I’m supportive of free distribution of scientific knowledge, BUT HN has a significant bias against believing in the power of legal systems.
No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.
In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available.
Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value.
EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSES
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints:
* *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it.
* *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism).
* *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them.
* *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well.
I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all.