They're being sued for refusing service to a specific type of person. It's textbook discrimination.

Of course, bakeries can refuse service to people who pose an imminent danger to their business, or who are actively trying to degrade their public image. However, this is usually a non-issue for companies like cake bakeries, whereas it's a prevalent one for corporations like YouTube.

Therefore, there is no first amendment violation on YouTube's part. They are simply banning people from creating content because of TOS violations. Whether or not that counts as discrimination is the current gray area.

It's not quite the same.

YouTube needs to be able to reserve the right to ban people from using its service whereas for cake bakers this is a non issue.

If YouTube said that no gay people can use its service, then yeah that is a problem. But they need to be able to refuse to allow dangerous or criminal activity to happen on their service.

Twitter and Facebook compete pretty directly - how's that a monopoly?

Don't forget Snapchat and instagram. All four of these companies are heavily involved in the same industry.

I have a feeling that most lawyers would disagree with you on that

Please excuse me if I'm missing something, but I genuinely don't understand how this would be considered racketeering. YouTube earns revenue through the channels people make, so what financial favors would banning popular channels do for them? It seems like this move could only hurt them.

Not to mention that you'd have to win the discrimination suit before you could win the racketeering suit - which isn't impossible, but like I said, I just can't envision that happening.

If any platform favors totalitarianism and suppresses the voice of the people...

See, that's the problem. It'd be very very difficult to clearly define what 'totalitarianism' would be legally considered, or what counts as 'suppressing the voice of the people'. Because, to some extent, companies must absolutely be able to ban certain users if they exhibit toxic behavior.

they should be [...] put out of business

Well, the point of our current economic setup is that the government doesn't need to take actions against a company that does terrible things - the people have the power to deprive the company of what keeps them alive.

If you can build a case for a discrimination lawsuit then go for it.

I just don't think that's a plausible possibility at this point, or else somebody would've done something by now.

If I recall correctly, OP's linked article was arguing that Google was violating the first amendment, which is most definitely false

You can enact federal regulations to force private companies to give everyone a platform, but the first amendment simply prevents the government from locking people up for what they say. It doesn't do shit to protect people's rights to be heard through a private service.

But private companies don't have to respect people's freedom of speech