The proper approach IMO is to honour legal requests, but provide transparency and display some information about blocked content, like who made the request to block it and so on. Of course content must only be blocked for requests originating from that specific country.
I maintain the moral equivalent of this for platforms like Twitter and YouTube is to stop conflating their centralized recommendation systems (which should be considered "their speech") with the functionality to publish at all (which should be considered "someone else's speech"): it is going to be way less controversial to stop recommending something that someone else likes if it is still accessible to people who know about it (as they externally discovered the content or author and were directly linked to it/them), and it is also going to be way less controversial to allow people to publish something that someone else doesn't like to their own audience if it isn't being actively recommended to third parties. These recommendation systems have started to conflate "being able to say what you want" with "being able to be granted a large audience" so well that the feature set for moderation fails to separate them, and that's bad for everyone: there is a reason why we talk about "the right to free speech" instead of "the right to be heard".
If that is happening, then the architecture of the internet needs to take more evolutionary steps.
If the state can censor the internet, there's nothing 'inter' about it. It's just a network, subject to the whims of its flailing predecessor.
Yes, that is happening for many years. China being the most known state, but AFAIK even well-recognized first-world democratic countries like UK block some websites.
> then the architecture of the internet needs to take more evolutionary steps.
Adoption of IPv6 is a good example that architecture of the Internet is pretty much set in stone at this moment. We can put more layers on top of it, like Tor network, but underlying protocols are still IPv4/IPv6 with enough meta-information to allow efficient blocking of protocols or resources.
I have some hopes that new TLS standards with hostname encryption (ECH) along with CDN networks will make blocking impossible. But even that is easily circumvented with government MITM. Kazakhstan already deployed all the necessary hardware and did some successful tests on scale. Browsers blocked its root certificate, but will they block (imaginary) China root certificate, losing 1.5B users?
centralization is merely a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for dystopianism. you also need a ratcheting consolidation of power, especially money (provided by advertisers in this case) and attention/influence (provided by viewers). centralization is simply one of those (key) ratchets that can be leveraged to further consolidate power for the benefit of directors and executives.
relatedly, the american constitution is an experiment in crafting a centralized system with checks and balances stable enough to withstand assaults of power consolidation. the jury is still out, but it's looking somewhat bleak at the moment, given a runaway executive branch fueled by an unhinged fed/central bank. we seem to be stomping on the gas pedal even as the brick wall looms ahead.
in any case, i've long been an advocate of right-sizing organizations of all sorts, especially governments and companies. we've concretely learned over the past many decades that the negatives of large (and small, but those tend to self-regulate away) entities eventually far outweigh the benefits, and are better substituted by a more diverse and specialized collection of medium-sized ones.
in this specific case, imagine if we had thousands of mini-youtubes, each with their own curational quirks. no single mini-youtube could unduly influence the whole zeitgeist. most (all?) will be flawed in their curatorial duties, but none could move public opinion in any meaningful way. viewers could also jump from one to another and be exposed to many different editorial perspectives, even without necessarily being cognizant of that. however, if every mini-youtube were relegated to being a single person each (i.e., no centralization), then we'd lose the benefits of aggregation and curation.
the problem of course, is that we societally accept size and growth as good things, and i'm arguing that they're only good to a certain point (and see your argument as saying all centralization is bad), and that we need to change incentives as a function of size/centralization, so that we get right-sized organizations, rather than unaccountable behemoths. our current incentives make right-sizing an unstable equilibrium point on that curve, which is why it doesn't happen.
A senator can ask you to do something but the fact the they are a senator does not legally obligate you to comply.
But if the DoJ sends you a demand (I'm not a lawyer, I'm just making up details here) let's say it's signed by a judge or something, what are you gonna do, say no?
There are also cases like child pornography where you might preemptively remove stuff without any demand because you want to but it would still be under justification of it clearly complying with a law so you haven't poisoned the well of if you censored anything.
And that's really the important factor in the end.
As everyone else had said, if you don't do that stuff, you are just going to get your domain and assets seized anyway.
I feel like the core problem in many cases was building a system where someone gets to be arbiter of content in the first place: Apple claims they take software down due to "legal requests" by/in various countries (though this is a lie as they also do it anti-competitively or for market perception reasons, but even taking them at their word here) and yet they caused the ability to do that as somehow Android devices sold in the same jurisdictions support installing arbitrary software without issue.
Platforms like Twitter and YouTube make their problems worse by recommending content--which is entirely their editorial decision and should be seen as such: any benefits or costs, moral or legal, should fall squarely on their shoulders--and then conflating that with having the ability to publish, but they would be in a much more morally (and often legally) defensible position if they simply didn't actively recommend content they disliked but still let it be found by people who actively followed the publisher.
Regardless, as usual, I will now link to my heavily-cited talk (every single slide is inherently a citation from a reputable news source) that I gave in 2017 (maybe 2018? the video was unlisted and I only just recently made it public as someone noted I had never done that, and now the upload date is weirdly set to last week ;P) at Mozilla Privacy Lab--"That's How You Get a Dystopia"--wherein I push hard at the idea that centralized systems and the arbiters they empower are the core problem and never work out, even if you like some of their decisions for some of the time.
https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms