28 ms·

It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Googl

It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn. The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly. Including Google.
- lupire 4y ago
  Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
  - bambax 4y ago
    If you search for porn images on Google you get much more porn without ever leaving Google, than you could have dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
    - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
      I’ve long wondered about their liability here with respect to age verification, consent, etc.
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    OnlyFans has its struggles, and is distasteful in many ways, but plenty of folks have their own businesses built on that.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      So, relying on a major company.
      - compiler-guy 4y ago
        It's a very rare business indeed that relies on no vendors, or only small vendors, if that is your standard.
        q-big 4y ago
        > that relies on no vendors, or only small vendors that relies on many small vendors and one big vendor
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        It's more about whether you can substitute your vendors without deeply upending your business.
      - armchairhacker 4y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't expect most porn stars to know how to get a static IP and set up a self-hosted website with payment processing.
        NoGravitas 4y ago
        Perhaps they should form a union, and let the union do that part.
    - lmm 4y ago
      It remains to be seen whether a sustainable business can be built on OnlyFans; it came very close to getting destroyed last year. And almost every other name in the sector is owned by MindGeek.
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    > It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company It's hard to run your own porn business even if you are a major company. People act extremely sensitive about their fetishes and think they are connoisseurs. but the reality is that 1000 porn movies in the 70s and 80s could satisfy jackoff habits of the whole global population for the forseeble future. The marginal value of more porn being produced is essentially zero OnlyFans is very present in culture and has a monstre evaluation, but if you look at revenues you'd be looking at the sum of some 300 big gas stations. Also OF is not a porn website it's an online GFE service.
    - bliteben 4y ago
      When will we reach the optimal number of books or mainstream movies? How many programming languages is optimal? Marginal value lol
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      By this standard we don’t need any additional media of any kind. No new movies, books, or tv shows. 99% of everything is crap. Most new movies or books are awful or entirely pedestrian and completely unoriginal to boot, and most don’t turn much of a profit. But people still make them for a huge variety of reasons.
      - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      - techdragon 4y ago
        We have new movies? I thought they abandoned that in the quest for reliable profit, dooming us to endless live action remakes, and and endless stream of remakes of comic book blockbusters.
- toss1 4y ago
  Sure there is all kinds of stuff out there. Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX. Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Or just post teasers and redirect to OF. It's so obvious, several well known female streamers are doing it. People are way overthinking this.
  - helloworld97 4y ago
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    This isn't true, though. Porn makes tremendous money, using normal payment methods like anything else. All of the repression is on user-generated content hosting platforms, not porn in general. So sure, direct performer to consumer without a studio is difficult to monetize, but that has always been the case. It hasn't become harder. User-generated content platforms largely didn't even exist a decade ago. Porn on the classic Internet people are pining for was still mostly studio-produced and stars needed agents.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is torrents as it’s always been.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    There is an immense gap between 'major streaming sites' and torrents. If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches. Whoever did the 'sanitizing' of the web should get charged a fine for doing a shoddy job.
    - netr0ute 4y ago
      > If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches I know, college textbooks are prime content to illegally share.
  - parasubvert 4y ago
    Pornbub didn’t purge their user content, there is still lots of it, but they require age verification. All of this action came down to child porn.
    - rafas 4y ago
    - rafas 4y ago
    - rafas 4y ago
- seydor 4y ago
  You are sidestepping the payments issue, which is THE real issue here. Without money, nothing runs
jjulius 4y ago
>It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. >The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Sure, but more of the internet is sanitized compared to 10-15 years ago, which is likely what they meant. More restrictions in place over more domains. Couple that with the fact that more people spend their time on fewer sites these days than they did in 2007, and it's hard to really argue that the internet most people experience isn't more content restricted.
  - lupire 4y ago
    That's good. People who don't want to be bothered aren't, and people who want fringe stuff can enjoy it semi-privately.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Or let me have some toggles so I don't have to seek out a hundred different fringe sites.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Most of this stuff used to spread word to mouth. It still does. 'Funny people' on Reddit still post links to NSFW in SFW spaces. Googling something angsty can be interpreted as a search for XXX. Twitter isn't exactly safe either, and can teach a few people NSFW words to get curious about. R34, DeviantArt etc. are all alive, and anything hentai related is far more prominent and mainstream than before. People interact on these sites and suggest enough to instill curiosities. It's not as on the nose as old flash game sites showing a highlighted "18+" with a shitty age verification or a random ad sending them into the rabbit hole, but it's still very much there.
mfer 4y ago
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture. Here are some examples... 1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be. 2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account. 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others. I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.
- lupire 4y ago
  > Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. They are two different things. Did you mean "sex slaves in porn"? Also, any kind of slave is a problem. You don't need to qualify it.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    I think he meant human trafficking. There's a lot of videos out there of women under duress.
- Griffinsauce 4y ago
  > "About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them." This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff. In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.
bawolff 4y ago
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.
- lupire 4y ago
  So, non mainstream stuff still isn't mainstream?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    But was it actually not mainstream back in the day? Or even if not mainstream, your average user was still highly likely to encounter it, well going about their mainstream day which isn't true anymore.
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      I think you might be overestimating the pervasiveness of hacker culture - even now, never mind ~25 years ago.
      - SiempreViernes 4y ago
        Look to Hackers (1995) for an proxy of how well hacker culture was understood at the time. Pretty sure the sports in Space Jam (1996) got a more accurate representation than hacking got in Hackers.
        naniwaduni 4y ago
        I mean sports is ... very mainstream.
        int_19h 4y ago
vlunkr 4y ago
I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms have found different providers.
- beaconstudios 4y ago
  they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now). Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So they are bad because they choose who gets their free service?
    - lmm 4y ago
      You're aware of the concept of dumping? Yes, it's bad to give away a service that undercuts your competitors and puts you in a monopoly position.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”? CloudFlare is not s monopoly even by HN commenters weird definition. But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.
        lmm 4y ago
        > Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”? Offering a sustainable free tier isn't dumping. Funding a free service with profits from a different business is. > But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal. Some of them have sensible unit economics and just need investment while they scale up. But yes, intentionally or not there is absolutely a whole lot of antitrust violation going on in silicon valley VC.
vkou 4y ago
> The whole point was to be decentralized Why do you say this? The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable. You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.
quest88 4y ago
I would argue it's laws that make them behave this way. Of course profit-seeking companies would like to profit off everything. But they also don't want to risk be sued or investigated.
- jmcgough 4y ago
  A lot of these laws are being pushed by religious-affiliated anti-porn groups that rebranded as anti-sex trafficking because it's more effective for them to make that argument.
jedberg 4y ago
> If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal. Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service? What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  That's the part people forget about "utilities" and "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely because they know the exact identities, (and even locations), of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves, they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is X connected, (or even connecting), to. We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.
  - hnick 4y ago
    This is not entirely true for at least the postal service - someone can address a bomb or drugs with some stamps and a fake sender address quite easily. Only the recipient address is known, but again people sometimes have mail sent to a known empty house to pick up.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    This is very important to not forget. We might also note, though, that that same indemnification exists in a context where e.g. the postal service is under no obligation to keep people from sending things in code to each other, even if police would prefer all communications to be in cleartext.
- 4y ago
tsavo 4y ago
Your points sound awfully close to Net Neutrality.
kmeisthax 4y ago
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is propaganda and cultural myth. Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech. Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1]. Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law. A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself. [0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft. [1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases. [2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.
- boppo1 4y ago
AlexandrB 4y ago
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  Public toplessness is also legal in most of the United States. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_State...
  - silisili 4y ago
    Warning - Above link is NSFW(images of topless women). That said, I found it very interesting. I honestly had no idea it was legal anywhere outside of private or 'cordoned off' places.
    - ekanes 4y ago
      For the folks downvoting the above comment, it doesn’t necessarily reflect a viewpoint (that you could disagree with) but could simply be a heads up for people at a workplace with policies against viewing that content at work. (A policy that you might also disagree with… but the warning itself is still useful to some.)
      - eyegouging 4y ago
        Yup, a lot of policies are dumb and and you can’t tilt all the time. A useful heads up for some I reckon.
      - misterS 4y ago
        I did not and can't downvote, no I have no stake in this. That said, in my opinion people working in such a workplace reading a post "Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022" should be savvy enough to not click links, or read the post in the first place. Also, ironically, the fact that we have to mark such links (to Wikipedia!) as NSFW is exactly what this particular comment chain is about, no?
synergy20 4y ago
Based on this trend, maybe it's time to load up some bitcoin for a profit down the road?
Buttons840 4y ago
