Opinion: Even with Net neutrality, it’s hard to find a neutral platform

In the ongoing debate over Net neutrality regulations, all sides have agreed on one thing: Internet users, not broadband providers, should ultimately determine which sites and services succeed and which ones fail. Even those who don’t want the government to impose any rules at all believe a free and open Internet is crucial to society and the economy.

If you’re looking for neutrality from the companies that use the Net, however, you should cut off the search now. As much as some companies try to maintain the posture of being open and non-judgmental, every operator of online platforms, services, communities and sites can’t help but exercise at least some level of editorial control.

A good example is GoFundMe, which claims to be “the world’s #1 fundraising site for personal causes and life-events.” The San Diego-based company initially held itself out as an open crowdfunding platform, placing no restrictions on what it was used for beyond the typical boilerplate provisions in its terms of service.

The site reaffirmed its stance as a neutral platform after supporters of Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson used GoFundMe to raise money for his defense. Wilson, who is white, fatally shot black teenager Michael Brown, leading to days of sometimes violent protests in the community. Some groups rankled by the shooting urged GoFundMe to cancel the campaign for Wilson, but the site refused.

“Much like Facebook, Twitter, and many other websites, GoFundMe is an open social media platform where opposing ideas and viewpoints exist,” the “GoFundMe Team” wrote on the site’s blog Sept. 2. “If GoFundMe were to remove campaigns because they are unpopular, it would set a dangerous precedent moving forward for all users.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, but GoFundMe appears to have set that precedent anyway. Within days of defending Wilson’s site, it took down a page that was raising money to help defend another white police officer facing racially charged accusations, Daniel Holtzclaw of Oklahoma City. Granted, unlike Wilson, Holtzclaw has actually been charged with a crime -- several of them, all involving the alleged sexual assault of black women while he was on duty. Yet like any other person who has yet to be convicted, Holtzclaw remains innocent in the eyes of the law, and his relatives should be able to help him mount a defense.

Holtzclaw’s sister showed CNN the email she’d received from GoFundMe, explaining why the page was removed. The company had received a high number of complaints, GoFundMe informed Jennifer Holtzclaw, and “your campaign contains subject matter that GoFundMe would rather not be associated with.”

Days later, the site took down a page by an Illinois woman seeking help paying for an abortion. It gave her the same explanation, indicating that the company’s you’ve-been-rejected email is a form letter. Shortly thereafter, it posted on its blog a long list of fundraising campaigns that would not be permitted, finally giving users long-overdue clarity that the site is not, in fact, the neutral platform it claimed to be.

Granted, it’s not as if the list is easy to find. Users first have to scroll all the way to the very bottom of GoFundMe’s home page, where the barely visible link to the blog hides next to a link to the company’s privacy policy and its copyright notice. Once on the blog, you have to scroll through a series of newer posts until you reach the one titled, “Important Update to Our Content Guidelines” -- which, by the way, refers to GoFundMe as an “open fundraising platform” before laying out the 50 types of campaigns that are prohibited.

Again, it’s impossible (at least in this country) to run a truly open platform or forum online because of federal and state laws that prohibit certain types of content. When a platform attracts child pornography, pirated movies or books, defamatory and libelous content, counterfeit items or threats of violence, the operators may be held liable if they don’t remove it.

Nor does it make much business sense to court controversies that drive away users. Where problems arise is when a site pretends to be less judgmental than it really is.

Witness the backlash against Reddit, a crowd-sourced content site, when it refused to shutter a forum (or “subreddit”) for stolen celebrity selfies, and again when it did shut the subreddit down. The excruciatingly earnest but conflicting explanations it offered obscured a simple truth: Reddit has finite resources, so at the end of the day it will block any content that strains those resources to the breaking point.

In other words, Reddit prioritizes free expression above almost everything else -- certainly above protecting people against gross privacy intrusions -- but not above the well-being of the company that operates the site.

Maybe that’s as neutral as any online player can be. And Reddit is certainly more open than GoFundMe, whose treatment of Holtzclaw and abortion pages inspired activists to renew their protests this week against Wilson’s page. It’s a moot point now; Wilson’s supporters had already closed their GoFundMe page, having collected more than $235,000 in pledges. But because GoFundMe keeps 5% of all the money raised on its site, critics at ColorOfChange.org are demanding that GoFundMe “return any money it has made from Darren Wilson fundraising pages.”

Follow Healey’s intermittent Twitter feed: @jcahealey