9 ms·

This sort of thing illustrates the biggest issue with web hosting, domain registrars and the internet's infrastructure in general; everything is privately owned

by CM30 8y ago

This sort of thing illustrates the biggest issue with web hosting, domain registrars and the internet's infrastructure in general; everything is privately owned by companies who get unlimited rights to decide who and what they want to host. The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP. Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? The power company can't cut off your service because you offended someone online or what not. If you want to argue the internet is a place for free speech, then it needs places you can host content/register domains/whatever that act like a public square, not a shopping centre.

394549 8y ago
> The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP. Exactly this. When the First Amendment was authored, I don't think it was even conceivable that any organization besides a government or state church could effectively censor speech at scale. Now that we have "private" organizations that effectively have that power, it's perhaps time that the law be updated to reflect that change in facts and preserve people's right to free expression. The internet shouldn't be another Zuccotti Park.
- CM30 8y ago
  When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and square and what not being the main platform for discussion. Reaching the crowd meant going out with a handbell or standing on a box passing out pamphlets. Stopping the government from arresting someone advertising in the town square was more important than stopping a shop from kicking out a customer they didn't like. But that's not the case now. The platforms hosting your work are privately owned, the large community websites/social networks/whatever with millions or billions of users are privately owned, and a larger portion of real life locations people frequent are privately owned too. The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.
  - DanAndersen 8y ago
    >The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on. Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement. The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    Sorry, but you seem to be confusing "the right to speak" with "the right to be heard." Your right to speak freely is not lost simply because the town square is empty and everyone is inside private clubs that will not allow you in.
- kevinmchugh 8y ago
  Some of the same people who voted for the First Amendment very shortly thereafter authored the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was certainly much more expensive to distribute writing in 1800 than it is today. It would be much easier to stop a person from printing.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? Because ISPs are, because of infrastructure (access to and across property, or access to scarce spectrum) requirements, naturally sharply limited, but anyone who connects to an ISP can host content.
- DanAndersen 8y ago
  Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? One tactic for deplatforming undesirable sites is a DDoS -- if you put your home server online, what options do you have for DDoS mitigation if the big players in that space decide they're on the political side of those doing the DDoS?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? For a wide reach via the press, you may need to either buy more (or higher capacity) presses or convince those who already have then of the value of devoting them to your ideas. That's inherent in freedom of the press and the marketplace of ideas. You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.
    - DanAndersen 8y ago
      Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks. By way of analogy, consider you are the owner of a small independent city paper -- the sort you see offered for free in boxes on streetcorners. Now imagine a large corporate entity -- perhaps a competing paper or someone with a personal grudge or a political mission. Every day, they go to all the locations where the paper is offered, take every copy, and destroy them so that no one else can read them. You spend the money you have to put it on more streetcorners, but your rival has deeper pockets than you and can hire people to go to all the new locations and take and destroy those papers too. Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?
millzlane 8y ago
Are people still able to download a web server and host their own content? What does anyone need a host for? If a bunch of angry racists want to start their own social network, they could build it, if they really wanted a place to spew their hate. Is anyone really stopping them from connecting to the internet?
- moduspol 8y ago
  Is that the point? There are a lot of people here completely in support of this, and it's not hard to trace an IP address to an ISP. When brigades start calling for ISPs to stop serving these sites, do you really think that's when they'll stand up for free speech? Keep in mind in the span of just a few days, we've seen the jump from application platforms (Facebook, Google) to now infrastructure providers. The leap to ISPs is not that far, and something tells me when it happens, supporters will simply move the bar again.
  - wmf 8y ago
    Historically if you have your own AS number it's very very hard to get kicked off the Internet. But maybe Nazis are revolting enough to make it happen.
    - moduspol 8y ago
      That misses the point. As long as there is an ISP that can be publicly pressured to block the source of content, and the source of that content can be easily differentiated (to avoid blocking other content), we're one Twitter mob away from "existing on the Internet" not being enough to avoid censorship. And it doesn't even need to be their ISP. It could be yours or mine.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    We already have organized brigades demanding ISPs stop providing service to certain people. That is to say, people who spam on an industrial scale. Do you think ISPs should instead be required to host spammers? Perhaps even to provide them extra resources to help them overcome the unfair way people's spam filters censor their valuable free speech?
DerekL 8y ago
> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? *free rein
theclaw 8y ago
The phone company would be a better analogy, and they absolutely can cut off your service if you’re being a nuisance. The first ammendment says your government won’t pass laws against you saying stuff, it stops you from going to jail for the things you say, and it’s there to protect the people’s right to criticise the government. It is not there to force companies to serve you if they don’t want to.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  Okay, so sticking with that analogy, can your phone company cut off your service if you're making racist comments or discussing unpopular political ideas with your friends over the phone? Or, perhaps more importantly, _should_ they be able to?
  - xfer 8y ago
    Phone conversations are private.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      And what if they weren't? Would you have a problem with a phone company listening into your conversations and determining if you said something bad or not?
      - aliakhtar 8y ago
        If you broke the law by saying something, yes. Incitement to violence is not protected free speech.
        computerfriend 8y ago
        That's not quite the definition. But suppose some piece of speech is not protected: that doesn't necessarily make it illegal, just that it is legal for the state to censor you.
        8y ago
test001only 8y ago
I am of the assumption that in the US ISPs no longer have to deal with net neutrality. So why would large hosting companies have to?
- betterunix2 8y ago
  Hosting companies never had to, because net neutrality is only about the Internet itself, not the edge services that host websites and whatnot. One bit of hilarious irony is that the only reason people in the US can access the Daily Stormer is net neutrality (now just de facto), yet the Daily Stormer was full of people calling for the end of net neutrality.
superkuh 8y ago
The solution is not to create more laws which will give the real danger (governments) more power to use their violence. The solution is to simply have everyone host themselves. Even a moderate home broadband connection is more than enough to serve up your personal website. Once you start relying on third parties you've lost. That's their property, not yours. When you claim it is yours and use government violence to enforce your wishes you are doing more damage to society than what you're trying to stop.
- kanox 8y ago
  Your ISP is also a private third party. If Microsoft rejects you why wouldn't Comcast? The 70 dollars you pay for a home connection isn't worth dealing with a twitter mob, so they'll gladly boot you.
  - superkuh 8y ago
    Some might. But that's where this fight should be fought: keeping internet access as dumb pipe infrastructure. The solid base on which the internet rests. As long as that's true people can always route around censorship in services provided remotely. In terms of implementation notabug.io is a pretty cool (and simple for the user) way to do p2p + federated node discussion boards on the web. It's not perfect but this kind of thing paired with tor for domain resolution and transport could provide a communications platform as long as internet access is still uncensored.
- thecabinet 8y ago
  It’s impossible to avoid relying on third parties. Somebody has to lease you the DNS name; we’ve already seen that used to punish sites. Somebody has to host your server or sell you an internet connection. Moving to Tor is the only way to protect yourself from those means of punishment, at which point you’ve lost 99.99% of any audience you might’ve had. You might as well just go to a physical newsletter.

