Re:Supreme Court Poised to Reconsider Key Tenets of Online S...
by rektide on Thursday January 19, 2023 @08:24PM
(#34448026)
This is dead on. Well said.
I want to just muse a bit though, because while I think the current axe grinding is facetiously bad, I can see things getting worse & do want to at least recognize some threats where I feel like the government might really have a role in mandating service.
Right now I'm at two cases, both of which I can see from different angles & feel differently about.
1. The idea of social media platforms that would filter (or, heavens, modify) conversations between consenting DM'ing folk scares me a bit, and this is absolutely an active situation in the authoritarian countries of the world and it doesn't sit well and right now I feel like some kind of democratic principles have a compelling stake even against private companies (& especially against the government itself, but that's whole nother enchilada).
2. Literally no one being willing to peer/transit you. When CloudFlare or AWS says no to KiwiFarms or Stormfront, I have zero sympathy. These are service providers. They ought not have their name tainted by affiliation, association with folks they don't want to host. I'm fine with that, because those are not critical services to getting or being online: they are convenient service providers, but fundamentally, being on the internet is just having some computers in a rack, and having interconnect and peerage and transit so people can talk to your servers. If we start getting to the place where that starts to become impossible (which so far has never been anywhere near a real circumstance), I start to get alarmed. But also... transit is a service. Being in a data-center with an Internet Exchange (IX) is a service. There's only a matter of degrees between CloudFlare refusing service & these fundamental internet connectivities saying: no, we refuse service. Democracy's/government's ability to navigate what is an essential connectivity service- which must necessarily to a high degree be content neutral- with higher-order providers is a key struggle that I see as enormously difficult. Which is to say, I do think there is a very real case for Hurricane Electric, I do think there is a case for Layer7 to be government mandated essential service providers, who don't get to pick who they carry. There has to be some Postal Service of the internet, someone who is content neutral (or the Democratic government itself- if it wishes to be regarded as an actual democracy- has to provide such) but to me, it is extremely low layer of essential services.
And there's definitely some kind of invisible undefined line where we shut off essential services. It'd be interesting to know some case law about who the post office or other public utilities can claim exception to giving service, where they say, no, you're a proven problem, you're on your own, we no longer will help you.
There is interesting situations I want to consider. Just, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever to me about any of the current whining aggrieved political man-children of politics who bitch & moan & whine & are completely f-ing off their rocker wrong.
I want to just muse a bit though, because while I think the current axe grinding is facetiously bad, I can see things getting worse & do want to at least recognize some threats where I feel like the government might really have a role in mandating service.
Right now I'm at two cases, both of which I can see from different angles & feel differently about.
1. The idea of social media platforms that would filter (or, heavens, modify) conversations between consenting DM'ing folk scares me a bit, and this is absolutely an active situation in the authoritarian countries of the world and it doesn't sit well and right now I feel like some kind of democratic principles have a compelling stake even against private companies (& especially against the government itself, but that's whole nother enchilada).
2. Literally no one being willing to peer/transit you. When CloudFlare or AWS says no to KiwiFarms or Stormfront, I have zero sympathy. These are service providers. They ought not have their name tainted by affiliation, association with folks they don't want to host. I'm fine with that, because those are not critical services to getting or being online: they are convenient service providers, but fundamentally, being on the internet is just having some computers in a rack, and having interconnect and peerage and transit so people can talk to your servers. If we start getting to the place where that starts to become impossible (which so far has never been anywhere near a real circumstance), I start to get alarmed. But also... transit is a service. Being in a data-center with an Internet Exchange (IX) is a service. There's only a matter of degrees between CloudFlare refusing service & these fundamental internet connectivities saying: no, we refuse service. Democracy's/government's ability to navigate what is an essential connectivity service- which must necessarily to a high degree be content neutral- with higher-order providers is a key struggle that I see as enormously difficult. Which is to say, I do think there is a very real case for Hurricane Electric, I do think there is a case for Layer7 to be government mandated essential service providers, who don't get to pick who they carry. There has to be some Postal Service of the internet, someone who is content neutral (or the Democratic government itself- if it wishes to be regarded as an actual democracy- has to provide such) but to me, it is extremely low layer of essential services.
And there's definitely some kind of invisible undefined line where we shut off essential services. It'd be interesting to know some case law about who the post office or other public utilities can claim exception to giving service, where they say, no, you're a proven problem, you're on your own, we no longer will help you.
There is interesting situations I want to consider. Just, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever to me about any of the current whining aggrieved political man-children of politics who bitch & moan & whine & are completely f-ing off their rocker wrong.