‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?

> “When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic,” she said. “The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope.”

What this alludes to is that somehow 2010 Open Internet Order 1. equals the concept of "Net Neutrality" as a whole and 2. was the backbone of internet freedom in the United States and both are untrue. In fact, none of the fear astroturfing that took place during that campaign ever came true. I'm interested in knowing who started that campaign and why.

I'm always in favor of iterating on broad ideas like Net Neutrality but it is constantly being used to misrepresent the state of freedom on the internet.

Multiple corporations (with their 'fiefdoms') is decentralised from government, in a similar manner to peers being decentralised from government (or the crown).

You could either argue 'not as much so', or that 'corporate lobbying, unions, and party donations have a similar influence on policy'; regardless I think it's an interesting idea.

It is. That doesn't mean that a democratically elected govt has to allow sites considered "good" by a private group (like the authors of this article) especially when even the authors themselves seem to be okay with blocking child pornography sites. It's tricky to argue against articles like this as it can quickly be twisted into an argument against human rights or same-sex marriages.

As far as I can see, all parties involved are behaving exactly like one would expect in a free society. People deciding who they want ruling them, democratically elected govts deciding what's good for their societies, ISPs following the laws and those who want to access the blocked sites firing up vpns and accessing them anyway while a group of people whining about this whole situation for profit pretending like they are the watchmen of a free society. This is virtue signalling. A private group passing judgment on what other sovereign nations may consider right and wrong (at that time) for their peoples.

There is nothing nefarious about bubbles. They happen automatically when people are in control of what they consume. Imagine I join Twitter and I am given a list of people to follow. I don't like to hear from people with viewpoints that I think are crazy so I unfollow someone if they say something I disagree with. If some gets retweeted into my feed saying something I agree with, I might follow them regardless of the validity of their comment since I don't have the time or motivation to fact check everything. Wouldn't you know it, I am now in a bubble despite there being zero censorship of anything. If one of the people in my bubble repeats some false claim, am I going to see someone dispute that claim or will the disputing occur outside my bubble?

>This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you can't protect people from themselves, you can only immunize them, we know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.

Ideas do have virality to them. Something like QAnon is a prime example. Is isn't like "wealthy democrats drink the blood of children" is some random idea that multiple people reached through parallel thinking. It was a particular conspiracy theory that spread from one person to another. Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach than trying to retroactively unconvince people who have already bought into the conspiracy.

I agree with the rest of your comment about the dangers of censorship. That is why I said I would have a preference for something that is closer to free and open than not, but that doesn't mean we can't recognize the specific situations in which completely free and open systems can go wrong.