by CM30 8y ago

394549 8y ago

> The solution is to require all hosting and domain companies to act as utilities, and require neutrality in regards to any content that's legal. They're not private forums or homes, they're the internet equivalent to the electricity company or the water company. They're the internet equivalent to a phone service provider or ISP. Exactly this. When the First Amendment was authored, I don't think it was even conceivable that any organization besides a government or state church could effectively censor speech at scale. Now that we have "private" organizations that effectively have that power, it's perhaps time that the law be updated to reflect that change in facts and preserve people's right to free expression. The internet shouldn't be another Zuccotti Park.

CM30 8y ago
When the First Amendment was authored, I suspect people thought public property was going to be where the largest audience was, with the town hall and park and square and what not being the main platform for discussion. Reaching the crowd meant going out with a handbell or standing on a box passing out pamphlets. Stopping the government from arresting someone advertising in the town square was more important than stopping a shop from kicking out a customer they didn't like. But that's not the case now. The platforms hosting your work are privately owned, the large community websites/social networks/whatever with millions or billions of users are privately owned, and a larger portion of real life locations people frequent are privately owned too. The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on.
- DanAndersen 8y ago
  >The way society is going seems to be making the amendment less and less relevant as time goes on. Exactly. As society moves more and more online, it moves more and more into a virtual territory that is owned at every level by corporate entities who grant no rights to their users. If we're not careful, we could end up with a strange cyber-feudal arrangement. The "it's their platform" argument seems strange to me when you start getting into the question of corporations beyond a certain size or monopoly. In the 1700s I'm sure there was a lot of arguing that certain kinds of protest were groundless because this is "the King's land." It took a re-examination of what the boundaries should be before that changed.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  Sorry, but you seem to be confusing "the right to speak" with "the right to be heard." Your right to speak freely is not lost simply because the town square is empty and everyone is inside private clubs that will not allow you in.
kevinmchugh 8y ago
Some of the same people who voted for the First Amendment very shortly thereafter authored the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was certainly much more expensive to distribute writing in 1800 than it is today. It would be much easier to stop a person from printing.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? Because ISPs are, because of infrastructure (access to and across property, or access to scarce spectrum) requirements, naturally sharply limited, but anyone who connects to an ISP can host content.

