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Net neutrality is crucial for a free internet. This will be even more important for the future, because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls ove

Net neutrality is crucial for a free internet. This will be even more important for the future, because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. A lack of neutrality will, among other things, allow secret deals between service providers and big platforms that will squeeze out the independent internet and accelerate a total commercialization of all aspects of the internet. Large businesses are becoming a greater liability than ever before. Although I applaud net neutrality advocates, something greater must be done: the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch.

bko 2y ago
Is there any evidence that this is taking place since it's been over 7 years since it's repeal? And that it's harming competition? I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. If some regulatory agency is telling ISPs to allow legitimate content equally, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine they'll forbid "illegitimate" content. Think cheap fakes and other misinformation.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  This is a difficult demand to meet, because (as many people have said) the main causalities of net neutrality are the companies and platforms which never get started because potential founders rationally calculate that they can’t compete with existing zero-rated services when ISPs play favorites. Lack of NN has massive opportunity costs for innovation, but these are difficult to quantify.
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  Yes we do have evidence. For example ISPs throttling specifically Netflix, and trying to extort money from them, when the customers already paid for the service. And continuing to do so, after Netflix offered to host middleboxes in their datacenters, to discredit their fake arguments. They are not doing that for service quality, but out of greed. We should have had comprehensive broadband and fiber in every home for decades, but ISPs would rather throttle you, and charge you more for worse service, rather than make overdue investments in infrastructure. Or ISPs not counting their own streaming services towards the data cap, but counting their competitors. Very anti competitive. We need net neutrality.
  - bko 2y ago
    I don't exactly feel bad for Netflix, but can you provide a link? Let me see if I understand. ISPs are extorting Netflix. And Netflix is hosting middleboxes that improve quality, but they don't actually care about improving quality, they are greedy, by not wanting to be extorted by the ISPs? And we don't build out fiber because ISPs would rather throttle you and they can't do two things at once. But doesn't throttling and extorting companies like Netflix give them more revenue to build fiber? Or somehow the new fiber and customers they could get somehow prevents their ability to throttle? No offense but this is the typical unpersuasive argument for net neutrality I hear. It's just non-sensical and all over the place. It makes no logical sense. Maybe there's a better argument, but so much of what I hear is this and it leads me to believe that proponents are just rooting for a sports team. The equivalent of arguing with a ref after a call against your team.
    - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
      The person you’re replying to was admittedly shortening the argument somewhat, so let’s expand it for you and anyone else that cares. You misread some fairly crucial points. ISPs care about something called “transit”. Transit is when you’re given a packet by someone that you connect to directly, but you don’t have a direct path to the destination, and need to go through some other entity to get there, such as another ISP. When you pay them for that (usually as a metered charge, or simply by size of the interconnect), this is called “buying transit”. When you connect that way, though, you can also agree with the other side that it’s mutually beneficial to just interconnect. After all, you might be giving them paths to destination they can’t get to directly. When you interconnect without payment (either way! There commonly are interconnects where only one side pays), that’s called peering. Internet ISPs exist on something called tiers. A tier 1, by actual definition, is an ISP that doesn’t pay anyone for transit because they peer with anyone. ISPs that only pay tier 1s for transit and peer with everyone they connect to that isn’t a tier 1 are called tier 2s, and so on. Transit is expensive so ISPs strive to be at a high tier and push as much data via peerings as possible. The best thing, of course, is when the ISP doesn’t have to go through an interconnect at all and can simply complete the full path on its own backbone, which is just smart use of assets you own. Netflix sends ISPs a lot of data. This can make the transit an ISP uses to get to Netflix quite expensive. Netflix also offers ISPs caches, which means that Netflix is telling ISPs that they are happy to take a box with a petabyte of storage, put their most popular programming on it, meet the ISP at some exchange point, and