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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 deplatform

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?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights? By the attacker? Sure, that's a straightforward violation of property rights. By a private third party better able to afford to, say, hire guards to protect against that attack for not choosing to allow you to use their resources for that purpose? No. The fact that people who might commit an attack exist does not give you a claim by right on other private party’s resources as an anticipatory defense. You might have a policy argument that government should provide public, equal access, content neutral resources for that purpose, but that is a claim of on-balance public benefit, not one to which there is an inherent right by any common conception of which I am aware.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    "Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks." The right to speak is not the right to not be shouted down.

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?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Has there or has there not been any violation of your rights? By the attacker? Sure, that's a straightforward violation of property rights. By a private third party better able to afford to, say, hire guards to protect against that attack for not choosing to allow you to use their resources for that purpose? No. The fact that people who might commit an attack exist does not give you a claim by right on other private party’s resources as an anticipatory defense. You might have a policy argument that government should provide public, equal access, content neutral resources for that purpose, but that is a claim of on-balance public benefit, not one to which there is an inherent right by any common conception of which I am aware.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  "Perhaps I was unclear. When I said "scale," I meant it specifically in the context of being able to weather DDoS attacks." The right to speak is not the right to not be shouted down.