Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters.

Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.

Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.

This is well outside of the practical capabilities of anyone but a nation state or large commercial entity. Even then, it's hard. It's more practical for a physical letter than for digital stuff. For a digital service, you'd have to go down to cabling infrastructure or take something like the SpaceX route and launch satellites. If you need something between a few nearby buildings, it's more practical to come up with a solution, but anything further out ... you're kind of stuck.

(Your ISP classifies as a middle man as well...)

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire

Beat me to it.

Paranoia is not new.

> you can always create your own courier

It is illegal to compete with USPS to deliver letters.

AFAIK there are exceptions for express couriers, which is why you can still use fedex/ups to delivery documents.

...but you can delivery boxes...?

so put mail in boxes?

I mean, there's DHL, Fedex, and others...

I don't believe the law has ever been revoked that requires anyone sending documents through a non-USPS service* to include the appropriate USPS postage cancelled with a pen along with their shipment

* excepting a point-to-point courier service for some reason

The USPS carved out a few exceptions, like delivering urgent mail. Gaming the system will get you raided by armed agents of the enforcement arm of the USPS.

You start by creating the universe...

I really detest this kind of attitude. Yes, the government is NOT restricting what you can say in an online space. But at the same time, there is no government platform I can speak from. They're not stopping me from saying what I want but they're also not giving me a platform.

Why are we giving corporate entities a pass on tyranny? It's not like restricting people's liberties is only something the government can do.

My onboard, state of the art, military grade AI suite is detecting infantile sarcasm, irritability unrelated to the current topic, and a tone unbecoming of a hacker news commenter.

the difference here though is that physically you can at least own the address, but even your digital address isn't actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided by someone else and can be taken away.

Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.

> physically you can at least own the address

No, a town owns an address and rents it to you. If something goes wrong with the billing you get evicted, if they want a mall they forcibly "buy" it from you.

There's no resource you can count on in this way. Resources get reallocated at some point.

Well, the USPS has renamed towns before. Ask Waimea, Hawaii Island, Hawaii.

> Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.

Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.

it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.

these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.

This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of these serious issues.

> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.

Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.

I presume you mean there are cases where registrar's have "seized" a domain. Would be good if you had an example, because I sure can't find one.

Here you are, from last month: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/17/godaddy-explains-ar15-...

And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google has revoked access to the given Google account.

Well, this is clearly not evidence if you bothered to visit https://www.ar15.com/index.html

Edit: Godaddy is not just a (crappy) registrar. GoDaddy is also a (crappy) hosting provided which I moved an organization out of.

Edit again: I guess I ought to explain domain names to you. Most DNS providers are crappy (unlike Cloudflare), and have a non-negligible TTL. Even if AR15 had access to GoDaddy's account to change their DNS records (A record for the www subdomain and root domain), it takes a while for new records to propagate globally.

More likely, what happened is GoDaddy told AR15 to take their domain to someone else. And thats what they did.

Looks like they were able to get the name transferred to Epik. Now try doing the same with your @gmail.com.

The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.

Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.