8 ms·

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not be

This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And then what? Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow. Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.

walkedaway 6y ago
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.
- brippalcharrid 6y ago
  Are you sure that you have an accurate assessment of how bad things are currently vs how bad they would become in a world where access to the Internet was strictly controlled by governments and anonymous/pseudonymous communications were forbidden? Don't you think that the risks in the second scenario are in a different category to the risks in the first one? While being sent to Facebook Jail could limit your social life, it pales besides the threat of Federal Prison.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    This is a contrived fantasy, or a realistic question? We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime. Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
    - brippalcharrid 6y ago
      Read the comments that I was responding to, if it's not clear to you. The GP described this scenario as being realistic, and the parent comment said that this seemed preferable to Big Tech acting without extensive regulation. > We have a system of justice ... That's irrelevant here, and there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name. I think that political content creators on YouTube supporting their family through money from their advertising program are an extreme edge-case, and they can always move to a new platform, whereas people in the former category would risk their non-political day-jobs and this would have a broader chilling effect across society at large. And tell me how the solution to this problem could possibly be to give the government access to and control over the internet activity of every member of the population? What kind of dystopian nightmare would we be trying to create? Do you think that access to this level and breadth of data is likely to make future governments more or less authoritarian? Do you think it might attract more authoritarian figures into politics? Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers or with the cooperation of service providers, but I can't imagine people seriously thinking that this would be a good idea, or maybe they haven't thought through its practical implications.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        "there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name.' I do not see how that is true outside of US, unless we are talking about seriously extremist stuff "they can always move to a new platform" Like what? What platform has at least 10% market share as alternative to YouTube? "Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers" Millions of people is 'limited numbers'? The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it. At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth, a monopolistic company can't. There was a really good quote adressing monopolies: "If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
  - walkedaway 6y ago
    Based on the freedom I have with using phone, electricity, water, roads, and other public infrastructure, absolutely I am sure. Twitter, Apple, and Facebook have showed their hand. I want no part of that future.
29athrowaway 6y ago
That is already somewhat the case in China. Meaning, it is not a possible dystopian future... it is the present in some parts of the world.
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  You can use a VPN in China to gain access to content blocked by the Great Firewall.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    You would be surprised, very very surprised at the great firewalls capabilities, things working one day and not working the next. It's terrible.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Sometimes. A connection from a hotel catering to westerners to a corporate VPN in Europe or North America is probably fine. Change either variable, to a "normal" hotel/office/home or a public VPN, and the connection can become very unreliable, if it works at all.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- teddyh 6y ago
  “The dystopia is already here, just not evenly distributed.” (with apologies to William Gibson)
konjin 6y ago
>Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. I mean you already do. What do you call a signing up to an ISP?
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  You can still (I think) go into a corner shop and get a SIM for cash in the UK which gives you access to online data. Can probably even top up the data allowance with cash too. Get a second hand phone for cash from someone like CEX and you're pretty much anonymous, I think (barring opsec snafus.)
- ralston3 6y ago
  Yes but I can take my laptop to my friend's place and use their internet, seemingly as someone who lives in that house. I think OP is talking more so about an ID (like driver's license type of thing) to use the internet. So that one might be able to say person X visited site Y (again, we have something similar to that now, but not exactly)
  - konjin 6y ago
    You can also ask to use your friends social ID. The only reason why you'd find it odd is that you're not used to it.
- clusterfish 6y ago
