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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

#311

Surprised by the huge outpouring of support here, yet when X puts forward the exact same values of "freedom of speech but not freedom of speech," it's met entirely with criticism.

Have you checked if it was the same people? I usually read about "Here last week someone said this, but now someone said that" as HN or communities in general are one single organism, what your post wants to say? Have the people in this thread forgotten to go through education camps?

Do you hope that Musk is going to throw some peanuts at you for defending him like a good boy?

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

#312
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> develop its own ways of dealing with people who use it to harm others So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate.

>So far, every "way" that's been developed of dealing with people who harm others has itself been used to harm others in more extreme ways than the harm they were supposed to mitigate. Has it? Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide. Your argument is that having a forum taken offline is a more extreme form of harm than literal death?

>Some of the people Kiwifarms harassed were driven to suicide.

This is repeated often but there's no proof for these claims. There's more evidence that Reddit has a greater kill count than KF.

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

#313
post #262

>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...…

> I don't agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially. I’m convinced they never truly cared about the ends. It’s the more basic rule that power corrupts. Those actions were all for show and it wasn’t to protect anybody. It was purely to showcase power.

Power does not corrupt, it's just that these people were always bad people and power gives them the tools to do some bad things.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading the other day about Germany making deadnaming a crime..

From an outsider's perspective (NZ) Germany's democracy looks a lot healthier than the US's.

Because of criminalizing "deadnaming" or in spite of it?

For those that don't know, so-called "deadnaming" "is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadnaming

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

#315

I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP? 'Essential internet infra…

Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral. Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all . If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that. Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal…

Performing a DDoS attack is already illegal. Content neutral for legal content shouldn't be a high bar.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Amazon dropped Gab for even flimsier reasons

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

#318
post #20

It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499 If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.

[flagged]

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an outsider's perspective (NZ) Germany's democracy looks a lot healthier than the US's.

Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand…

For those of people who are wondering about the "indigenous apartheid", the poster is talking about co-governance, i.e. giving certain "typically local", economic and political powers to indigenous organizations. This has become recently become on-vogue to call "apartheid" in right circles.

I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).

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

#320
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>That's fine when you have the jurisdiction for doing that

KF operates in the USA. If there was anything illegal on there it would have been taken down by the courts.

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