put an interface on that cache onto the ISPs network. Now the ISP can just use its backbone to serve Netflix streams available via that cache. Some ISPs have documented behavior of refusing to put a cache onto their network, instead asking Netflix to subvert or fund the transit cost. They don’t care about how good their customer’s Netflix experience is, they want to generate revenue. This is arguably greedy. ISPs also have a last mile issue. Backbone networks are typically quite good in the US, but there are capacity problems where the ISP meets actual customers. Some ISPs have a documented history of taking federal grants given to improve last mile networks and just not making those actual investments. This was particularly prevalent in the 2000s. Instead, they simply offer lower speeds or introduce data caps that let them throttle end users after certain thresholds, which reduces the overall load on their last mile networks
- piva00 2y ago
  > I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. Slippery slope fallacy. The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage. Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets. ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship). And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
    - piva00 2y ago
      > it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.
phkahler 2y ago
>> the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch. They are actually destroying themselves. Enshitification is killing Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and more. Just build solid alternatives focused on user satisfaction instead of profit so people have viable alternatives. You can't build anything great from scratch in less than 10 years.
- auc 2y ago
  You say this, but their share prices are pretty much straight lines up the last 10 years (other than a short lived dip during Covid).
  - dartos 2y ago
    Pretty sure tech stocks boomed during covid.
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      Certainly, but they did also have a short-lived drop, as GP mentioned.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  We don't really need to build from scratch in less than 10 years. We don't really NEED something as good as netflix, google, or Facebook. We need smaller, better alternatives. Ask yourself this: imagine Facebook and Twitter going down for good. Would society be worse off? Probably not. We'd quickly find alternatives. Maybe they wouldn't be as fully featured but they'd work.
  - sydbarrett74 2y ago
    If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, I would argue that the world would be vastly better off.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Enshitification is killing Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and more Based on what metric?
Hendrikto 2y ago
> takedown of large corporations absolutely > and rebuilding them absolutely not
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  Given enough time and slack, they will rebuild itself, no matter what. Corporations and cancer, they keep coming back.
  - Hendrikto 2y ago
    That’s what antitrust law is for. We just need to actually enforce it.
    - AdrianB1 2y ago
      Antitrust laws in US rarely works. I have no idea if the problem is bad law or bad enforcement, but the results are bad.
      - palata 2y ago
        Isn't it the case that the US has just mostly stopped enforcing antitrust laws in the last 3-4 decades? That would explain why they don't work.
      - ajmurmann 2y ago
        What are examples where antitrust laws should have been applied but aren't?
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        from my glimpse, it's bad enforcement and outright sleazy lobbying or conflict of interest. the laws can be better, but I find it hard to imagine any actual court case ruling in Google/Amazon's favor in anything. Apple is a bit harder and that may be where the laws are a bit outdated. But EU is setting a good precedent when that comes around.
    - 2y ago
AdrianB1 2y ago
I fully agree with what you wrote. The question is: current laws are fit for purpose? There are many things that are wrong and supported by laws or things that can be improved but existing laws forbid that. Is this a question about net neutrality or a question about how can/should be implemented? Same about corporate powers, especially in US where consumer protection seems to be a lot weaker than in EU, even if US has a lot more regulations.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Good points. I do feel like the current laws are still insufficient, and will ultimately fail due to the corporate control of the internet/governments. More drastic solutions are probably needed. Much better anti-trust laws perhaps to combat the excessive power of big tech, maybe.