3 ms·

> where two endpoint parties are trying to communicate yet there is a third party in the middle playing the position of censor. This is the entire crux of the m

> where two endpoint parties are trying to communicate yet there is a third party in the middle playing the position of censor. This is the entire crux of the matter. Hey if they want to keep communicating they can send letters. There are plenty of communication solutions that don't involve conscripting a private third party to transit the data against their will. > what I see is a description of our traditional values that had been previously serving to foster an open society, but have now fallen apart with companies scaling to own much larger portions of markets, prying into what should be the business of their customers, and colluding with each other to create unavoidable de facto governmentesque power. What I see is the logical conclusion of that open society. If people didn't know we were going here they weren't paying attention. Additionally, the unfettered open society brings us KiwiFarms and 4chan; I think the burden of proof is on those who support this model to explain why companies should be forced to facilitate those actors on the Internet. You can still set up your own ISP If you don't like how the others are playing. You can't do that if the government starts putting constraints on what an ISP is. > If you really don't see the problem with an ISP censoring, then how about the electric company? Entirely different scenario. Electric companies have government-sanctioned local distribution monopolies; those monopolies come with additional constraints on their corporate behavior. Hypothetically, one could argue that in the US at least, this fact constrains Verizon and Comcast's hands. But it doesn't constrain Twitter, or Hurricane Electric, or Reddit, or Google, or Facebook, etc., etc., etc. If you don't like those companies' behavior you can go to another or set up your own. I didn't like Twitter; I run a Mastodon node.

mindslight 3y ago
> Hey if they want to keep communicating they can send letters ... You can still set up your own ISP If you don't like how the others are playing If you're trying to make jokes, then you need to work on your delivery. > What I see is the logical conclusion of that open society. If people didn't know we were going here they weren't paying attention I generally hate references to the paradox of tolerance, but you're essentially advocating intolerance that takes advantage of tolerance. I'd say that when the logical conclusions of rules that currently lead to an open society are abused to create an ever-more closed society, those rules need to be amended - it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction. Even when pushed you seem to be pretty explicitly support corporate authoritarianism, so I doubt I'm going to change your mind. But as I said in another comment - it's quite comfortable to cheerlead for authoritarianism when it aligns with your preferences, but the winds can change at any time.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction I believe it's also foolish to assume the outcome of forcing people to transit signal harmful to them is moral. The nice thing about the status quo is we can address this problem with our own choices: if one doesn't like HE's behavior, for instance, one can de-peer from HE. The 'net can interpret censorship as damage and route around it, as it were. I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association. But so long as it can be routed around, it's fine (and if it cannot be routed around, we have antitrust for that). But consider Mastodon, where individual users are continuously deciding who to follow and who to block and node operators are continuously deciding similar questions at the node-to-node peer level. It's beautiful chaos, not authoritarianism. What business would the State of California have dictating to every Mastodon admin the rules of their node (or, for that matter: ¿cui bono? from the state even tracking those policies? Maybe it's none of the state's damn business who I let on my node and who I peer / de-peer from.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > forcing people to transit signal harmful to them This is like the third time you've swapped in a sympathetically-small example to make it sound as if any regulation of large companies implies that grassroots individuals would be forced to unreasonably do things against their will. But we're not discussing a vibrant competitive landscape of Mastodon instances, local mom-and-pop ISPs, websites run by individuals, or "people". Rather we're talking about the likes of Twitter, Google, and Comcast. > I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association I wholeheartedly agree with individual sovereignty, and that's precisely where my comment is coming from. The second part is fallacious induction - scale is the entire crux of the matter, especially with the context of Metcalfe's law. The larger these companies get, and the more they cooperate with each other, the more inescapable interacting with them becomes. This destroys the ideal of individual sovereignty for actual individuals. Hand waving about "antitrust" is an excuse that doesn't redeem the narrative. If you were actually concerned about coercive power created through anticompetitive actions, you'd lead with the utter lack of anti-trust enforcement and arrive at very different conclusion. For example reforming this bundling of identity, data hosting, and software that is pervasive across the industry would go a long way to reforming the power dynamics. On the topic of actually running more decentralized nodes, I'm all for it. If you want to discuss things non-normatively as an assumption of the worst case fusing of government and corporate power, I'm right there with you. But in the context of the big tech power consolidation, what are currently small-time self-help options for the technical few to hide from the overall trend aren't particularly relevant. For example even though I've always run my own mail server and recommend people get their own domains, I can still condemn the negative societal effects of Gmail having unilateral control over many individuals' online identities. (In fact doing so gets even more important because Google blazing the trail of unilateral corporate authoritarianism has caused the domain registries to want to get in on the shameless action)

