4 ms·

I wrote about this last year: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corpora

I wrote about this last year: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... It's easy to side with CloudFlair when they go against a site like The Daily Stormer (Which is so out there it might just fall into Poe's Law). The fact is that most decent hosting is only available in a handful of industries. Even the CF CEO has had misgivings of his decision and it gets us into a really questionable space. Platforms should be free to do what they want right? They should be able to deny customers .. just like an airplane company should be allowed to keep people who crazy political opinions from boarding plans right? .. oh and black people too. Oh wait..what? The freedom of speech in the US is pretty limited to government censorship. But we don't let businesses do whatever they want. They can't keep a certain ethnic group from eating at their restaurant, and in many states they can't choose if their venue allows smoking. The big question is, does speech need to fit into this same framework? With the recent child protection act that gutted craigslist and took down backpage (an act that is leading to more violence against sex workers in the US and an act that the EFF and ACLU are actively fighting as being unconstitutional), we see the US government holding content hosting companies liable for the criminal actions of their user base. That is disturbing and already a form of government control over what customers a business is allowed to have. It'd be one thing if censored sites could just go to another provider, but there are only a couple of big providers and their mass has the ability to crush anything they find questionable.

repolfx 8y ago
It's actually worse than there being only a couple of big providers. The problem is that the same sort of people who are trying to shut down sites through legal pressure tactics against Amazon, Google etc are absolutely happy to use illegal tactics too. In particular once sites are booted off large providers onto smaller ones or self hosted sites, that's when the DDoS attacks start. Infowars already saw one, for instance. How many firms can sink large DDoS attacks without needing to kick out the target? Not many. If a pressure group or activist employee base can get content off CloudFlare, Google, Amazon and Microsoft then DDoS-wielding ideological zealots will do the rest and then the site is gone for good. Where does speech go then? It's a very dangerous game for the people at these content platforms to play. I don't see Republicans sitting back doing nothing as their worldview and voter base is systematically wiped off the internet. Legislation seems likely.
- nine_k 8y ago
  > Where does speech go then? Federated / p2p systems like Mastodon? Non-Web-proper sites based on Dat and IPFS? /* If I were an adviser to the conspiracy theorists' insidious world government, I would suggest that pressure on non-consenting opinions be put carefully, to securely remove them form the normal mass Web, but not too strong as to push the normal users away from the (controlled) Web, to harder-to-control media. One way to achieve this is to allow some mild fringe content, and actively demonize any serious non-consenters, so that they'd look way off the chart to general public, thus "worthy" of being censored out. */
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Dat/IPFS are peer to peer protocols. There is nothing that makes them DDoS resistant, you can just locate each peer rehosting content and blast each one off the net. But more to the point, being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased, given that nobody would know how to find or access the new location (Google doesn't index such net spaces).
    - nine_k 8y ago
      Finding and blasting every peer is a bit harder, especially since pieces of content are encrypted on peer nodes, AFAICT. It's not any easier than to blast every peer torrenting chinks of a particular file (which, AFAICT, is still unheard of). > being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased Yes, for now it is! It's a wild frontier without amenities for a normal netizen, such as a decent search engine. So the point of censorship is to force every important non-consenter to that wilderness without having enough other people to go there and civilize it, as they civilized the web, the online music access, etc.
- geodel 8y ago
  I agree. I see this all the time when otherwise reasonable people spout "oh well, Google/FB/Twitter are private companies so free speech argument does not apply to them and that racists/nazis etc aren't owed anything by social media platforms."

repolfx 8y ago

It's actually worse than there being only a couple of big providers. The problem is that the same sort of people who are trying to shut down sites through legal pressure tactics against Amazon, Google etc are absolutely happy to use illegal tactics too. In particular once sites are booted off large providers onto smaller ones or self hosted sites, that's when the DDoS attacks start. Infowars already saw one, for instance. How many firms can sink large DDoS attacks without needing to kick out the target? Not many. If a pressure group or activist employee base can get content off CloudFlare, Google, Amazon and Microsoft then DDoS-wielding ideological zealots will do the rest and then the site is gone for good. Where does speech go then? It's a very dangerous game for the people at these content platforms to play. I don't see Republicans sitting back doing nothing as their worldview and voter base is systematically wiped off the internet. Legislation seems likely.

nine_k 8y ago
> Where does speech go then? Federated / p2p systems like Mastodon? Non-Web-proper sites based on Dat and IPFS? /* If I were an adviser to the conspiracy theorists' insidious world government, I would suggest that pressure on non-consenting opinions be put carefully, to securely remove them form the normal mass Web, but not too strong as to push the normal users away from the (controlled) Web, to harder-to-control media. One way to achieve this is to allow some mild fringe content, and actively demonize any serious non-consenters, so that they'd look way off the chart to general public, thus "worthy" of being censored out. */
- repolfx 8y ago
  Dat/IPFS are peer to peer protocols. There is nothing that makes them DDoS resistant, you can just locate each peer rehosting content and blast each one off the net. But more to the point, being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased, given that nobody would know how to find or access the new location (Google doesn't index such net spaces).
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Finding and blasting every peer is a bit harder, especially since pieces of content are encrypted on peer nodes, AFAICT. It's not any easier than to blast every peer torrenting chinks of a particular file (which, AFAICT, is still unheard of). > being forced onto Dat or IPFS is equivalent to being erased Yes, for now it is! It's a wild frontier without amenities for a normal netizen, such as a decent search engine. So the point of censorship is to force every important non-consenter to that wilderness without having enough other people to go there and civilize it, as they civilized the web, the online music access, etc.
geodel 8y ago
I agree. I see this all the time when otherwise reasonable people spout "oh well, Google/FB/Twitter are private companies so free speech argument does not apply to them and that racists/nazis etc aren't owed anything by social media platforms."