I don’t want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.
But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.
Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as “flash worms” or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it’s causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.
And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn’t speech; it’s fully-automated malware activity.
¹ From Andy Warhol’s aphorism that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
Yeah ok, that’s like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.
I don’t want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies
I mean, piracy is a real crime, you might not be a software or game developer but if people were free to pirate without consequence, those jobs would be crippled. You wouldn’t go into a book store and steal a book, why is software viewed any differently?
The ordinary court system is quite adequate to resolve that sort of thing.
It begins by showing evidence under penalty of perjury that a crime has actually been committed. Then you can get warrants and subpoenas and so on. You don’t get to demand that an ISP shut off a customer just on your say-so.
Many years ago, I was the designated recipient for abuse reports for a large institutional network. We frequently got very firmly-worded demands that we shut off the terrible pirates who were smuggling bootleg copies of The Matrix through various IP addresses on our network.
The problem was … the IP addresses the complaints mentioned, had never been routed. They had never been connected to the Internet. Those IP addresses had never received so much as a ping packet. They certainly were not sharing copies of The Matrix on Kazaa.
The complaints were not only false, but obviously false to anyone who had even basic technical competence to investigate them. They were probably due to a bug in the software the MPAA Agents were using to track down bootleg copies of The Matrix.
Which is to say, some jackhole at the MPAA didn’t even check whether they could actually download The Matrix from a Kazaa host at that address, before emailing me a nastygram telling me to take it down. They threatened us and told us we were breaking the law, incorrectly, because they didn’t check that the crime they were alleging had even actually occurred.
The “copyright industry” have never even tried to behave as law-abiding citizens with honest legal complaints about other people’s conduct. They have consistently perjured themselves, lied to the public, committed felonies against their own customers, demanded dictatorial control over things they don’t own (including your own hard drive), and generally acted like a band of clownish goons.
They don’t get the benefit of the doubt on anything related to Internet technology, ever.
I can’t believe people are still making this argument in 2023.
I went to the library and copied a book.
Digital piracy is not theft. There is nothing stolen.
That doesn’t make it right, but stop trying to conflate it with larceny. It is NOT analogous.
Digital piracy is not theft. There is nothing stolen.
Out of curiosity, what are you’re thoughts on the below scenarios:
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attempted robbery
If you go to a bank and attempt to steal the money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong. -
getting a service, e.g going to the barbers and running out of the store before paying
There wouldn’t be a loss again
People only seem to gloss over theft when it’s digital, not taking it seriously, it might not directly cause a loss for the developers, but if you’re in a situation where you can afford the software but choose piracy to save money, you’re leeching off someone else’s time and resources, and taking away money that could have been paid to them, for your own selfish desires.
Ahoy matey, come aboard the good ship I don’t give a fuck
If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.
Theft is taking property with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it, which you were attempting to do
getting a service, e.g going to the barbers and running out of the store before paying
Technically fraud not theft.
Out of curiosity, what are you’re thoughts on the below scenarios:
- attempted robbery If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.
- getting a service, e.g going to the barbers and running out of the store before paying There wouldn’t be a loss again
Those aren’t really good equivalents since in the first example, you’re trying to take something away from someone but you fail. The law is not concerned with your skill, just your intent. Attempted murder is illegal even if the victim is still alive.
In the second example, there is absolutely a loss. The barber would have spent time and used resources in order to provide you with that service that they wouldn’t get compensated for. Your involvement directly costs them money and time, unlike with piracy where even a billion people pirating won’t cost the developer any more money than if those people just never played it to begin with.
Your involvement directly costs them money and time, unlike with piracy where even a billion people pirating won’t cost the developer any more money than if those people just never played it to begin with.
Sometimes “legal” is even worse for developers than pirated:
Here’s a scenario: I’m a wizard with the magical ability to clone any object I point at. I see a person with a Rolex watch on their wrist. I point to it and instantly a perfect copy of that Rolex appears on my wrist.
What got stolen? Who got robbed? Who is deprived of anything? And don’t say Rolex got deprived of money, because they still have exactly as much money as before, and nobody is “owed” profit.
If people could be owed profit just because they did work, then I could run around parking lots all day cleaning off people’s cars and then forcing them to pay for my services when they got back.
If people could be owed profit just for creating things, I could go around town singing my original music to people passing by and then forcing them to pay for listening to it.
Both of those scenarios are obviously ridiculous.
Pirating digital media is wrong in the same way that poaching unicorns is wrong. It’s not, because unicorns don’t actually exist, and neither does intellectual property, it’s a myth, a fable, a fabrication that is enforced by powerful corpos in order to forcefully extract undeserved profits from a market of artificial scarcity that they created in the first place.
If people could be owed profit just for creating things, I could go around town singing my original music to people passing by and then forcing them to pay for listening to it.
The difference being, those people didn’t ask for your music, but you needed that software, otherwise you wouldn’t use it.
and neither does intellectual property, it’s a myth, a fable, a fabrication that is enforced by powerful corpos in order to forcefully extract undeserved profits from a market of artificial scarcity that they created in the first place.
Lol, so basically confirming my last paragraph then, “doesn’t actually exist” because its digital, what a take.
Respond to my scenario I proposed, if I magically cloned an object like a Rolex, what got stolen? Who is deprived of something? What are they deprived of and how?
