John Gruber on the Neil Young and Spotify fracas:

It’s correct to argue that Joe Rogan has a right to say whatever he wants on his podcast, and that people who want to listen to his show should be able to. But it’s also correct that Neil Young has a right to make clear that he doesn’t want to be associated with a service that is associated with Rogan, and to publicize his stance. The answer to speech one disagrees with is more speech, and this is more speech.

Where has this Gruber been the past few years?

Also, apparently in the wake of this story, there were also calls for Apple to remove Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which John addresses:

Apple, clearly, does not host Steve Bannon’s podcast. Apple’s podcast directory is akin to a search engine; they index the feeds of open podcasts. They do have lines for content they won’t index (porno, of course, and hate speech), but even then, if you copy the URL for the feed, you can subscribe to it in Apple Podcasts, just like how you can visit any website you want using Safari.

If you feel so strongly that Apple ought not even include Steve Bannon’s podcast in search results that it warrants boycotting Apple’s other products and services, more power to you. But that, to me, crosses the line into being against free speech.

Again, where has this Gruber been the past few years?

If we want to de-escalate, we don’t do that by trying to silence our political opponents, we do that by actually talking to them and trying to find the topics where there is common ground and room for compromise.

On a related note, if you’re opposed to podcast platform’s removing legal speech content from their index, I would encourage you to support efforts like Podcast Index and reach out to your favorite podcast app to suggest they add support for it alongside Podcasting 2.0 features.

➝ Source: daringfireball.net