financial burden and severe legal risks of bypassing the state firewall to access blocked global alternatives are prohibitively high.
As a legal theorist, how do you parse this situation? I would be immensely grateful for your thoughts on these brief questions:
- Does a private title-holder retain an untainted “right to exclude” when the consumer’s “right to exit” has been structurally paralyzed by state aggression?
- Since this ban is driven by fear of state violence, is the platform’s appeal to absolute property rights a philosophical fallacy used to sanitize what is essentially proxy censorship?
- Under Austrian economics, is the users’ “chips” campaign a legitimate consumer boycott and reputational check, even within a profoundly distorted market?
Thank you very much for your time, your dedication to liberty, and your invaluable scholarship.
***
A:
First, thank you for the polite and coherent question. That is a rarity. Second, I sympathize with your situation and that of your people and my version of prayers is with you. I hope your people and country eventually emerge from all this terrible situation with more liberty and prosperity. As you know, not all Americans side with our government’s actions, certainly not us libertarians.
Now, I like how you recognize that the “platform” is really just a service and the key issue is the property rights of the owners of that hardware, and any contracts between the owners and users.
A few general comments. First, just as employment in a free society is voluntary for both parties–meaning no one is under an obligation to hire you or keep you hired, and you can be fired for any reason; just as the employee is free to quit—so there is freedom of association in general, and also in commercial matters—no one is entitled use your service or platform and they can be ejected or banned for any reason, especially for not abiding by the rules and conditions set. And these rules and conditions can be whatever the owner wants to impose, whether reasonable or not. This can include rules adopted preemptively or out of concern for state retaliation. In fact that does not seem unreasonable to me.
If the service benefits from state regulations that give it more market or bargaining power than it would otherwise have, that is presumably not its fault and it cannot be blamed for acting according to the reality it faces, though I suppose one could craft various arguments that one has some form or moral obligation to be aware of this and to perhaps act as ethically as possible under the circumstances though it does not strike me that it is unethical to act prudently to try to avoid unwanted attention from the corrupt state.
The situation would be somewhat different if (a) the company actively calls for or supports the state reducing or hampering its competition; or (b) the company is using its state-enhanced monopoly position to coerce or manipulate or spread state propaganda (as happened with tech and media social media companies and corporate America during covid). And here in your case perhaps the companies are somewhat aiding the regime carry out its censorship, a bit like social media companies did during covid in deplatforming or censoring dissident voices. But even here the main wrong is the state in effect coercing social media companies into engaging in state propaganda and censorship.
So with some of this in mind—
Recently, the platform abruptly banned all political speech, using a peculiar analogy: they claimed the platform is a “library,” political discourse is like “eating chips in a quiet reading room,” and the “librarian” has an absolute right to evict violators. They gave users a “comply or exit” ultimatum. In response, hundreds of users launched a symbolic boycott, changing their profile pictures to a bag of chips.
I can see nothing wrong with the server owners choosing to view and describe their platform and related service with this metaphor.
This scenario presents an apparent paradox that requires careful parsing:
On one hand, the owners hold absolute title to their servers and never contractually guaranteed a permanent right to political expression. Furthermore, their sudden ban stems from three overlapping real-world pressures:
- Direct Coercion: Behind-the-scenes pressure from state security forces.
- Preemptive Defense: Mitigating risk to prevent state seizure of the platform and its database (which carries immense risk for users, as accounts are tied to national IDs via SIM cards).
- UX Management: Halting severe UX degradation, as political debates in our deeply traumatized and polarized society frequently devolved into toxic verbal abuse.
I do not quite understand #3, but I can understand the reasons they are doing this.
On the other hand, because the state has eliminated all foreign alternatives, users face near-insurmountable switching costs. Exiting means entering a digital wasteland. With the regime criminalizing the use of VPNs and enforcing capital punishment for trading Starlink dishes, the financial burden and severe legal risks of bypassing the state firewall to access blocked global alternatives are prohibitively high.
As a legal theorist, how do you parse this situation? I would be immensely grateful for your thoughts on these brief questions:
- Does a private title-holder retain an untainted “right to exclude” when the consumer’s “right to exit” has been structurally paralyzed by state aggression?
I cannot see any alternative, because otherwise we would have to say the users are now co-owners of the hardware; or the platform provider has a positive obligation to use his property in a certain way even though he never agreed to this and is not causally responsible for the state actions that gave him this extra market power. It is the regime/state that is reducing the consumers’ other options, not the platform provider.
2. Since this ban is driven by fear of state violence, is the platform’s appeal to absolute property rights a philosophical fallacy used to sanitize what is essentially proxy censorship?
Well, any private company has the right to censor. It’s just that normally they face competition and thus face real limits or consequences on abuse of this power. The thing is the state has no right to take away consumer choices for alternatives, or to directly or indirectly pressure platform providers to censor. That said, the platform provider is under no obligation to harm itself by refusing to respond to coercion. It may be somewhat disingenuous or dishonest for the platform provider to pretend that its power to censor is a natural free market result but being sleazy is not a crime. It might be better if they were to just be honest but maybe that itself would be too risky.
3. Under Austrian economics, is the users’ “chips” campaign a legitimate consumer boycott and reputational check, even within a profoundly distorted market?
Well action that does not violate anyone’s property rights does not require justification; it is “legitimate” by its nature. I do not see that the users’ protest campaign is wrong at all, either legally, morally, or tactically. If they can get away with it and it has a chance of pushing back a bit and preserving some of the features they desire, more power to them, and of course the threat of such a response is one of the ways consumers and users can impose a check on the actions of the service provider. Even if the cost of alternatives is very high, at some point the users can simply abandon the platform. I believe it is in Armentano’s work on antitrust where he explains no private firm ever has a real monopoly: even if you appear to have a monopoly on a given good or service (say: Disney has a monopoly on its theme parks), since money is fungible every other good is in competition with all others. So if the airlines or Disney raise price too much, I might forgo a flight or vacation and spend the money on a new dishwasher in state; so dishwashers are in competition with airlines and theme parks, in the end (see Grok for more).
