Internet Association Endorses Internet Censorship Bill

In 1984 you had the Telescreen in every house. You were not allowed to cover it up and it was used to broadcast propaganda into peoples homes without any filtering (plus it was a surveillance device, but that's besides the point here).

To a certain degree you are right about spam and malware, but I think those are quite in a different category, as it's pretty clear cut which is which. Spam is random email from people who seem to send a lot of those types of emails to many people, and malware is code that uses known vulnerabilities in the CVE database, so again, pretty clear-cut which stuff they are supposed to stop. Censoring speech is in a way different league.

So I think things started going downhill when they started being very aggressive about copyright. That's certainly been the case with Google.

They fought on our side against SOPA, because they figured abiding by SOPA would cost them too much manual work. But then they wanted TV content and music services on the Play Store and Youtube, so stuff like SOPA became more acceptable to them as they were trying to get those deals.

So they implemented highly-aggressive and anti-fair use takedown bots across the Google search engine and Youtube to appease those companies with which they were making deals as much as possible.

So now of course the governments are like: "Well, if you can identify copyrighted content, surely you can identify "extremist" content, too, right?"

> The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or CloudFlare [...]

Except that Google or CloudFlare does not equal to "The Internet companies" as there are far more out there than these 2. Especially world-wide.

Also, companies do make mistakes. They don't strive for that, but they do. It is not too late to admit a mistake was made in this circumstance.

>The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer.

Companies still have the right to refuse service to anyone. They're not "banning" them or "censoring" them; they're refusing a service that white advocacy organisations like Daily Stormer are fundamentally not owed, and only continues to disrupt their bottom line by degrading the quality of service provided for every other user of the platform.

What is often unsaid in this argument is the corrosive impact of "zero-tolerance" free speech on private platforms. What starts as a well-intentioned marketplace of ideas rapidly degenerates into a choking haze of obnoxious users who alienate more tactful users, as well as advertisers. Well-reasoned albeit inflammatory discussion gives way to a 4chan-style culture where the new bar for "ideas" is set at some variation of "nigger nigger nigger". Then, when normal users leave and Pizza Hut balks at seeing its logo next to a Klan hood, "corporate globalists" are accused of pulling the advertising solely to silence them, when really they're just defending their intellectual property against unsavory people who regularly act in bad faith.

"Free speech" on private platforms ends up killing the platform every time, because unsavory people misuse it, and the misuse draws more and more unsavory users. Voat is suffering from this problem, being more than willing to host the jailbait board that reddit wisely canned, as well as hosting content pandering to white community outreach and conspiracy theorists. When advertisers exercise their own freedom of association and refuse to do business with Voat, they're simply derided as part of a global elite that's seeking to extinguish their ideas. When in reality, nobody is interested in their ideas enough to be willing to fund them or associate with them.

Google et al are simply acknowledging that advertisers have every bit of freedom of association, as people believe they think they have freedom of speech on a private platform. They are not building governmental organisations, where freedom of speech is absolute and untouchable. They're building for-profit corporations that need to retain advertisers. And you don't retain advertisers by enabling their intellectual property to be placed amidst people who regularly act in bad faith.

> as there are far more out there than these 2.

GP listed them as examples, that does not mean that they are the only two companies that did so. So this becomes a paradox of the heap. At which point does "a few individual companies" turn into "the internet"? Since the internet is a decentralized system there is no clear defined boundary and any of the big, private infrastructure providers finding novel reason (within their own ecosystem) to not provide a service is concerning.

What if google refused to resolve some domains via their 8.8.8.8 resolver? Clearly this is trivial to circumvent, at worst you would have to setup your own resolver at home. And yet it could affect millions of unaware users.

What if the CEO of a single Tier 1 peering provider suddenly found some content so much in conflict with his values that they refuse to route the whole IP block?

Yes, they are private entities, but the internet consists predominantly of private entities providing infrastructure.