DanAndersen 8y ago
Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? One tactic for deplatforming undesirable sites is a DDoS -- if you put your home server online, what options do you have for DDoS mitigation if the big players in that space decide they're on the political side of those doing the DDoS?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Anyone with a server can host content in a technical sense, but can it ever scale without playing ideologically with the big players? For a wide reach via the press, you may need to either buy more (or higher capacity) presses or convince those who already have then of the value of devoting them to your ideas. That's inherent in freedom of the press and the marketplace of ideas. You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.
  - DanAndersen 8y ago
    Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks. By way of analogy, consider you are the owner of a small independent city paper -- the sort you see offered for free in boxes on streetcorners. Now imagine a large corporate entity -- perhaps a competing paper or someone with a personal grudge or a political mission. Every day, they go to all the locations where the paper is offered, take every copy, and destroy them so that no one else can read them. You spend the money you have to put it on more streetcorners, but your rival has deeper pockets than you and can hire people to go to all the new locations and take and destroy those papers too. Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights?

millzlane 8y ago

Are people still able to download a web server and host their own content? What does anyone need a host for? If a bunch of angry racists want to start their own social network, they could build it, if they really wanted a place to spew their hate. Is anyone really stopping them from connecting to the internet?

moduspol 8y ago
Is that the point? There are a lot of people here completely in support of this, and it's not hard to trace an IP address to an ISP. When brigades start calling for ISPs to stop serving these sites, do you really think that's when they'll stand up for free speech? Keep in mind in the span of just a few days, we've seen the jump from application platforms (Facebook, Google) to now infrastructure providers. The leap to ISPs is not that far, and something tells me when it happens, supporters will simply move the bar again.
- wmf 8y ago
  Historically if you have your own AS number it's very very hard to get kicked off the Internet. But maybe Nazis are revolting enough to make it happen.
  - moduspol 8y ago
    That misses the point. As long as there is an ISP that can be publicly pressured to block the source of content, and the source of that content can be easily differentiated (to avoid blocking other content), we're one Twitter mob away from "existing on the Internet" not being enough to avoid censorship. And it doesn't even need to be their ISP. It could be yours or mine.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  We already have organized brigades demanding ISPs stop providing service to certain people. That is to say, people who spam on an industrial scale. Do you think ISPs should instead be required to host spammers? Perhaps even to provide them extra resources to help them overcome the unfair way people's spam filters censor their valuable free speech?

DerekL 8y ago

> Why do/did ISPs have to deal with net neutrality while large hosting companies and registrars get free reign? *free rein

theclaw 8y ago

The phone company would be a better analogy, and they absolutely can cut off your service if you’re being a nuisance. The first ammendment says your government won’t pass laws against you saying stuff, it stops you from going to jail for the things you say, and it’s there to protect the people’s right to criticise the government. It is not there to force companies to serve you if they don’t want to.

Ajedi32 8y ago
Okay, so sticking with that analogy, can your phone company cut off your service if you're making racist comments or discussing unpopular political ideas with your friends over the phone? Or, perhaps more importantly, _should_ they be able to?
- xfer 8y ago
  Phone conversations are private.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    And what if they weren't? Would you have a problem with a phone company listening into your conversations and determining if you said something bad or not?
    - aliakhtar 8y ago
      If you broke the law by saying something, yes. Incitement to violence is not protected free speech.
      - computerfriend 8y ago
        That's not quite the definition. But suppose some piece of speech is not protected: that doesn't necessarily make it illegal, just that it is legal for the state to censor you.
      - 8y ago

test001only 8y ago

I am of the assumption that in the US ISPs no longer have to deal with net neutrality. So why would large hosting companies have to?

betterunix2 8y ago
Hosting companies never had to, because net neutrality is only about the Internet itself, not the edge services that host websites and whatnot. One bit of hilarious irony is that the only reason people in the US can access the Daily Stormer is net neutrality (now just de facto), yet the Daily Stormer was full of people calling for the end of net neutrality.

superkuh 8y ago

The solution is not to create more laws which will give the real danger (governments) more power to use their violence. The solution is to simply have everyone host themselves. Even a moderate home broadband connection is more than enough to serve up your personal website. Once you start relying on third parties you've lost. That's their property, not yours. When you claim it is yours and use government violence to enforce your wishes you are doing more damage to society than what you're trying to stop.

kanox 8y ago
Your ISP is also a private third party. If Microsoft rejects you why wouldn't Comcast? The 70 dollars you pay for a home connection isn't worth dealing with a twitter mob, so they'll gladly boot you.
- superkuh 8y ago
  Some might. But that's where this fight should be fought: keeping internet access as dumb pipe infrastructure. The solid base on which the internet rests. As long as that's true people can always route around censorship in services provided remotely. In terms of implementation notabug.io is a pretty cool (and simple for the user) way to do p2p + federated node discussion boards on the web. It's not perfect but this kind of thing paired with tor for domain resolution and transport could provide a communications platform as long as internet access is still uncensored.
thecabinet 8y ago
It’s impossible to avoid relying on third parties. Somebody has to lease you the DNS name; we’ve already seen that used to punish sites. Somebody has to host your server or sell you an internet connection. Moving to Tor is the only way to protect yourself from those means of punishment, at which point you’ve lost 99.99% of any audience you might’ve had. You might as well just go to a physical newsletter.