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> You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen. It's difficult when the backbone of the i

by bko 5y ago

> You can even spin up your own sources and serve whatever you want,a right not afforded the average Chinese citizen. It's difficult when the backbone of the internet isn't available to you. For instance, AWS can be denied cutting off vital internet infrastructure we take for granted. Further payment processors like Visa can cut off access. Even banks could cut you off and even seize your funds if they got the directive. You can spin your own service is a nice fiction we tell ourselves but with financing getting cut off it becomes impossible to build a service that reaches a lot of people without a lot of money and a disregard for profit. In China maybe someone would come knocking on the door to take you away to jail. But in the US, we don't need to go that far. All it would take is the press secretary telling big tech they need to help fight "misinformation" and pointing them in the right direction.

vikingerik 5y ago
And spinning your own service also fails once the upstream ISPs and DNS registrars also start banning you for wrongthink. That's coming too.
- bko 5y ago
  That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency). But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
- roenxi 5y ago
  I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software. Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
- omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
  That's where we need regulation. There should some default level of access to the net by everyone. At the same time, don't expect everyone to provide access to their platform regardless of what someone does. YouTube suspending accounts is the old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
deleted 5y ago
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by bko 5y ago

vikingerik 5y ago

And spinning your own service also fails once the upstream ISPs and DNS registrars also start banning you for wrongthink. That's coming too.

bko 5y ago
That's a good point. It just keeps moving upstream. I'm especially worried about the tie between big tech and the government. There's open communication between the two and the current administration is helping tech companies craft their "misinformation policy". On a certain level its inevitable. If you want to make sure people have reliable resources, someone needs to identify whats reliable and what's not (usually a three letter agency). But when you have the white house openly call on a Swedish company to censor a popular podcaster, that's where I draw the line. Artists can pull their music, people can boycott, but the government shouldn't have their finger on the scale. That's exactly what the 1st amendment is about. If the state can declare something should be censored and it is (voluntarily though!) then it's no different than force. And when you exert that same pressure on upstream providers, you've essentially rebuilt the great firewall of China without any casualties.
roenxi 5y ago
I'm sceptical that is technically possible. If it was, it would have been deployed against the torrent websites by now. Despite countless attempts to shut them down, trackers are still easy to access with only basic technical knowledge and no specialist software. Communication is even harder to block than torrent traffic. At least torrents have an unusual characteristic traffic pattern that could be checked for. Watching wrongthink videos over an encrypted connection doesn't even have that.
omgwtfbyobbq 5y ago
That's where we need regulation. There should some default level of access to the net by everyone. At the same time, don't expect everyone to provide access to their platform regardless of what someone does. YouTube suspending accounts is the old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn.

deleted 5y ago

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