Meanwhile lawmakers are focusing on regulating Twitter to give everyone the right to post their sentence amongst the ads. They're targeting the wrong layer. Regulate ISPs, and maybe big hosting companies like AWS and Cloudflare.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The “big hosting companies” are only a tiny slice of how people run servers. https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jassy-says-cloud-less-than-5-of-all-it-spending/ https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas... There is no “monopoly” on running servers and connecting them to the internet.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    That's why I said "maybe", but you make a good point. Although at present, what you say isn't completely true, because ISPs are not common carriers. Fixing this should be first priority.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You realize the same politicians who are complaining about censorship from the social networks fought tooth and nail against net neutrality? While net neutrality is not strictly the same thing, you can easily imagine where ISPs are forced to act as common carriers, but are not forced to prioritize it.
AussieWog93 4y ago
I've got a teenage cousin with a dark sense of humour. The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.
- boppo1 4y ago
  >The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there It's different now. I've been on 4chan a long time. It's a more sinister and hateful place than it was when I was a teenager.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    Or is it that you take the world more seriously than you did when nothing mattered? I know that's the case for me.
AdamH12113 4y ago
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.
- jlawson 4y ago
  It's fine to have to 'integrate with society'. The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are not allowed to operate'. At any substantial scale at all, these are true: - If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. - If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered. - If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid. We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is illegitimate.
  - admax88qqq 4y ago
    > We never elected these corporations; Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected these companies with votes. In the current policital landscape in much of the western hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive policies around speech or access to healthcare. At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck getting your account reactivated when the government sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
    - nostromo 4y ago
      Some types of regulation increase competition - for example, antitrust law.
IntFee588 4y ago
Freedom of choice aside, there is also a shocking lack of awareness that a major factor in the rise of the internet is that it wasn't like traditional media. There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. that would never gain traction with the legacy entertainment industry. There is no point in using youtube or twitter if it's all just clips from mainstream tv or shittakes from established pundits that I can see on repeat on cable all day anyways.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  >There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. Aka user-generated content.
throwaway6734 4y ago
The internet is still incredibly decentralized. Be the change you want to see and stop using normie, silo'd sites
notapornbro 4y ago
I don't know, who cares. It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship. It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned. Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs. But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences! All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense. And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad. A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.
MikePlacid 4y ago
> now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves. Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court. Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable! A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content. So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
- bavent 4y ago
  Maybe there's no censorship, but there's a shitload of white supremacists. Almost exclusively from what I've seen.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    My point exactly.
    - bavent 4y ago
      Which was what?
      - MikePlacid 4y ago
        Let me copy vetbatim: You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.
sneak 4y ago
Apple’s anti-porn (or more accurately anti-nudity) stance even extends on to your device now. The auto-mask feature in ios16 will do shirtless men, but not shirtless women. I’m a photographer who shoots a lot of nudes, and I don’t use iCloud at all. This is the local, on-device software editorializing over my art.
tiffanyh 4y ago
It’s not about “sanitizing the web”. And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed. It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”. Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.
FpUser 4y ago
>"If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal." Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.
SLWW 4y ago
FedNow might be able to provide another avenue, if and when it launches, even though i'm not a big fan of the gov being more involved, but private sector has a monopoly and are being needlessly moralistic and essentially censoring both political and cultural movements through their control. https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
adolph 4y ago
> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Sometimes they win, sometimes their effort backfires like that elderly lady with a cliffside beach house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
scarface_74 4y ago
You really expect the government to pass laws that force companies to allow porn? Did you miss this part? > There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.
krick 4y ago
First off, you kinda have wrong notion of "utilities or publishers", there is no such distinction, at least, not in a sense that would put finance companies into "impartial utilities" category. KYC is why somebody is allowed to be a finance company, they are required to be partial. Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical. Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with. Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
The worrying thing is that these companies are not just applying the law but going beyond that and dictating additional rules and decisions that are theirs. Apple does not like adult content. It does not want to be associated with it not because it is illegal but because it makes them look dirty by association, which is bad for business; or so they seem to believe. So, they are being much stricter than is legally necessary. They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process. Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be? The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business. In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.
- root_axis 4y ago
  > Discriminating people is illegal No it isn't. Discriminating against certain classes of people is illegal. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against individuals based on their behavior.
  - 4y ago
root_axis 4y ago
It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content. Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It's not just prudish, it's down to legality as well. Age verification is a big thing there. It's trivial for a minor to post their junk online (please don't ask me how I know) outside of parental oversight; everything has a camera and is internet connected these days. Who dares take responsibility? Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw. Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke. I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.
seydor 4y ago
> Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare I can't think of a single policy in which they disagreed or were not in lockstep. So it's like we have a single cabal, not 6 > how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. When you accumulate money, your interest is to protect it, not to make more
- fomine3 4y ago
  Cloudflare want to say something.
  - seydor 4y ago
    I don't see that. They dont seem to abide by a different set of principles, they are just not targetted enough and thus dont need to act. The other actors in the list are shielding them. There doesn't seem to be a competition among any of them. The goalposts are generally moved around to whatever is convenient but the principles remain the same.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
This would make any kind of moderated forum impossible.
gadders 4y ago
At least in the UK there seems to be some push back. PayPal recently cancelled (but re-instated after pressure) [1] the Free Speech Union [2]. This seems to have got the attention of quite a few MPs who are looking to pass laws banning politically-motivated cancellations. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reinstates-free-speech-union-accounts-accused-politically/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reins... [2] https://freespeechunion.org/about/ https://freespeechunion.org/about/
ForHackernews 4y ago
It's all about money. For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet. But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly. If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.
arinlen 4y ago
> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. 5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services. Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized. Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies. Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.
psychlops 4y ago
> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. In theory yes, but maybe envision the lawmakers as a monopoly with vested interests and no accountability then project the result.
ellen364 4y ago
“So long as it’s legal” is an interesting caveat to universal service. Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. It seems like a true “utility” internet company would only take down content on receiving a court order. It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.
- foxyv 4y ago
  > Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. This is not exactly true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-private-utility-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-pri...
foxyv 4y ago
You can still buy a domain and happily host it in thousands of places that will allow you to put up anything you want, including your own home. However you have a point about utilities/publishers.
JohnBooty 4y ago
The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare Visa and MC are by far the most powerful forces at work here. You can start an online business without the others, but you can't do it without getting paid. Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards. It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money. People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  So why not just up processing fees on those transactions to the point that they're profitable. If Visa/MC made a new processing code that all adult platforms were required to use, and charged a 10% fee, they would make plenty of money. I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration. Maybe? But in general they're pretty morally agnostic - they don't go shun other "controversial" businesses. Except the cannibus business here in the US, but that's because it's technically still illegal at the federal level.
  - ocschwar 4y ago
    Uncertainty. Doesn't matter what they set their fees to. If a jury decides that Visa/MC is liable for the exploitation of a minor, they will be instructed to assess punitive damages, and the whole point of punitive damages it to make it hurt for the losing party. No tweaking of the transaction fees will prevent that.
- runevault 4y ago
  I'd tweak it slightly. Either you need MC/Visa or you need ad revenue. Though if your business is one the duopoly won't touch I dunno how many advertisers with real money will touch you.
ocschwar 4y ago
The internet was a venue for liberation back when you had to take active measures to connect to it. Nowadays you have to take active measures to disconnect. I'm not sure what to do about this.
behaveEc0n00 4y ago
I am a “personal cognitive freedom across contexts should be protected, full stop.” For example, that means opt-in social healthcare should be a thing that resources are provided for. A minority in charge saying “no” to the public “opting in” spending agency on providing free healthcare is living under a police state mindset; forcing poor who have no real choice into illness, empowering death is freedom! It’s a twisted joke to not care as a society and say we individually chose this; individually we’re beholden to the group think, how neighborly of you all. That we should be expected to spend our time only on profitable (a form of political correctness serving official economic policy ) application of agency is authoritarian, and conveniently coupled to maintenance of financiers past investments. Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference. Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone? There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces. Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn. The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly. Including Google.

lupire 4y ago
Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
- bambax 4y ago
  If you search for porn images on Google you get much more porn without ever leaving Google, than you could have dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
  - AgentOrange1234 4y ago
    I’ve long wondered about their liability here with respect to age verification, consent, etc.
- compiler-guy 4y ago
  OnlyFans has its struggles, and is distasteful in many ways, but plenty of folks have their own businesses built on that.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    So, relying on a major company.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      It's a very rare business indeed that relies on no vendors, or only small vendors, if that is your standard.
      - q-big 4y ago
        > that relies on no vendors, or only small vendors that relies on many small vendors and one big vendor
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        It's more about whether you can substitute your vendors without deeply upending your business.
    - armchairhacker 4y ago
      Unfortunately, I don't expect most porn stars to know how to get a static IP and set up a self-hosted website with payment processing.
      - NoGravitas 4y ago
        Perhaps they should form a union, and let the union do that part.
  - lmm 4y ago
    It remains to be seen whether a sustainable business can be built on OnlyFans; it came very close to getting destroyed last year. And almost every other name in the sector is owned by MindGeek.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  > It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company It's hard to run your own porn business even if you are a major company. People act extremely sensitive about their fetishes and think they are connoisseurs. but the reality is that 1000 porn movies in the 70s and 80s could satisfy jackoff habits of the whole global population for the forseeble future. The marginal value of more porn being produced is essentially zero OnlyFans is very present in culture and has a monstre evaluation, but if you look at revenues you'd be looking at the sum of some 300 big gas stations. Also OF is not a porn website it's an online GFE service.
  - bliteben 4y ago
    When will we reach the optimal number of books or mainstream movies? How many programming languages is optimal? Marginal value lol
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    By this standard we don’t need any additional media of any kind. No new movies, books, or tv shows. 99% of everything is crap. Most new movies or books are awful or entirely pedestrian and completely unoriginal to boot, and most don’t turn much of a profit. But people still make them for a huge variety of reasons.
    - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    - techdragon 4y ago
      We have new movies? I thought they abandoned that in the quest for reliable profit, dooming us to endless live action remakes, and and endless stream of remakes of comic book blockbusters.
toss1 4y ago
Sure there is all kinds of stuff out there. Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX. Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Or just post teasers and redirect to OF. It's so obvious, several well known female streamers are doing it. People are way overthinking this.
- helloworld97 4y ago
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  This isn't true, though. Porn makes tremendous money, using normal payment methods like anything else. All of the repression is on user-generated content hosting platforms, not porn in general. So sure, direct performer to consumer without a studio is difficult to monetize, but that has always been the case. It hasn't become harder. User-generated content platforms largely didn't even exist a decade ago. Porn on the classic Internet people are pining for was still mostly studio-produced and stars needed agents.
bergenty 4y ago
Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is torrents as it’s always been.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  There is an immense gap between 'major streaming sites' and torrents. If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches. Whoever did the 'sanitizing' of the web should get charged a fine for doing a shoddy job.
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    > If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches I know, college textbooks are prime content to illegally share.
- parasubvert 4y ago
  Pornbub didn’t purge their user content, there is still lots of it, but they require age verification. All of this action came down to child porn.
  - rafas 4y ago
  - rafas 4y ago
  - rafas 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
You are sidestepping the payments issue, which is THE real issue here. Without money, nothing runs

jjulius 4y ago

>It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. >The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. I mean, yes and no. People have been successful in sanitizing the mainstream internet, the pop culture internet, the one your grandparents like to visit. There's plenty of internet out there beyond what is commonly used.

karaterobot 4y ago
Sure, but more of the internet is sanitized compared to 10-15 years ago, which is likely what they meant. More restrictions in place over more domains. Couple that with the fact that more people spend their time on fewer sites these days than they did in 2007, and it's hard to really argue that the internet most people experience isn't more content restricted.
- lupire 4y ago
  That's good. People who don't want to be bothered aren't, and people who want fringe stuff can enjoy it semi-privately.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Or let me have some toggles so I don't have to seek out a hundred different fringe sites.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Most of this stuff used to spread word to mouth. It still does. 'Funny people' on Reddit still post links to NSFW in SFW spaces. Googling something angsty can be interpreted as a search for XXX. Twitter isn't exactly safe either, and can teach a few people NSFW words to get curious about. R34, DeviantArt etc. are all alive, and anything hentai related is far more prominent and mainstream than before. People interact on these sites and suggest enough to instill curiosities. It's not as on the nose as old flash game sites showing a highlighted "18+" with a shitty age verification or a random ad sending them into the rabbit hole, but it's still very much there.

mfer 4y ago

> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. It's far more complicated than that and looking at the complicated details is useful to understand the bigger picture. Here are some examples... 1. It's now that far more things are on the Internet than there used to be. Some things that used to be huge are now a smaller percentage in an immensely larger space. In some cases they are bigger now than they used to be. 2. Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. There's both more of it and more awareness of it. In many places there are laws about this that companies who process money have to take in to account. 3. Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild. If more things were more easily accessible than the culture around screens and handling that with kids will need to change. Kids are ready for different things at different ages and the way they view things during their formative years impacts the way they view and treat others. I use these to just illustrate that it's more than money, power, and control by the wealthy. Sometimes (like in the case of #2) it's about the most vulnerable.

lupire 4y ago
> Sex slaves and porn are a thing and a problem. They are two different things. Did you mean "sex slaves in porn"? Also, any kind of slave is a problem. You don't need to qualify it.
- boppo1 4y ago
  I think he meant human trafficking. There's a lot of videos out there of women under duress.
Griffinsauce 4y ago
> "About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them." This is on parents (and how they are educated around parenthood) IMO. Notice the comment about Reddit, even with all the sanitization it's ridiculously easy to find very hardcore (in every sense of the word) stuff. In the same way that you hold hands when you walk past a busy street, you cannot expect the internet to be a safe place. As a parent you have the responsibility here.

bawolff 4y ago

> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Not just in a porn way. Looking back at archives of the old internet just seem way more risque. For example, take the hacker magazine phrack. Maybe its a bad example because a hacker mag is always going to be out there, but the early issues included all sorts of stuff around making improvised bombs. Its hard to imagine anything like that on the semi-mainstream internet now a days.

lupire 4y ago
So, non mainstream stuff still isn't mainstream?
- bawolff 4y ago
  But was it actually not mainstream back in the day? Or even if not mainstream, your average user was still highly likely to encounter it, well going about their mainstream day which isn't true anymore.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    I think you might be overestimating the pervasiveness of hacker culture - even now, never mind ~25 years ago.
    - SiempreViernes 4y ago
      Look to Hackers (1995) for an proxy of how well hacker culture was understood at the time. Pretty sure the sports in Space Jam (1996) got a more accurate representation than hacking got in Hackers.
      - naniwaduni 4y ago
        I mean sports is ... very mainstream.
      - int_19h 4y ago

vlunkr 4y ago

I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms have found different providers.