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    The issue is the government has been ignoring for nearly 4 decades passing proper laws. They have been deferring to these groups to make fiat laws and calling them regulations. Laws not passed by the congress or senate. The current ruling exactly because the supreme court has basically said 'hey congress do your job and we are not deferring to these made up laws anymore'. It is going to be very messy for a long time. I got ganged up on when this was first done in the FCC. I said it will flip flop depending on who is in power and what their motivations are. Here we are 15 years later and that is exactly what happened. Until Title III is written there will be no real change. We should not let the executive branch have law judge and jury authority. It was not designed that way, it fundamentally breaks the separation of duties. We should also not let the congress and senate and judiciary cede their authority because it is convenient at the moment.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      If you look at who we elect and how there is no reason to believe they will every be capable of drafting laws on complex subject matter nor revising them to keep up with the times. Adopting a strategy that wouldn't have worked in 1980 and probably wont work in 2080 unless the country is literally torn down and rebuilt from the ground up doesn't seem like an effective strategy. The supreme court has never just been a cold arbiter of law and they certainly aren't acting thus now. The intention isn't for congress to do their job the purpose is to gut regulation so that the parties who hired the justices by proxy can profit.
pjmlp 2y ago
We are already beyond that, with countries closing down Internet access, and geopolitics going back to the cold war days.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
This is where boycotts come in. Time to actually suffer to get what you want people.
- afavour 2y ago
  I think this understates how essential internet access is these days. It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider. Like, “not able to do your job” difficult. Few people are going to risk their job for net neutrality rules.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    > It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider. As I said; "Time to actually suffer to get what you want people." But I am not just talking about the providers, I am talking about compaines like Facebook and Google. But my Grandfather was a coal miner in PA and they had strikes that led directly to some of their deaths by murder by agents of the coal companies, so do not talk about losing your job would be hard.
    - afavour 2y ago
      You don't see the difference between miners striking to improve their livelihoods and striking for net neutrality rules? I'd think it would be obvious far fewer people are prepared to do the latter. The stakes simply aren't as high.
      - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
        People here seem to think net neutrality effects their livelihood...
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    This isn't a first (or hundredth) shot. it's a boiling frog. They won't even know their internet is slower and blame the website.
CivBase 2y ago
I'm pro net neutrality, but if it's ever going to work we need the legislature to do their job and put it into law. They either need to broaden the powers of the FCC or - better yet - enshrine net neutrality itself as law.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  This is a part of the windfall from Chevron and all according to plan. Tear down the executive structures and have a congress in conflict. Leave the rest to "states rights" for their motte. When in reality we're giving the keys for private corporations to do whatever they want. we'll likely see similar moves with the Department of Education this year.
  - CivBase 2y ago
    Congress is no more in conflict now than it has been for the last two or three decades.
assimpleaspossi 2y ago
>we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Years ago, I said this might happen. Way back when, there was no FCC and the airwaves were the Wild West and anyone could throw up an antenna and call themselves a broadcaster. The internet is too wild and you all know it. I, too, want to be able to put together my own web site to hold content or sell my wares but, as psychologists now warn, the harm this "anything goes" content has caused us needs to be tamed.
smsm42 2y ago
> because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Were you paying attention for the last 10 years? We already have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Pretty much every government on the planet is itching to institute internet censorship, and many already did. Major content providers are tightly working with the governments to ensure no information disapproved by the government is allowed on their platforms. States are instituting digital ID schemes to control access to sites (and if you think it's only about porn you're still not paying attention). People are regularly deplatformed and banned from major internet services for expressing controversial opinions. Are you trying to scare me with something that had already happened? > something greater must be done: the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch. Ah yes, of course, only the glorious proletarian revolution will save us. How does it go? Le monde va changer de base: Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout! Please wake me up when that happens. On the second thought, please don't, I'd rather not see it. We had enough of it in the last centrury, thankyouverymuch.

