The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied t

The old chestnut "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" referred specifically to USENET if I recall correctly; it is often mis-applied to the Internet itself or to other services. But it referred to the notion that since USENET servers just routed their stash of stories to any node that requested them, censorship was functionally a non-starter; if you (the node owner) wanted content that some other node owner was squelching, you could request it from another node. But it turns out that model had some major flaws. Nowadays, one could say the 'net interprets lack of censorship as offensive and migrates away from it. If there's one thing the experiments after USENET (from Slashdot to Mastodon) suggest, it's that people on average want some control (and don't on average want the burden of being their own moderator for every damn bitstream that comes down the pipe).