beaconstudios 4y ago
they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now). Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So they are bad because they choose who gets their free service?
  - lmm 4y ago
    You're aware of the concept of dumping? Yes, it's bad to give away a service that undercuts your competitors and puts you in a monopoly position.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”? CloudFlare is not s monopoly even by HN commenters weird definition. But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.
      - lmm 4y ago
        > Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”? Offering a sustainable free tier isn't dumping. Funding a free service with profits from a different business is. > But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal. Some of them have sensible unit economics and just need investment while they scale up. But yes, intentionally or not there is absolutely a whole lot of antitrust violation going on in silicon valley VC.

vkou 4y ago

> The whole point was to be decentralized Why do you say this? The whole point of the internet was for distant parties to be able to communicate. That's it. Parts of it were implemented in a decentralized fashion because neither the nodes, nor the links between nodes were considered reliable. You can still do all that communication in a decentralized fashion, you're just unhappy that all the value-add services built on top of that substrate don't share the initial design constraints of the network.

quest88 4y ago

I would argue it's laws that make them behave this way. Of course profit-seeking companies would like to profit off everything. But they also don't want to risk be sued or investigated.

jmcgough 4y ago
A lot of these laws are being pushed by religious-affiliated anti-porn groups that rebranded as anti-sex trafficking because it's more effective for them to make that argument.

jedberg 4y ago

> If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal. Unless you have an ironclad way to verify the identity of every poster, you'll get a bunch of illegal stuff anyway. And if you're a "utility", then who is responsible for removing that from your service? What you're really suggesting is "common carrier", but the difference is most common carriers carry the content in a point to point way, not publicly (FedEx, UPS, your telephone provider). For the common carriers that do have public broadcast (radio, TV, cable) they either have to moderate all their content and are responsible for it (TV, radio) or they have to provide an unmoderated but public access section where they know exactly who the content provider is (cable TV, who gets to choose which channels to carry as long as they have a public access channel).

bilbo0s 4y ago
That's the part people forget about "utilities" and "carriers". The reason they were indemnified, is precisely because they know the exact identities, (and even locations), of all of their users. The cops can handle things themselves, they just ask the "utility" or "carrier" who X is? And who is X connected, (or even connecting), to. We have to think up an entirely different model for the newer technologies we are using.
- hnick 4y ago
  This is not entirely true for at least the postal service - someone can address a bomb or drugs with some stamps and a fake sender address quite easily. Only the recipient address is known, but again people sometimes have mail sent to a known empty house to pick up.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  This is very important to not forget. We might also note, though, that that same indemnification exists in a context where e.g. the postal service is under no obligation to keep people from sending things in code to each other, even if police would prefer all communications to be in cleartext.
4y ago

tsavo 4y ago

Your points sound awfully close to Net Neutrality.

kmeisthax 4y ago

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is propaganda and cultural myth. Conditioning liability limitation on being hands-off will only go so far. For one thing, most platforms are basically unusable if you try to turn them into the verbal equivalent of 2b2t[0]. You need to do spam filtering at the least, and that implies making editorial judgments as to what users to take on. It is also possible to use free speech as a censorship tool - say, by harassing or doxing users as reprisal for speech. Even if we walked this back to "utilities must have consistent rules and users can sue for unfair application of them", this is still historically lenient in terms of intermediary liability. The law does not chase pointers: with literally any other field of endeavor, we don't accept the idea that someone can facilitate a crime without being liable for it. That would be a massive loophole. But we accept it for defamation and copyright law because we convinced Congress to accept the propaganda of the Internet[1]. Under current law, Visa and Mastercard cannot disclaim liability that Apple or Google can. This is why the anti-porn campaigns have been so successful at killing amateurs in that space. Apple might be prudish about not having porn in their app, but they can at least accept filters on the app[2]. And, as we've seen with cryptocurrency, letting those companies disclaim liability would be an absolute nightmare. Cryptocurrency has been an absolute boon to ransomware and scam enterprises that otherwise would not be able to take payments. So you will never convince Congress to carve massive, gaping loopholes in banking law the same way we did to defamation and copyright law. A decade and change ago our biggest worry was that Comcast would try to turn the Internet into a series of cable TV packages. Now, we have forced so many people to effectively immigrate to the Internet, that they are in a position to demand that it does actually work like cable (in that things they don't like can be sued into oblivion or taken down). The old Internet cannot exist in a world where it can be used against itself to destroy itself. [0] The oldest anarchy server in Minecraft. [1] For the record, I am not opposed to CDA 230 or DMCA 512. But we still need to recognize that these liability limiters have massively harmed the ability for plaintiffs to prosecute legitimate defamation or copyright cases. [2] I am aware that Tumblr got smacked down for this, but this is not because Apple refuses to accept filtering on social networks. They got smacked down because they are absolutely terrible at filtering anything, and an app reviewer saw CSAM.

boppo1 4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago

> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores. Showing a naked boob is considered porn and banned on most of these platform while public toplessness is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's lucky that at least these companies are not based in an even more restrictive society like China or we would see further restrictions become commonplace.

Conan_Kudo 4y ago
Public toplessness is also legal in most of the United States. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topfreedom_in_the_United_State...
- silisili 4y ago
  Warning - Above link is NSFW(images of topless women). That said, I found it very interesting. I honestly had no idea it was legal anywhere outside of private or 'cordoned off' places.
  - ekanes 4y ago
    For the folks downvoting the above comment, it doesn’t necessarily reflect a viewpoint (that you could disagree with) but could simply be a heads up for people at a workplace with policies against viewing that content at work. (A policy that you might also disagree with… but the warning itself is still useful to some.)
    - eyegouging 4y ago
      Yup, a lot of policies are dumb and and you can’t tilt all the time. A useful heads up for some I reckon.
    - misterS 4y ago
      I did not and can't downvote, no I have no stake in this. That said, in my opinion people working in such a workplace reading a post "Why “go nuts, show nuts” doesn’t work in 2022" should be savvy enough to not click links, or read the post in the first place. Also, ironically, the fact that we have to mark such links (to Wikipedia!) as NSFW is exactly what this particular comment chain is about, no?

synergy20 4y ago

Based on this trend, maybe it's time to load up some bitcoin for a profit down the road?