bko 2y ago

Is there any evidence that this is taking place since it's been over 7 years since it's repeal? And that it's harming competition? I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. If some regulatory agency is telling ISPs to allow legitimate content equally, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine they'll forbid "illegitimate" content. Think cheap fakes and other misinformation.

Analemma_ 2y ago
This is a difficult demand to meet, because (as many people have said) the main causalities of net neutrality are the companies and platforms which never get started because potential founders rationally calculate that they can’t compete with existing zero-rated services when ISPs play favorites. Lack of NN has massive opportunity costs for innovation, but these are difficult to quantify.
Hendrikto 2y ago
Yes we do have evidence. For example ISPs throttling specifically Netflix, and trying to extort money from them, when the customers already paid for the service. And continuing to do so, after Netflix offered to host middleboxes in their datacenters, to discredit their fake arguments. They are not doing that for service quality, but out of greed. We should have had comprehensive broadband and fiber in every home for decades, but ISPs would rather throttle you, and charge you more for worse service, rather than make overdue investments in infrastructure. Or ISPs not counting their own streaming services towards the data cap, but counting their competitors. Very anti competitive. We need net neutrality.
- bko 2y ago
  I don't exactly feel bad for Netflix, but can you provide a link? Let me see if I understand. ISPs are extorting Netflix. And Netflix is hosting middleboxes that improve quality, but they don't actually care about improving quality, they are greedy, by not wanting to be extorted by the ISPs? And we don't build out fiber because ISPs would rather throttle you and they can't do two things at once. But doesn't throttling and extorting companies like Netflix give them more revenue to build fiber? Or somehow the new fiber and customers they could get somehow prevents their ability to throttle? No offense but this is the typical unpersuasive argument for net neutrality I hear. It's just non-sensical and all over the place. It makes no logical sense. Maybe there's a better argument, but so much of what I hear is this and it leads me to believe that proponents are just rooting for a sports team. The equivalent of arguing with a ref after a call against your team.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
    The person you’re replying to was admittedly shortening the argument somewhat, so let’s expand it for you and anyone else that cares. You misread some fairly crucial points. ISPs care about something called “transit”. Transit is when you’re given a packet by someone that you connect to directly, but you don’t have a direct path to the destination, and need to go through some other entity to get there, such as another ISP. When you pay them for that (usually as a metered charge, or simply by size of the interconnect), this is called “buying transit”. When you connect that way, though, you can also agree with the other side that it’s mutually beneficial to just interconnect. After all, you might be giving them paths to destination they can’t get to directly. When you interconnect without payment (either way! There commonly are interconnects where only one side pays), that’s called peering. Internet ISPs exist on something called tiers. A tier 1, by actual definition, is an ISP that doesn’t pay anyone for transit because they peer with anyone. ISPs that only pay tier 1s for transit and peer with everyone they connect to that isn’t a tier 1 are called tier 2s, and so on. Transit is expensive so ISPs strive to be at a high tier and push as much data via peerings as possible. The best thing, of course, is when the ISP doesn’t have to go through an interconnect at all and can simply complete the full path on its own backbone, which is just smart use of assets you own. Netflix sends ISPs a lot of data. This can make the transit an ISP uses to get to Netflix quite expensive. Netflix also offers ISPs caches, which means that Netflix is telling ISPs that they are happy to take a box with a petabyte of storage, put their most popular programming on it, meet the ISP at some exchange point, and put an interface on that cache onto the ISPs network. Now the ISP can just use its backbone to serve Netflix streams available via that cache. Some ISPs have documented behavior of refusing to put a cache onto their network, instead asking Netflix to subvert or fund the transit cost. They don’t care about how good their customer’s Netflix experience is, they want to generate revenue. This is arguably greedy. ISPs also have a last mile issue. Backbone networks are typically quite good in the US, but there are capacity problems where the ISP meets actual customers. Some ISPs have a documented history of taking federal grants given to improve last mile networks and just not making those actual investments. This was particularly prevalent in the 2000s. Instead, they simply offer lower speeds or introduce data caps that let them throttle end users after certain thresholds, which reduces the overall load on their last mile networks
piva00 2y ago
> I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. Slippery slope fallacy. The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage. Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets. ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship). And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
  - piva00 2y ago
    > it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.

phkahler 2y ago

>> the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch. They are actually destroying themselves. Enshitification is killing Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and more. Just build solid alternatives focused on user satisfaction instead of profit so people have viable alternatives. You can't build anything great from scratch in less than 10 years.

auc 2y ago
You say this, but their share prices are pretty much straight lines up the last 10 years (other than a short lived dip during Covid).
- dartos 2y ago
  Pretty sure tech stocks boomed during covid.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    Certainly, but they did also have a short-lived drop, as GP mentioned.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
We don't really need to build from scratch in less than 10 years. We don't really NEED something as good as netflix, google, or Facebook. We need smaller, better alternatives. Ask yourself this: imagine Facebook and Twitter going down for good. Would society be worse off? Probably not. We'd quickly find alternatives. Maybe they wouldn't be as fully featured but they'd work.
- sydbarrett74 2y ago
  If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, I would argue that the world would be vastly better off.
sofixa 2y ago
> Enshitification is killing Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Facebook, and more Based on what metric?

Hendrikto 2y ago

> takedown of large corporations absolutely > and rebuilding them absolutely not

AdrianB1 2y ago
Given enough time and slack, they will rebuild itself, no matter what. Corporations and cancer, they keep coming back.
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  That’s what antitrust law is for. We just need to actually enforce it.
  - AdrianB1 2y ago
    Antitrust laws in US rarely works. I have no idea if the problem is bad law or bad enforcement, but the results are bad.
    - palata 2y ago
      Isn't it the case that the US has just mostly stopped enforcing antitrust laws in the last 3-4 decades? That would explain why they don't work.
    - ajmurmann 2y ago
      What are examples where antitrust laws should have been applied but aren't?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      from my glimpse, it's bad enforcement and outright sleazy lobbying or conflict of interest. the laws can be better, but I find it hard to imagine any actual court case ruling in Google/Amazon's favor in anything. Apple is a bit harder and that may be where the laws are a bit outdated. But EU is setting a good precedent when that comes around.
  - 2y ago

