> Should Ismailov win, he would serve as a conduit for the government of Russia’s internet policy goals, which historically have included censoring dissent.

Good thing that has never happened in the USA.

There's a huge difference between people being booted off proprietary hosting systems (Cloudflare) or platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and censorship at the IP and BGP level with deep packet inspection and real time filtering.

The Internet in the USA and much of the world remains pretty damn neutral. It doesn't care much what bits you send over it. That's not the case in China, Russia, and a number of other more authoritarian countries.

We can encrypt everything of course, but if the censorship is at the wire level that may not be enough. Using meta-data, IPs tied to identities, and loads of other information sources it's possible to dynamically filter content and people by inference.

"At least we're not China" has to be the lowest possible bar you could have picked. And it doesn't make a lot of sense as a point of comparison when the other candidate mentioned in the article isn't even Chinese.

You set the bar, not him, by inviting the comparison. Moreover, the poster makes the point that freedom of association, a component of free speech, requires private censorship - a feature, not a bug.

> You set the bar, not him, by inviting the comparison.

Would you like to explain to me how Ismailov became Chinese all of a sudden?

The American internet may be neutral but that means little when the legal system doesn't respect freedom of the press. For example, isn't Julian Assange is being prosecuted right now because he exposed government wrongdoing?