Buttons840 4y ago

Meanwhile lawmakers are focusing on regulating Twitter to give everyone the right to post their sentence amongst the ads. They're targeting the wrong layer. Regulate ISPs, and maybe big hosting companies like AWS and Cloudflare.

scarface74 4y ago
The “big hosting companies” are only a tiny slice of how people run servers. https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jassy-says-cloud-less-than-5-of-all-it-spending/ https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas... There is no “monopoly” on running servers and connecting them to the internet.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  That's why I said "maybe", but you make a good point. Although at present, what you say isn't completely true, because ISPs are not common carriers. Fixing this should be first priority.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You realize the same politicians who are complaining about censorship from the social networks fought tooth and nail against net neutrality? While net neutrality is not strictly the same thing, you can easily imagine where ISPs are forced to act as common carriers, but are not forced to prioritize it.

AussieWog93 4y ago

I've got a teenage cousin with a dark sense of humour. The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there, even on mainstream social media like TikTok. It's just that most of 30 year-olds don't know about it any more because we're out of the loop. We're square.

boppo1 4y ago
>The shock stuff, edgy humour and 4chan-line shenanigans are still out there It's different now. I've been on 4chan a long time. It's a more sinister and hateful place than it was when I was a teenager.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Or is it that you take the world more seriously than you did when nothing mattered? I know that's the case for me.

AdamH12113 4y ago

> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. And virtually in lockstep, they are becoming increasingly prudish. You can be as independent as you want if you don't care about getting paid. If you want to run a small web site with handwritten HTML hosted on a server in your house that gets a few hundred visitors a month, you can still do that. (I'd be willing to bet it's easier now than it was in the 90s!) If you want to have ten million customers and a staff of full-time employees, then you'll be integrating with the rest of society whether you like it or not. I'm not sure that's unreasonable in and of itself, although I do agree that the way we treat porn (and sex in general) in the US is pretty bizarre.

jlawson 4y ago
It's fine to have to 'integrate with society'. The problem is that you have to 'integrate with this very short list of megacorps, and if they don't like you you are not allowed to operate'. At any substantial scale at all, these are true: - If Cloudflare doesn't like you, you can't have a website. - If Google doesn't like you, you can't get discovered. - If Visa and Mastercard don't like you, you can't get paid. We never elected these corporations; they power they wield is illegitimate.
- admax88qqq 4y ago
  > We never elected these corporations; Sure we did. We voted with our wallets. I'm not sure why you believe it would be any different if we _had_ elected these companies with votes. In the current policital landscape in much of the western hemisphere has lots of people arguing for restrictive policies around speech or access to healthcare. At least with the megacorps there is the potential to build a competitor. If they were heavily regulated good luck getting your account reactivated when the government sanctioned monopoly decides it doesn't like you.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    Some types of regulation increase competition - for example, antitrust law.

IntFee588 4y ago

Freedom of choice aside, there is also a shocking lack of awareness that a major factor in the rise of the internet is that it wasn't like traditional media. There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. that would never gain traction with the legacy entertainment industry. There is no point in using youtube or twitter if it's all just clips from mainstream tv or shittakes from established pundits that I can see on repeat on cable all day anyways.

mrkramer 4y ago
>There were memes, blogs, video content, music, etc. Aka user-generated content.

throwaway6734 4y ago

The internet is still incredibly decentralized. Be the change you want to see and stop using normie, silo'd sites

notapornbro 4y ago

I don't know, who cares. It's always people who produce zero meaningful creative content who complain most vociferously about Internet censorship. It would be better for the average content creator if porn were blocked. I also think things like virtual slot machines should be banned from the App Store. I think conspiracy theorists should be banned. Why do we tolerate ads? A branded video game doesn't have to make money, so it can focus on being fun. There are fun branded games. The budgets are bigger. You don't give a fuck that it's a fucking cereal or cookie or whatever, it doesn't really matter. Chex Quest was a branded video game. And nobody is forcing a creative person to make games sort-of promoting junk food. Like everything it has tradeoffs. But seriously, it's the same people who say "sanitizing the Internet" as the ones who pay for literally nothing new. They are the mouth agape neckbeard guys clutching a fistfull of dollars for a 30 year old gigantism IP, only paying for Star Wars and Game of Thrones, and if it was something that Hollywood hasn't yet said is good, they just do not care. They don't pay for porn. They complain about it being not in the App Store and then they don't pay for it. They are the worst audiences! All this crummy stuff drains audiences away from more substantive cultural endeavors. I understand it is stuff people want, and is high engagement, but honestly, who the fuck cares? So what. What comes next? Engagement is not meaning. But audiences have a finite amount of time. You will reduce meaning if people spend all their time on meaningless things. That's just common sense. And if you actually knew a single talented creative person in your life, you'd learn that they yuck people's yums all the fucking time. It's an essential reason they are successful - they have opinions about good and bad. A certain Twitteratti demand Apple show the nipples and Netflix, in the opposite direction, ban the saucy comedians. In service of what? For really dead end, lame, seriously unfunny and uninteresting teenage-depth narratives about sex. Seriously, again, who the fuck cares.

