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 e…
> No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough. I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where this is not true (US encryption mainly). I'm wondering if you have any examples of where it is true. What has been censored effectively? As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective…
I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc.
I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).