  You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id. Alternatively, you can use free wifi or a burner SIM with data. That possibility is not the case in every country, nor will it necessarily remain open in the future.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    > You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id. I don't remember for my current place but I know that when I first moved to the US I needed a credit check to get internet access in my home.
ralston3 6y ago
> and anonymous use will be illegal. Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight. Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth. I 1000% agree that eventually people will need some type of unique identifier to operate on the internet. And I'll take it a little further and say that in the future, anonymity will be reserved for the wealthy primarily.
- dave5104 6y ago
  > I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Isn't this Facebook? Granted I'm sure not every single profile is "verified" with an actual ID, but lack of anonymity doesn't seem to stop as many people as you'd think.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Suppose that you had to have a RealID, or the equivalent for your country, to post on Facebook? Or at least be visible beyond a few close friends. Comments?
    - stretchcat 6y ago
      Most of the people being toxic on Facebook are using their real names. Requiring them to prove their names are real wouldn't change anything.
      - type0 6y ago
        There are also a bunch of people using other peoples names, this has real world consequences, as impersonated John Doe might not get a next job because the employer will scan FB and find awful posts written in their name. Hell, pictures of inactivated accounts are regularly snatched to make impersonations better, nothing new here.
nexthash 6y ago
What makes you think the future will be so dystopian? In Western countries such as the United States citizens have a high level of political participation and awareness of various issues. If the government attempts to unilaterally throttle the Internet there will be such a large uproar that our political leaders will be overturned on the next election. Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of advocating for the freedom of the web. So your fears of a dystopian, throttled Internet seem unfounded to me.
- trident5000 6y ago
  People do nothing as long as they have their cheetos and xbox near by.
  - doctorOb 6y ago
    Hey, those are my weekend plans you're talking about!
- snoshy 6y ago
  I'm not sure what makes you believe this. The voter turnout for the 2020 election was merely 62%, and that was a record high. American voters being more aware of various issues is another myth. Look at how quickly a politician that straight up denied facts made it to the highest office in the land. Political leaders in the US are not really all that beholden to their voters, and very frequently strive to push self-serving agendas ($) over the needs of the public. As dystopian as it sounds, we're already well on our way toward the Balkanization of the internet. Russia and China have their own firewalls bearing down on global network access. Many other authoritarian countries are following suit. It's going to be hard to stop that train regardless of if/how Facebook or Google are regulated. We shouldn't confuse a throttled Internet with a fractured, balkanized one.
- bluSCALE4 6y ago
  I've yet to see a strong political movement on something that actually matters. Everything is half-assed and the major movements all fail. Look at Bernie, the Wall Street bailout, China buying out our mortgages, the war on: Iraq, Afghanistan. And these are just recent memory. The will of the American people has been long controlled. Now they only care what the oligarchs tell them to like unions, universal healthcare, living wages, parental leave, a free internet are either un-capitalistic or communistic.
starkd 6y ago
They've opened up pandora's box. Who knows what will come out of this.
Tokkemon 6y ago
I think you need to lay off the apocalyptic movies for a bit.
- monadic3 6y ago
  Do you disagree? Care you finish your thought?
- RedShift1 6y ago
  It has happened before, it will happen again.
- choward 6y ago
  Way to be dismissive. I bet you would have said the same thing to people a decade ago who thought the government was using the Internet to spy on them.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    I thought that has been a given for a very long time- at the very least since 9/11.
    - brippalcharrid 6y ago
      The idea of pervasive monitoring and dragnet surveillance was very much an implausible tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory in the minds of the general public until the Snowden revelations came out. Everyone knew that we were surveilling terrorists, particularly since 9/11, but they weren't aware that the NSA/GCHQ were doing things like compromising major communications platforms of domestic companies and exfiltrating and storing data indiscriminately in case it became useful in the future.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        I had teachers tell me that I was saying paranoid conspiracy theories when I talked about it way back before Snowden :)
Karishma1234 6y ago
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal The new war on drugs would be coming.
root_axis 6y ago
The decentralized web is the world wide web, and the decentralized tech you're referring to is just a shrunken facsimile of the real thing. Facebook is just the most popular "node" on the decentralized web, if the masses switched over to some ActivityPub social network history would just repeat itself whenever the most popular node bans someone popular.