MikePlacid 4y ago

> now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. I think the blame is displaced. It’s not these nice companies that decide what you are and what you are allowed to see. It’s you. Or more generally - we, the People, ourselves. Indeed: Gab is not using Amazon or Google cloud services, Visa and Mastercard do not serve Gab - it has to rely on checks, money orders and crypto. Gab does not have an app… actually it has, in a way of a web link, copied to your home page - btw I have never seen an app that was better than a web page for the same company, have you? Gab has even launched GabPay, its own payment processor open to others. Gab explicitly promise not to delete anything unless it is found illegal by a court. Still, you the People are not using Gab, you are using Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Why are you not using Gab? Last time I’ve checked it was because Gab… does not delete the content that you the People find objectionable! A cherry on this cake was the decision of some state GOP party committee to delete their Gab account because Gab refuses to censor anti-Semitic content. So, please - do not blame this nice long list of the evil companies. You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.

bavent 4y ago
Maybe there's no censorship, but there's a shitload of white supremacists. Almost exclusively from what I've seen.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  My point exactly.
  - bavent 4y ago
    Which was what?
    - MikePlacid 4y ago
      Let me copy vetbatim: You have at least one alternative. You, the freest people in the world, are not using it. Not enough censorship there.

sneak 4y ago

Apple’s anti-porn (or more accurately anti-nudity) stance even extends on to your device now. The auto-mask feature in ios16 will do shirtless men, but not shirtless women. I’m a photographer who shoots a lot of nudes, and I don’t use iCloud at all. This is the local, on-device software editorializing over my art.

tiffanyh 4y ago

It’s not about “sanitizing the web”. And these companies you mention are getting wrongfully blamed. It’s must simpler, it’s just the digital equivalent of a brick & mortar business saying “no shirt, no shoes, no service”. Additionally, there’s regulatory requirements for some of these companies to not do business in certain circumstances. You can’t fault them for refusing service in order to comply with laws.

FpUser 4y ago

>"If you're a publisher, you take liability for your content and can edit it at will. If you're a utility, you do not take liability for your services, but you cannot pick and choose which customers you service so long as it's legal." Would absolutely vote for this assuming it starts when the company reaches some size.

SLWW 4y ago

FedNow might be able to provide another avenue, if and when it launches, even though i'm not a big fan of the gov being more involved, but private sector has a monopoly and are being needlessly moralistic and essentially censoring both political and cultural movements through their control. https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

adolph 4y ago

> It's sad to me how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. Sometimes they win, sometimes their effort backfires like that elderly lady with a cliffside beach house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

scarface_74 4y ago

You really expect the government to pass laws that force companies to allow porn? Did you miss this part? > There are lots of new rules around verifying consent and age in adult content. The rise of smartphones also means that everyone has a camera that can capture pictures and video at any time. Non-consensual sharing has grown exponentially and has been a huge problem on dedicated porn sites like Pornhub – and governments have rightly been expanding laws and regulations to make sure everyone being shown in online adult content is of legal age and has consented to the material being shared. Tumblr has no way to go back and identify the featured persons or the legality of every piece of adult content that was shared on the platform and taken down in 2018, nor does it have the resources or expertise to do that for new uploads.

krick 4y ago

First off, you kinda have wrong notion of "utilities or publishers", there is no such distinction, at least, not in a sense that would put finance companies into "impartial utilities" category. KYC is why somebody is allowed to be a finance company, they are required to be partial. Second, I don't find it worthy of contemplation if such laws would help, because if they would — they just wouldn't be passed, simple as that. The same way as there's no real point to invent a perfect cryptocurrency, because if it would actually enable things that crypto is supposed to enable — it would be basically shut down, like Monero.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws In some cases the laws are front-running the tech companies, and in other cases it's the reverse. The problem (hand-waving warning) is the vocal minority of the easily-offended enforcing their sterile worldview on a political class too scared of being seen to be permissive of anything less than that which would paint them as puritanical. Despite the realities these laws and policies are incompatible with. Having said all that, yes, it _should_ be laws that address these things.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

The worrying thing is that these companies are not just applying the law but going beyond that and dictating additional rules and decisions that are theirs. Apple does not like adult content. It does not want to be associated with it not because it is illegal but because it makes them look dirty by association, which is bad for business; or so they seem to believe. So, they are being much stricter than is legally necessary. They've effectively become the highest authority on what is "legal". The worrying thing here is that of course they don't implement any form of democracy (other than share holder voting). They are deciding for us but we don't get to be involved in that decision process. Credit card companies are doing the same. They are telling people what they can and cannot spend on and they are telling businesses what they can and cannot use their payment systems for. Effectively they are discriminating between businesses they like and businesses they don't like based on criteria that they define. Discriminating people is illegal. But discriminating against companies (which in a legal sense are regarded as persons) is fine. Maybe it shouldn't be? The solution is breaking monopolies like that and forcing competition to happen. Apple and Google own app stores. That's fine; good for them. But banning other people's app stores isn't. If they don't want to sell something, somebody else will happily take that business. In the same way you can use any credit card you want as long as it is Visa or Mastercard. None of the other ones matter anymore, which is weird. Effectively Visa and Mastercard monopolized online payments and are re-enforcing their position through anti-competitive moves. And of course Apple and Google have payment solutions too that are actually based on those. So, we're talking about an oligarchy that controls payments and online distribution of content that only consists of a handful of companies. They decide what's legal and isn't legal. And they profit from all transactions that happen. And they are fiercely defensive of their exclusive control as it is highly profitable. So, competing with them is one of the things that they've simply decided is illegal.

root_axis 4y ago
> Discriminating people is illegal No it isn't. Discriminating against certain classes of people is illegal. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against individuals based on their behavior.
- 4y ago

root_axis 4y ago

It's pretty obvious that the individual posting illegal content is the person responsible for it and not the platform it's posted to, unless the platform is soliciting or refusing to remove said content. Websites with content moderation should be allowed to exist.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

It's not just prudish, it's down to legality as well. Age verification is a big thing there. It's trivial for a minor to post their junk online (please don't ask me how I know) outside of parental oversight; everything has a camera and is internet connected these days. Who dares take responsibility? Since Pornhub could not guarantee they had 0 underage content, the credit card companies decided to withdraw. Because if the law finds out the credit card companies dealt with Pornhub, and Pornhub was hosting underage people's explicit content, then the credit card company would end up in real trouble. Human trafficking and child pornography laws are no joke. I'm confident Reddit and Twitter will be targeted and announce a crackdown on adult content soon enough.

