Correction

[supergee]

In an earlier post, I picked up sloppy phrasing that made me sound like those collectivist assholes who believe that businesses can censor. Amazon stupidly deprived its customers of a chance to purchase books that offended its excessive sense of propriety. I wish I still believed that the market would punish it for so doing.

Thanx to emceeaich for correcting me.

Comments

[oursin]

Speaking as someone who has worked on the history of censorship in the UK, a great deal of censorship in the past was not so much the government/legal system/police* doing anything, as much as it was quivering circulating libraries/publishers/theatre managers/the nascent cinematographic distribution industry deciding that they would be ever so, ever so, careful not to fall foul of laws that were applied in a really arbitrary and haphazard fashion.

So yes, businesses could and did censor.

*Though I may mention the great Metropolitan Police Vice Squad corruption case of the 1970s, in which the squad in question were found to be raiding Soho porn shops, and then selling the seized items back into that market.