- colordrops 6y ago
  That's like claiming that digital money can't be fully decentralized. And it indeed wasn't possible until Satoshi figured it out. There's no obvious reason to believe that a fully distributed social network isn't also possible. A requirement would be that any individual would have full agency for all operations on the network. Once you've got one agent that has special power over another agent, it's lost.
  - SR2Z 6y ago
    What Satoshi has actually proven is that the cliche is true: you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, if by "nothing" you mean "nothing that's a major crime." Bitcoin is mostly a speculative tool and what few transactions happen on the blockchain are dominated by drugs and other contraband. Society doesn't hold together at all unless people are smacked back into line when they act antisocially. No amount of technology can change that fundamental truth; ostracism and silence are core to human nature.
    - colordrops 6y ago
      What does that have to do with anything I said? The point was that something previous claimed not possible was actually technically feasible. Completely unrelated to its morals, use cases, or value proposition. Do you now understand my point?
      - SR2Z 6y ago
        It's not technically feasible because feasibility requires it to satisfy the common use cases. Being irreversible makes many use cases infeasible. I see your point - Bitcoin does exactly what it claims to do - but it is not a feasible replacement for money.
Funes- 6y ago
>Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow. >Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Garlic routing provides plausible deniability. ISPs can't know for sure that you are using I2P, for instance, or what you are using it for. Sure, they could force every ISP to ban all encrypted P2P connections. And we could start setting up mesh networks that would subsequently be brought down by authorities. But here's the real question: how much abuse will people tolerate in the name of "security"? What will happen when a majority realizes that these measures are intended to control and suppress them while the elite keeps acting with ever-increasing impunity?
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  People tolerate abuse from the "war on drugs", they will tolerate end of privacy. Just a matter of time and correct propaganda.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    I think we can expect legislation to be drawn up soon. They try it every couple of years anyway, now they'll use the lawmaker's fear of another Capital Insurrection attempt to finally get it passed... the same way they used 911 to punch other holes in the 4th Amendment.
  - obviouslynotme 6y ago
    You are absolutely correct. It bothers me to this day that "I want my weed" is a bigger reason for stepping back on the War on Drugs than "I am tired of police murdering people in no-knock warrants for entire streets with zero repercussions." I don't understand it, and it makes me sad sometimes just thinking about it.
    - bluSCALE4 6y ago
      Yeah, I was waiting in line with a black guy and a white guy walks in with a blue line mask. Black guy didn't notice but man, what a way to flip off your fellow man with merely your presence. It's to hard these days to even imagine walking in someone shoes even if the narrative is being announced on a blowhorn.
philjohn 6y ago
I mean, newspapers have escaped regulation for a hell of a long time - in the UK Leveson was defanged and the "part 2" that would have enacted real change was quietly dropped.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  The UK has strong libel laws[1], which I can only assume act as a counter-weight, so that's a bad example really as it's more complicated than you make out. [1] far too strong in fact as far as I understand it
  - philjohn 6y ago
    Doesn't stop stories designed to provoke outrage and generate clicks and shares in online form - e.g. "look at this asylum seeker who's got an 8 bed house in Knightsbrige and a bazillion pounds in benefits ... GRRRRR" Even when said stories are patently false and designed to enrage and inflame public opinion. See also all the papers who escaped any real consequences for hacking the voicemail of a murdered child (as well as various celebrities).
maedla 6y ago
I don't think that is the case!
- stemlord 6y ago
  Okay. Why.
  - maedla 6y ago
    OP is saying the regulations would be at the international level. So, I am going to have to buy a UN license to use the internet? How is that enforced? If not, then it's up to individual countries to make their citizens buy a pass to get online? That doesn't seem enforceable either.
0x426577617265 6y ago
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. A lot of users IDs are already tied to their ISP. A simple date/timestamp and a IP address would probably identify the majority of users (in the US).
- IndySun 6y ago
  >users IDs are already tied Yes, true. It's more the illegal-to-access-internet-anonymously part that concerns. Overreach is usually declared 'in the name of security/crime' reasons. A paid licence for more privileged access has also been mooted, but I can't recall where I read that.
hollerith 6y ago
>As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. How did the US government take back any control from newspaper barons? I honestly cannot think of anything.

