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Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

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31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this So large Western corporations consolidating the majority of the Internet use in their hands, and then censoring/controlling it through algorithms is ok. Horrible when governments do any kind of regulation/control. All ok if its done by unaccountable private tyrants for profit...

I will never understand why private companies curating their platforms is equated with censorship. In China (and elsewhere) a central government curates acceptable speech. If you don't comply you go to jail. In the "West" you might get kicked off a platform, which diminishes your reach, but doesn't extinguish your speech. You can always find another soapbox. Or start your own, as one recent ex-president demonstrated.

IMO, the problem isn't that private companies exercise censorship (and it is censorship even if it is a private company), it is the amount of power and influence that individual companies wield.

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#32
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dare I bring a space cash in to the convo but what do you think about a "decentralized internet" like the TRON project https://tron.network ?

Justin Sun's scam blockchain?

Do you have any sources? Or does blockchain = scam?

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#33
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justin Sun's scam blockchain?

Do you have any sources? Or does blockchain = scam?

Most blockchain stuff does seem pretty scammy, yes, so that's my default assumption. At best, if I'm being more charitable than it deserves, it's failed ideology.

(And don't complain about downvotes. Not only is it against site guidelines, it just makes people want to downvote you more for whining about it.)

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this So large Western corporations consolidating the majority of the Internet use in their hands, and then censoring/controlling it through algorithms is ok. Horrible when governments do any kind of regulation/control. All ok if its done by unaccountable private tyrants for profit...

Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China. Tech companies are not running concentration camps and don’t have nuclear weapons. They want to sell ads, not dominate the world.

> Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China

If ~2-3 corporations control the speech, and they censor it according to their arbitrary whim and what the US government dictates as 'fake news' as the government wields the hammer of 'inquiries' that could lead to potential gigantic fines, even breakup over their heads, its the exact same thing with China's censorship.

The US government does not directly censor - it just 'outsources' the censorship to the 'free market' which has to do what the government wants or they will face inquiries, fines, regulations, break up or even persecution of their executives.

The same approach is employed in every other forms of repression and enforcement in US society too: The government does not repress people directly when they use their free speech dangerously. It just gets the police to enforce 'local ordinances' and then the courts make short work of the protesters by imposing fines on them for irrelevant things. Like how Occupy protesters were fined tens of thousands of dollars for 'trespassing' on PUBLIC property. No one's free speech was repressed. Its just that they were hooked up with fines and debt that will have them shut up and keep working like an indentured servant for decades to come in order to be able to pay those fines and debts.

> concentration camps

China does not have concentration camps. We, in the rest of the world have fed up with the constant smears and lies that the US media directs against the enemy they target. Each of our countries have passed from the same smear machine's target sights at least once in the past 60 years. The very fac that you are able to repeat such a smear on the public Internet without hesitating for even a second tells how strong is the censorship and control of 'free speech' in the US and its satellites.

Its not even 20 years after the tale of nonexistent Iraqi WMDS. You people still buy what is sold to you unquestioningly and ironically assert that you have 'free speech'.

One does not even need to mention the doublespeak of other countries having 'concentration camps', where in the US, actual slave labor are just called 'the private prison system'. The former 'concentration camp' de-radicalizes actual head-cutting terrorists, teaches them sciences, trades, and reintegrates them to the society as productive members free of charge. The latter just incarcerates people for trivial reasons to use them slave labor for their life. But the former is a 'rights problem'. Not the latter. You just 'rephrase' slavery differently, and its not slavery.

> They want to sell ads, not dominate the world.

They are appendages of the establishment that has over 800 military bases around the world. Especially around the targeted countries like China. So save that 'not wanting to dominate the world' thing.

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#35
“Free and open” is all well and good as long as everyone is super nice. But the people preaching freeness and openness are most often the bad guys. It’s a notion that can easily be abused to pitch totalitarianism to the disempowered because it seems like a good idea in principle, but the world has existing power structures. If you take the state now as “free and open” and attempt to preserve it, you cement those power structures in place.

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely no one even mentions how evil Google is in the discussion.

2012 was a different time — Google had a better reputation back then.

I remember 2011-2012 as roughly the time when their search results started to decline in quality, correlated with the beginnings of applying "AI" to them.

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#37
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China. Tech companies are not running concentration camps and don’t have nuclear weapons. They want to sell ads, not dominate the world.

> Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China If ~2-3 corporations control the speech, and they censor it according to their arbitrary whim and what the US government dictates as 'fake news' as the government wields the hammer of 'inquiries' that could lead to potential gigantic fines, even breakup over their heads, its the exact same thing with China's censorship. The…

So is your office right in Beijing or somewhere else?

> Its not even 20 years after the tale of nonexistent Iraqi WMDS. You people still buy what is sold to you unquestioningly and ironically assert that you have 'free speech'.

Look at this. Here you are on a US website, free to post critical things about the US government with no fear of being put in jail or re-educated.

Why don’t you go to China and post on Weibo about Tiennamen Square and then come back and tell me again how they are the same.

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's censorship. Getting banned off Twitter, and getting executed by firing squad, are both forms of censorship.

The difference is there can be 100s of twitters, and they require voluntary usage. There's only one government, and you are required to abide by their rules, so restrictions need to be placed on the government. If twitter and the government work together (e.g. twitter banning people that disagree with the government to get favors or avoid punishments) then that should be treated in a similar lense as government actio…

The problem, though, is that there is one ginormous twitter, and the other twitters are pretty much like fleas on an elephantine body. Or it can be Facebook. They deplatform you, and you and your business may as well not exist at all.

It becomes interesting if it turns out that there indeed exists a symbiosis between the US government and social media companies wherein the latter are compelled to do censorship laundering on behalf of the former, maybe in exchange of their balls being not so tight in the regulatory vise. After all, it’s not censorship if a private company does it, right? Right? (wink, wink)

Re: Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

#39

Vint Cerf was right. The internet is dead. What we have now is the splinternet, where a lot of countries have giant Galapagos intranets. We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this

While I agree china share some blame, and Cisco is a terrible company...

One can not overlook what "Big Tech" has done to silo the internet too. In the 90's AOL dreamed to become what Google, and the other "Big Tech" have created.

Sure anyone can create a site and put it on the internet... But can it be discovered? Can it be found? Not with out the blessing and boosting of Big Tech, gone are the days of truly organic growth

as the old saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to see it..... well if a website goes live on the internet but no can find it is it really there?

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