Why is trust the default here? If governments, ISPs, and other tech entities behave this way in a single instance, why assume that it's the only instance? Why not just migrate the infrastructure to a country like Belarus and strip away the leverage of whatever shitty jurisdiction you're living under?
ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
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Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#102[flagged]
Quoting the article: > When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable. Although your points are valid in some sense, I don’t see…
That's fine when you have the jurisdiction for doing that. In your example, there is a house with people in it doing something illegal. That's within the realm of law enforcements and courts.
A better example is robocall spam. Most of it comes from overseas. That is incredibly difficult to do about directly. The only effective way to go after it is with the exchanges that transmit and essentially "launder" the spam traffic, cutting them off if necessary.
KiwiFarms openly engages in and faciclitates harassment and doxxing. It's absolutely the right thing to do to limit its reach and availability.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#103I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…
When in all of US history were private companies not controlling the public discourse and "censoring free speech"?
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#104It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.
Free speech has never existed. We've always been pushing and pulling against what's acceptable.
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Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#105> Cloudflare is an often brought up example And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech. > It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society r…
>This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.
Want an example of this type of end run being used in practice? Nearly a decade ago? Obama used banking access to do a similar end run around businesses deemed political enemies. Some to the good, weapons/ammunition sellers with uncertain scruples, payday lenders...[0] but for some reason I'm not super confident about its consistent use for the better..
[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obamas-ope...
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#106The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for "not doing enough" to stop the big-ole-meanies online. I see ISPs blocking "mean speech" to "protect people" as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey,…
You're thinking solely in terms of private individuals. Other entities exist and have to be internet-connected to function; corporations, nonprofits, government bodies, institutions. They can't very well use pseudonyms because their whole reason for being is to be accessible to the public. So that makes them easy to target for abuse, eg https://oaklandside.org/2023/08/29/chabot-elementary-evacuat... An episode like t…
Do you agree with everyone's idea of what a bad actor is?
Because Mississippi and New York have very different ideas about who are bad actors.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#107I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…
> It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what's allowed online and in society right now, and that it's almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.
This is why monopoly power is dangerous as without it you could just move to a more tolerant competitor and be on with your business. The courts almost never consider the "secondary markets" that exist around these behemoths, and how all of our interests and independence are significantly damaged by allowing these monopolies to merge into existence.
Of course, even this feels like the conversation they would _like_ you to have, because the other side I never see considered is what does it take to buy an "indulgence" from these companies? Is it easy? Is it often done? How often are these "scions of social justice" actually just "turning a blind eye?"
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#108It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context. Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.
> It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.
And it's going to go the opposite way that people are expecting. For some reason, the Democratic base has been trained to think that it will be possible for them to impose an authoritarian meritocracy of kind middle-class people using a police force and army largely made up of working-class reactionary quasi-theocrats. When the shit goes down, the neocons will forget that they spent a year or two pretending to care about misgendering while liberals helped them build the Stasi's dream. Instead we'll end up with dictatorship run by a mashup of Reagan, Trump, and Thiel.
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#109I agree, we've got far too many entities that should just be 'dumb pipes' trying to play moral police at the moment, and it's a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that's not actually illegal feels like…
That's right. Authoritarian censors found an exploit. They couldn't use the government to clamp down on civil liberties because of the pesky constitution, so they invaded the administrative layer of big tech. It's not the engineers who built the web and these companies with Silicon Valley ideals. They were never intended to be used this way and are secretly horrified.
> play moral police at the moment
Moral fashion police
Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. Causing a stampede or crush being the obvious example. I do get baffled by the absolutionist statements about the freedom of speech. Speech is a side-channel into violence. My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess. Government ministers aren't free to speak state secrets in public. It's not legal to disclose the names of persons with judicial name suppres…
It's part of the American creation myth that's drilled into our heads as children. The Alien and Sedition Act was passed in 1798 which made it illegal to critique the government. Eugene Debs went to prison for advocating for draft dodging in World War 1. Part of is a lot of folks either can't or wont see the difference between "free speech" and "consequences for your actions". As Americans, we've never had more free…
> Eugene Debs went to prison for advocating for draft dodging in World War 1.
You're trying to rewrite this into a Whig history, but we're obviously backsliding when we're prosecuting people under the Espionage Act.