walkedaway 6y ago

> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Sadly, given the actions of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google, that is a preferred option to the current state today. Ironically we will have more freedom in that state.

brippalcharrid 6y ago
Are you sure that you have an accurate assessment of how bad things are currently vs how bad they would become in a world where access to the Internet was strictly controlled by governments and anonymous/pseudonymous communications were forbidden? Don't you think that the risks in the second scenario are in a different category to the risks in the first one? While being sent to Facebook Jail could limit your social life, it pales besides the threat of Federal Prison.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  This is a contrived fantasy, or a realistic question? We have a system of justice, you get to defend youself, judged by your peers and posting general BS about politics is not a crime. Youtube, on the other hand, will ban your channel without any recourse, so if you are earning a living from it, you kids might be on the street because something in a mysteruous machine learning algorithm got triggered.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    Read the comments that I was responding to, if it's not clear to you. The GP described this scenario as being realistic, and the parent comment said that this seemed preferable to Big Tech acting without extensive regulation. > We have a system of justice ... That's irrelevant here, and there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name. I think that political content creators on YouTube supporting their family through money from their advertising program are an extreme edge-case, and they can always move to a new platform, whereas people in the former category would risk their non-political day-jobs and this would have a broader chilling effect across society at large. And tell me how the solution to this problem could possibly be to give the government access to and control over the internet activity of every member of the population? What kind of dystopian nightmare would we be trying to create? Do you think that access to this level and breadth of data is likely to make future governments more or less authoritarian? Do you think it might attract more authoritarian figures into politics? Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers or with the cooperation of service providers, but I can't imagine people seriously thinking that this would be a good idea, or maybe they haven't thought through its practical implications.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      "there are probably far more people who are likely to lose their livelihoods if they post unpopular stuff about politics under their real name.' I do not see how that is true outside of US, unless we are talking about seriously extremist stuff "they can always move to a new platform" Like what? What platform has at least 10% market share as alternative to YouTube? "Of course governments can surveil people currently, but in relatively limited numbers" Millions of people is 'limited numbers'? The liberty you are talikng about was already lost to corporates, the survalience state is alrwady here. you have no ability to escape phone providers selling your date and no knowledge of them doing it. At least governments can be held accountable at the voting booth, a monopolistic company can't. There was a really good quote adressing monopolies: "If we will not accept kings and tyrants over over lives, then we shall not accept a king over necceseties of life"
- walkedaway 6y ago
  Based on the freedom I have with using phone, electricity, water, roads, and other public infrastructure, absolutely I am sure. Twitter, Apple, and Facebook have showed their hand. I want no part of that future.

29athrowaway 6y ago

That is already somewhat the case in China. Meaning, it is not a possible dystopian future... it is the present in some parts of the world.

DonaldFisk 6y ago
You can use a VPN in China to gain access to content blocked by the Great Firewall.
- foxhop 6y ago
  You would be surprised, very very surprised at the great firewalls capabilities, things working one day and not working the next. It's terrible.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Sometimes. A connection from a hotel catering to westerners to a corporate VPN in Europe or North America is probably fine. Change either variable, to a "normal" hotel/office/home or a public VPN, and the connection can become very unreliable, if it works at all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
teddyh 6y ago
“The dystopia is already here, just not evenly distributed.” (with apologies to William Gibson)

konjin 6y ago

>Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. I mean you already do. What do you call a signing up to an ISP?

zimpenfish 6y ago
You can still (I think) go into a corner shop and get a SIM for cash in the UK which gives you access to online data. Can probably even top up the data allowance with cash too. Get a second hand phone for cash from someone like CEX and you're pretty much anonymous, I think (barring opsec snafus.)
ralston3 6y ago
Yes but I can take my laptop to my friend's place and use their internet, seemingly as someone who lives in that house. I think OP is talking more so about an ID (like driver's license type of thing) to use the internet. So that one might be able to say person X visited site Y (again, we have something similar to that now, but not exactly)
- konjin 6y ago
  You can also ask to use your friends social ID. The only reason why you'd find it odd is that you're not used to it.
clusterfish 6y ago
You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id. Alternatively, you can use free wifi or a burner SIM with data. That possibility is not the case in every country, nor will it necessarily remain open in the future.
- fredophile 6y ago
  > You're just paying for a service that needs to know your address in order to function. Nobody will even check your id. I don't remember for my current place but I know that when I first moved to the US I needed a credit check to get internet access in my home.