seydor 4y ago

> Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare I can't think of a single policy in which they disagreed or were not in lockstep. So it's like we have a single cabal, not 6 > how successful people have been sanitizing the internet. When you accumulate money, your interest is to protect it, not to make more

fomine3 4y ago
Cloudflare want to say something.
- seydor 4y ago
  I don't see that. They dont seem to abide by a different set of principles, they are just not targetted enough and thus dont need to act. The other actors in the list are shielding them. There doesn't seem to be a competition among any of them. The goalposts are generally moved around to whatever is convenient but the principles remain the same.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

This would make any kind of moderated forum impossible.

gadders 4y ago

At least in the UK there seems to be some push back. PayPal recently cancelled (but re-instated after pressure) [1] the Free Speech Union [2]. This seems to have got the attention of quite a few MPs who are looking to pass laws banning politically-motivated cancellations. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reinstates-free-speech-union-accounts-accused-politically/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/27/paypal-reins... [2] https://freespeechunion.org/about/ https://freespeechunion.org/about/

ForHackernews 4y ago

It's all about money. For the most part (leaving aside harassment, actual crimes) there's nothing stopping you from setting up a personal website to post photos of your nuts on the internet. But all of these platforms are about making money selling ads, so they are going to make policies that are advertiser friendly. If you want the internet of 1996, you can still have that, but you're going to have to run your own server. Most of the "hackers" on this site are not prepared to do what the old-school web required.

arinlen 4y ago

> The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare deciding what we are and are not allowed to see, read and buy. 5 out of the 6 companies you mentioned are only involved in how you consume goods and services. Not being able to buy something is not the same as the web not being centralized. Also, the reference point you're using as a paragon for decentralized web is also a point in time when people were not able to buy goods and services from any of these companies. Consumerism and free speech are not the same thing.

psychlops 4y ago

> I'm curious if this could be addressed with laws that force companies to either be utilities or publishers. In theory yes, but maybe envision the lawmakers as a monopoly with vested interests and no accountability then project the result.

ellen364 4y ago

“So long as it’s legal” is an interesting caveat to universal service. Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. It seems like a true “utility” internet company would only take down content on receiving a court order. It’s possible that a “choose to be utility or publisher” world would have an extremely polarised internet. On one hand, “utility” services with a lot of illegal content and the police playing whack-a-mole. On the other hand, “publisher” services with liability and therefore intensely risk averse, allowing only the most anaemic content.

foxyv 4y ago
> Utility companies, e.g. electricity suppliers, don’t check whether you’re using the utility for illegal purposes. This is not exactly true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-private-utility-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/26/ice-pri...

foxyv 4y ago

You can still buy a domain and happily host it in thousands of places that will allow you to put up anything you want, including your own home. However you have a point about utilities/publishers.

JohnBooty 4y ago

The whole point was to be decentralized, and now we have Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare Visa and MC are by far the most powerful forces at work here. You can start an online business without the others, but you can't do it without getting paid. Currently, for most of the world, that means you need to take credit cards. It's also crucial for us to note that Visa and MC don't care about porn for puritanical reasons; they're not the root cause of this particular issue. They care only about money. People buy adult content and frequently dispute the charges, which is a headache and eats profits.

fallingknife 4y ago
So why not just up processing fees on those transactions to the point that they're profitable. If Visa/MC made a new processing code that all adult platforms were required to use, and charged a 10% fee, they would make plenty of money. I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  I have to conclude that this is more than just a profit consideration. Maybe? But in general they're pretty morally agnostic - they don't go shun other "controversial" businesses. Except the cannibus business here in the US, but that's because it's technically still illegal at the federal level.
- ocschwar 4y ago
  Uncertainty. Doesn't matter what they set their fees to. If a jury decides that Visa/MC is liable for the exploitation of a minor, they will be instructed to assess punitive damages, and the whole point of punitive damages it to make it hurt for the losing party. No tweaking of the transaction fees will prevent that.
runevault 4y ago
I'd tweak it slightly. Either you need MC/Visa or you need ad revenue. Though if your business is one the duopoly won't touch I dunno how many advertisers with real money will touch you.

ocschwar 4y ago

The internet was a venue for liberation back when you had to take active measures to connect to it. Nowadays you have to take active measures to disconnect. I'm not sure what to do about this.

behaveEc0n00 4y ago

I am a “personal cognitive freedom across contexts should be protected, full stop.” For example, that means opt-in social healthcare should be a thing that resources are provided for. A minority in charge saying “no” to the public “opting in” spending agency on providing free healthcare is living under a police state mindset; forcing poor who have no real choice into illness, empowering death is freedom! It’s a twisted joke to not care as a society and say we individually chose this; individually we’re beholden to the group think, how neighborly of you all. That we should be expected to spend our time only on profitable (a form of political correctness serving official economic policy ) application of agency is authoritarian, and conveniently coupled to maintenance of financiers past investments. Fascism was alive and well in Yerp before WW2 started in the form of old aristocrats who lorded over the soon to be new aristocrats, who had yet to claim total control of public institutions. So with that in mind the “solution” is public control of life preserving logistics networks, and tribal, de-centralized DIY social media for fluffing our imaginations. Ogling punsters, memes is hardly a universal preference. Decentralized filter bubbles are getting easier and easier to host; Docker and k8s via private Wireguard networks anyone? There’s a lot of chatter about new protocols needed for decentralizing. Other than email, I have been self hosting a long list of personal services via Docker for years. I am shocked other hacker types are bought into all the service subscriptions. New protocols will be taken over by old social forces. Tech workers have been told to dog food products as if they’re pets. As a society we once made shopping at the company store illegal. Monopoly busting is about avoiding a minority guiding species agency at scale.