Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;m certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they&#x27;re defending.<p>The situation we&#x27;re in now is one in which political thugs apply pressure to private companies to hurt individuals, in an attempt to chill free speech.<p>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.<p>To my view, Blizzard is like a store clerk who gives up the store&#x27;s money to a robber.  It would be nice if he was a hero, but he&#x27;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.<p>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.