ralston3 6y ago

> and anonymous use will be illegal. Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight. Anonymity seems to just bring the worst out of people (that's not a tech problem, that's a human/culture problem). I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Post messages...as your public self (not just on an individual platform level). So on and so forth. I 1000% agree that eventually people will need some type of unique identifier to operate on the internet. And I'll take it a little further and say that in the future, anonymity will be reserved for the wealthy primarily.

dave5104 6y ago
> I would personally love to see a "web" where you have to comment...as your public self. Isn't this Facebook? Granted I'm sure not every single profile is "verified" with an actual ID, but lack of anonymity doesn't seem to stop as many people as you'd think.
- Animats 6y ago
  Suppose that you had to have a RealID, or the equivalent for your country, to post on Facebook? Or at least be visible beyond a few close friends. Comments?
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    Most of the people being toxic on Facebook are using their real names. Requiring them to prove their names are real wouldn't change anything.
    - type0 6y ago
      There are also a bunch of people using other peoples names, this has real world consequences, as impersonated John Doe might not get a next job because the employer will scan FB and find awful posts written in their name. Hell, pictures of inactivated accounts are regularly snatched to make impersonations better, nothing new here.

nexthash 6y ago

What makes you think the future will be so dystopian? In Western countries such as the United States citizens have a high level of political participation and awareness of various issues. If the government attempts to unilaterally throttle the Internet there will be such a large uproar that our political leaders will be overturned on the next election. Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of advocating for the freedom of the web. So your fears of a dystopian, throttled Internet seem unfounded to me.

trident5000 6y ago
People do nothing as long as they have their cheetos and xbox near by.
- doctorOb 6y ago
  Hey, those are my weekend plans you're talking about!
snoshy 6y ago
I'm not sure what makes you believe this. The voter turnout for the 2020 election was merely 62%, and that was a record high. American voters being more aware of various issues is another myth. Look at how quickly a politician that straight up denied facts made it to the highest office in the land. Political leaders in the US are not really all that beholden to their voters, and very frequently strive to push self-serving agendas ($) over the needs of the public. As dystopian as it sounds, we're already well on our way toward the Balkanization of the internet. Russia and China have their own firewalls bearing down on global network access. Many other authoritarian countries are following suit. It's going to be hard to stop that train regardless of if/how Facebook or Google are regulated. We shouldn't confuse a throttled Internet with a fractured, balkanized one.
bluSCALE4 6y ago
I've yet to see a strong political movement on something that actually matters. Everything is half-assed and the major movements all fail. Look at Bernie, the Wall Street bailout, China buying out our mortgages, the war on: Iraq, Afghanistan. And these are just recent memory. The will of the American people has been long controlled. Now they only care what the oligarchs tell them to like unions, universal healthcare, living wages, parental leave, a free internet are either un-capitalistic or communistic.

starkd 6y ago

They've opened up pandora's box. Who knows what will come out of this.

Tokkemon 6y ago

I think you need to lay off the apocalyptic movies for a bit.

monadic3 6y ago
Do you disagree? Care you finish your thought?
RedShift1 6y ago
It has happened before, it will happen again.
choward 6y ago
Way to be dismissive. I bet you would have said the same thing to people a decade ago who thought the government was using the Internet to spy on them.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I thought that has been a given for a very long time- at the very least since 9/11.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    The idea of pervasive monitoring and dragnet surveillance was very much an implausible tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory in the minds of the general public until the Snowden revelations came out. Everyone knew that we were surveilling terrorists, particularly since 9/11, but they weren't aware that the NSA/GCHQ were doing things like compromising major communications platforms of domestic companies and exfiltrating and storing data indiscriminately in case it became useful in the future.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      I had teachers tell me that I was saying paranoid conspiracy theories when I talked about it way back before Snowden :)

Karishma1234 6y ago

> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal The new war on drugs would be coming.

root_axis 6y ago

The decentralized web is the world wide web, and the decentralized tech you're referring to is just a shrunken facsimile of the real thing. Facebook is just the most popular "node" on the decentralized web, if the masses switched over to some ActivityPub social network history would just repeat itself whenever the most popular node bans someone popular.