AdrianB1 2y ago

I fully agree with what you wrote. The question is: current laws are fit for purpose? There are many things that are wrong and supported by laws or things that can be improved but existing laws forbid that. Is this a question about net neutrality or a question about how can/should be implemented? Same about corporate powers, especially in US where consumer protection seems to be a lot weaker than in EU, even if US has a lot more regulations.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
Good points. I do feel like the current laws are still insufficient, and will ultimately fail due to the corporate control of the internet/governments. More drastic solutions are probably needed. Much better anti-trust laws perhaps to combat the excessive power of big tech, maybe.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  The issue is the government has been ignoring for nearly 4 decades passing proper laws. They have been deferring to these groups to make fiat laws and calling them regulations. Laws not passed by the congress or senate. The current ruling exactly because the supreme court has basically said 'hey congress do your job and we are not deferring to these made up laws anymore'. It is going to be very messy for a long time. I got ganged up on when this was first done in the FCC. I said it will flip flop depending on who is in power and what their motivations are. Here we are 15 years later and that is exactly what happened. Until Title III is written there will be no real change. We should not let the executive branch have law judge and jury authority. It was not designed that way, it fundamentally breaks the separation of duties. We should also not let the congress and senate and judiciary cede their authority because it is convenient at the moment.
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    If you look at who we elect and how there is no reason to believe they will every be capable of drafting laws on complex subject matter nor revising them to keep up with the times. Adopting a strategy that wouldn't have worked in 1980 and probably wont work in 2080 unless the country is literally torn down and rebuilt from the ground up doesn't seem like an effective strategy. The supreme court has never just been a cold arbiter of law and they certainly aren't acting thus now. The intention isn't for congress to do their job the purpose is to gut regulation so that the parties who hired the justices by proxy can profit.

pjmlp 2y ago

We are already beyond that, with countries closing down Internet access, and geopolitics going back to the cold war days.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

This is where boycotts come in. Time to actually suffer to get what you want people.

afavour 2y ago
I think this understates how essential internet access is these days. It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider. Like, “not able to do your job” difficult. Few people are going to risk their job for net neutrality rules.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  > It would be very, very difficult for a lot of people to simply boycott their internet provider. As I said; "Time to actually suffer to get what you want people." But I am not just talking about the providers, I am talking about compaines like Facebook and Google. But my Grandfather was a coal miner in PA and they had strikes that led directly to some of their deaths by murder by agents of the coal companies, so do not talk about losing your job would be hard.
  - afavour 2y ago
    You don't see the difference between miners striking to improve their livelihoods and striking for net neutrality rules? I'd think it would be obvious far fewer people are prepared to do the latter. The stakes simply aren't as high.
    - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      People here seem to think net neutrality effects their livelihood...
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  This isn't a first (or hundredth) shot. it's a boiling frog. They won't even know their internet is slower and blame the website.

CivBase 2y ago

I'm pro net neutrality, but if it's ever going to work we need the legislature to do their job and put it into law. They either need to broaden the powers of the FCC or - better yet - enshrine net neutrality itself as law.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
This is a part of the windfall from Chevron and all according to plan. Tear down the executive structures and have a congress in conflict. Leave the rest to "states rights" for their motte. When in reality we're giving the keys for private corporations to do whatever they want. we'll likely see similar moves with the Department of Education this year.
- CivBase 2y ago
  Congress is no more in conflict now than it has been for the last two or three decades.

assimpleaspossi 2y ago

>we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Years ago, I said this might happen. Way back when, there was no FCC and the airwaves were the Wild West and anyone could throw up an antenna and call themselves a broadcaster. The internet is too wild and you all know it. I, too, want to be able to put together my own web site to hold content or sell my wares but, as psychologists now warn, the harm this "anything goes" content has caused us needs to be tamed.

smsm42 2y ago

> because without it we will have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Were you paying attention for the last 10 years? We already have tighter and tighter controls over the internet. Pretty much every government on the planet is itching to institute internet censorship, and many already did. Major content providers are tightly working with the governments to ensure no information disapproved by the government is allowed on their platforms. States are instituting digital ID schemes to control access to sites (and if you think it's only about porn you're still not paying attention). People are regularly deplatformed and banned from major internet services for expressing controversial opinions. Are you trying to scare me with something that had already happened? > something greater must be done: the takedown of large corporations and rebuilding them from scratch. Ah yes, of course, only the glorious proletarian revolution will save us. How does it go? Le monde va changer de base: Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout! Please wake me up when that happens. On the second thought, please don't, I'd rather not see it. We had enough of it in the last centrury, thankyouverymuch.