mindslight 3y ago

> Hey if they want to keep communicating they can send letters ... You can still set up your own ISP If you don't like how the others are playing If you're trying to make jokes, then you need to work on your delivery. > What I see is the logical conclusion of that open society. If people didn't know we were going here they weren't paying attention I generally hate references to the paradox of tolerance, but you're essentially advocating intolerance that takes advantage of tolerance. I'd say that when the logical conclusions of rules that currently lead to an open society are abused to create an ever-more closed society, those rules need to be amended - it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction. Even when pushed you seem to be pretty explicitly support corporate authoritarianism, so I doubt I'm going to change your mind. But as I said in another comment - it's quite comfortable to cheerlead for authoritarianism when it aligns with your preferences, but the winds can change at any time.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction I believe it's also foolish to assume the outcome of forcing people to transit signal harmful to them is moral. The nice thing about the status quo is we can address this problem with our own choices: if one doesn't like HE's behavior, for instance, one can de-peer from HE. The 'net can interpret censorship as damage and route around it, as it were. I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association. But so long as it can be routed around, it's fine (and if it cannot be routed around, we have antitrust for that). But consider Mastodon, where individual users are continuously deciding who to follow and who to block and node operators are continuously deciding similar questions at the node-to-node peer level. It's beautiful chaos, not authoritarianism. What business would the State of California have dictating to every Mastodon admin the rules of their node (or, for that matter: ¿cui bono? from the state even tracking those policies? Maybe it's none of the state's damn business who I let on my node and who I peer / de-peer from.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > forcing people to transit signal harmful to them This is like the third time you've swapped in a sympathetically-small example to make it sound as if any regulation of large companies implies that grassroots individuals would be forced to unreasonably do things against their will. But we're not discussing a vibrant competitive landscape of Mastodon instances, local mom-and-pop ISPs, websites run by individuals, or "people". Rather we're talking about the likes of Twitter, Google, and Comcast. > I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association I wholeheartedly agree with individual sovereignty, and that's precisely where my comment is coming from. The second part is fallacious induction - scale is the entire crux of the matter, especially with the context of Metcalfe's law. The larger these companies get, and the more they cooperate with each other, the more inescapable interacting with them becomes. This destroys the ideal of individual sovereignty for actual individuals. Hand waving about "antitrust" is an excuse that doesn't redeem the narrative. If you were actually concerned about coercive power created through anticompetitive actions, you'd lead with the utter lack of anti-trust enforcement and arrive at very different conclusion. For example reforming this bundling of identity, data hosting, and software that is pervasive across the industry would go a long way to reforming the power dynamics. On the topic of actually running more decentralized nodes, I'm all for it. If you want to discuss things non-normatively as an assumption of the worst case fusing of government and corporate power, I'm right there with you. But in the context of the big tech power consolidation, what are currently small-time self-help options for the technical few to hide from the overall trend aren't particularly relevant. For example even though I've always run my own mail server and recommend people get their own domains, I can still condemn the negative societal effects of Gmail having unilateral control over many individuals' online identities. (In fact doing so gets even more important because Google blazing the trail of unilateral corporate authoritarianism has caused the domain registries to want to get in on the shameless action)