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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

#281

Post by dietr1ch »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #249

>To put it even more simply: 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. LA actually did this during covid to shut off water for homes being accused of holding parties during covid. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/us/los-angeles-shuts-off-powe...…

What an awful example from the third world. What's next? The IRS forces doctors not to treat some patients in ER because they may owe taxes?

Access to water and medical attention are human rights, no matter how awful the humans may be according to the acting officers.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#282

Post by mamborambo »

There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.

There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.

Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#283

Post by bb88 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #219
TylerE wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Even a literal Nazi should have access to utilities. Though I would say cloudflare isn't quite up to that level. Edit: Seeing this downvoted is disappointing. Access to utilities needs to be treated as a right . Only the courts should be able to take it away.

I have a hard time with this.

The constitution doesn't say you have a right to water, electricity, internet service, sewer service, etc.

Meanwhile the conservatives in the US are saying that corporations have a right to choose who they serve based upon their religious beliefs. See the SCOTUS Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling on whether they must serve a gay couple.

I'm pretty sure I could argue that Nazism is against someone's religious beliefs....

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#286

Post by [deleted] »

mid-kid wrote: post #112
jauer wrote: post #89

Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don't like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics. Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list. Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time. Even Google wasn't reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute. For all we know someone working at HE was targeted…

> Happens all the time. As this is the first time I hear of this, I'm curious. Do you have any examples?

[deleted]

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#287

Post by rhelz »

CM30 wrote: post #46

I 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…

// private companies a re de facto writing the laws //

We can certainly discuss whether these services should be publicly or privately owned. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and wouldn't mind seeing publically-owned versions of Twitter, ChatGPT, or Google, as a guard against corporations dominating the information age.

But calling for more government regulation of privately-owned services? Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to? The whole point of private property is that it carves out a space of freedom for you, the owner of the private property, to use it as you wish!!!

I really wonder how I became the radical conservative here......

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#288

Post by zeroCalories »

judge2020 wrote: post #198
zeroCalories wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.

It’s clear that it’s only an action they take if there is enough immense pressure from everyone who’s not that site. So while Cloudflare isn’t a diamond in the rough, you could say they’re a.. topaz in the rough.

The more social pressure there is, the more meaningful the commitment is. Cloudflare doesn't get points for hosting sites that no cares about. They failed to uphold their promise when it mattered twice, so it's pretty much meaningless. Just use AWS for your DDoS protection at that point.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#289

Post by BirAdam »

TylerE wrote: post #170
zeroCalories wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. This is not true. There has been at least two high profile cases where Cloudflare dropped their commitment to free speech when under no real legal pressure(kiwifarms and stormfromt). Maybe you think they did the right thing, but it's clear that they are not a neutral party.

[flagged]

The problem for me is that banning them makes them think that they’re correct. For many people who take hideous ideas to heart, they do so because they believe themselves to be under attack and fighting for “their people.” In this way, they attempt to justify themselves. By banning them, the attack is made more real. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike Nazis. They believe me to be inhuman. I just believe this to be the wrong strategic move.
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