colordrops 6y ago
That's like claiming that digital money can't be fully decentralized. And it indeed wasn't possible until Satoshi figured it out. There's no obvious reason to believe that a fully distributed social network isn't also possible. A requirement would be that any individual would have full agency for all operations on the network. Once you've got one agent that has special power over another agent, it's lost.
- SR2Z 6y ago
  What Satoshi has actually proven is that the cliche is true: you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, if by "nothing" you mean "nothing that's a major crime." Bitcoin is mostly a speculative tool and what few transactions happen on the blockchain are dominated by drugs and other contraband. Society doesn't hold together at all unless people are smacked back into line when they act antisocially. No amount of technology can change that fundamental truth; ostracism and silence are core to human nature.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    What does that have to do with anything I said? The point was that something previous claimed not possible was actually technically feasible. Completely unrelated to its morals, use cases, or value proposition. Do you now understand my point?
    - SR2Z 6y ago
      It's not technically feasible because feasibility requires it to satisfy the common use cases. Being irreversible makes many use cases infeasible. I see your point - Bitcoin does exactly what it claims to do - but it is not a feasible replacement for money.

Funes- 6y ago

>Decentralized systems, and The Dark Web, will grow. >Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. Garlic routing provides plausible deniability. ISPs can't know for sure that you are using I2P, for instance, or what you are using it for. Sure, they could force every ISP to ban all encrypted P2P connections. And we could start setting up mesh networks that would subsequently be brought down by authorities. But here's the real question: how much abuse will people tolerate in the name of "security"? What will happen when a majority realizes that these measures are intended to control and suppress them while the elite keeps acting with ever-increasing impunity?

intricatedetail 6y ago
People tolerate abuse from the "war on drugs", they will tolerate end of privacy. Just a matter of time and correct propaganda.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  I think we can expect legislation to be drawn up soon. They try it every couple of years anyway, now they'll use the lawmaker's fear of another Capital Insurrection attempt to finally get it passed... the same way they used 911 to punch other holes in the 4th Amendment.
- obviouslynotme 6y ago
  You are absolutely correct. It bothers me to this day that "I want my weed" is a bigger reason for stepping back on the War on Drugs than "I am tired of police murdering people in no-knock warrants for entire streets with zero repercussions." I don't understand it, and it makes me sad sometimes just thinking about it.
  - bluSCALE4 6y ago
    Yeah, I was waiting in line with a black guy and a white guy walks in with a blue line mask. Black guy didn't notice but man, what a way to flip off your fellow man with merely your presence. It's to hard these days to even imagine walking in someone shoes even if the narrative is being announced on a blowhorn.

philjohn 6y ago

I mean, newspapers have escaped regulation for a hell of a long time - in the UK Leveson was defanged and the "part 2" that would have enacted real change was quietly dropped.

mattmanser 6y ago
The UK has strong libel laws[1], which I can only assume act as a counter-weight, so that's a bad example really as it's more complicated than you make out. [1] far too strong in fact as far as I understand it
- philjohn 6y ago
  Doesn't stop stories designed to provoke outrage and generate clicks and shares in online form - e.g. "look at this asylum seeker who's got an 8 bed house in Knightsbrige and a bazillion pounds in benefits ... GRRRRR" Even when said stories are patently false and designed to enrage and inflame public opinion. See also all the papers who escaped any real consequences for hacking the voicemail of a murdered child (as well as various celebrities).

maedla 6y ago

I don't think that is the case!

stemlord 6y ago
Okay. Why.
- maedla 6y ago
  OP is saying the regulations would be at the international level. So, I am going to have to buy a UN license to use the internet? How is that enforced? If not, then it's up to individual countries to make their citizens buy a pass to get online? That doesn't seem enforceable either.

0x426577617265 6y ago

> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal. A lot of users IDs are already tied to their ISP. A simple date/timestamp and a IP address would probably identify the majority of users (in the US).

IndySun 6y ago
>users IDs are already tied Yes, true. It's more the illegal-to-access-internet-anonymously part that concerns. Overreach is usually declared 'in the name of security/crime' reasons. A paid licence for more privileged access has also been mooted, but I can't recall where I read that.

hollerith 6y ago

>As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. How did the US government take back any control from newspaper barons? I honestly cannot think of anything.