The difference being, those people didn’t ask for your music, but you needed that software, otherwise you wouldn’t use it.
Nope, I didn’t necessarily need the software. The point of that illustration is that people and companies aren’t owed profit on something merely because they created it. Money is owned in a mutual social contract, and I don’t agree to that contract for purchase. The reason why that’s not theft though in the case of digital “piracy” is because Nobody Is Being Deprived Of Anything.
Until you can show me clearly what Rolex or the person wearing the Rolex is being deprived of in that example I gave, theft hasn’t been demonstrated because theft means depriving somebody of something against their will or desire. Copying Is Not Theft.
Lol, so basically confirming my last paragraph then, “doesn’t actually exist” because its digital, what a take.
Nope, wrong again. Read what I said more carefully, intellectual property, not just digital. If I go to the library, grab a textbook and hand copy that book onto my own paper, that is totally fine.
If Intellectual property is real, please explain to me how somebody can have an idea “stolen” from them? How would a person be “robbed” of a concept? Here’s an idea I’m making up: “Zixatubayponawa” which is a far away land where the rivers are purple sugar water. Tell me how you would “steal” that from me.
You can legally go to the library, xerox every page in a book and leave. Legally. The publishers and author don’t get a penny. What is the difference between that and pirating something online other than it being easier and more convenient?
attempted robbery
If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.Unsuccessful attempt to take away? Well, you can point out who was loosing files.
you’re leeching off someone else’s time and resources, and taking away money that could have been paid to them, for your own selfish desires.
Except saud developers were fired 10 years ago. If you were truly pro-copyright, you would make it personal and inalienable.
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I went to the library and copied a book.
And in Europe it is perfectly legal for last thousand of years.
Copying👏 data👏 is👏 not👏 theft.
You trollin’ bruh?
And recordable cassette tapes are going to kill the music industry.
Because it is quasi-infinitely replicable. There is nuance and debate to be made, but that’s the difference at its core.
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Putting aside the argument that privacy is NOT theft. The argument that piracy hurts creators has been shown to be largely false.
Most of the time the people who pirate software or media wouldn’t convert to real sales if the piracy option wasn’t there. Those people simply wouldn’t buy the product. And even if some of those did convert to real sales, it wouldn’t be enough to make or break profits.
Secondly, there’s a knock-on benefit to having more people use the product regardless of legitimacy, as it increases word of mouth sales. The more people that talk positively about a product, the more people hear about it, and consequently the more sales you’ll make.
Microsoft learned that lesson with Windows licenses. They really don’t care if someone has a legitimate license or not. The more people they keep on their platform the more it translates to sales in other ways. I still meet people that have never heard of Linux, because there’s a network effect of “everyone uses Windows”, despite Linux accounting for around 5% of global desktop marketshare.
Quick edit: this isn’t an argument to say that piracy is fine. The point I’m making is that from a logistics perspective, it can actually increase sales in some instances.
that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources
First question: how?
This was literally the Net Neutrality debate from 2013-2016ish… And yall can correct me if im mis-remembering what the argument was. IIRC it was if an ISP wanted to be classified as a public utility or private service and the outcome was something along the lines of.
Public utility > protection under title 2 of The Communications Act of 1934 (ammended in 1996, its not that old, and could NOT be sued for the content they transmitted) > they could not police the content, otherwise they were liable for what their customers used it for.
The reasoning was you could not sue a public utility for someone using them to do something illegal. However if it was a private service.
Private service > not protected under title 2 > could police content as it was private infrastructure. The fear was if Time Warner or someone throttled connections to streaming platforms to ruin the expirence so people would go back to watching cable. This was kicked off when Netflix, Level 3 and Comcast all got into a spat over content usage, data volumes and who was responsible for paying for hardware upgrades.
The issue was that they were poorly classified at the time (unsure if that changed) and had a habbit of flip-flopping classifications as they saw fit in different cases (ISPs claimed to be both and would only argue in favor of the classification that was more useful at the time). I dont think this was ever resolved as it was on chairman Wheelers to-do list but 45s nominee to the FCC was a wet blanket and intentionally did nothing. Now the seat is empty because congressional approval is required for appointees and were doing the “think of the kids/ruin the internet” bill again… /Sigh.
Y’all know the drill, call your congress critter n’ shit, remind them not to break the internet again. And if your in a red state, just fart loudly into the phone, its funny and they wont do anything constructive anyway, even if you asked nicely. (Sorry, im just tired of this cycle of regulatory lights on, lights off)
Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
Man, this is so wierd reading from post-soviet country. Here red state/region meant in 90-ies region with communists majority. And they probably would be for public utility.
Anyway now it doesn’t matter in personalist resource autocracy.
Thats the part that makes this double frustrating, it by all accounts should be a public. Back in the early 00’s the US federal government basicly gave all these companies a blank check to provide “broadband internet” to every home in America (See the US Postal Service as them doing shit like this before).
They (ISPs) have since taken the money and done some of the work (with the promise to get it done some day, eventually maybe never) and the term “broadband” is borderline useless in terms of an acceptable internet connection. Every few years there is some skuttlebutt to increase the standard of what “broadband” means, but the last update set it at 25mb down / 3mb up… Which in 2023 is pretty emberassing.
Downlink speed itself is not as embarassing as assymetrical channel.
And not everybody receiving it also embarassing. To the point of articles 19 and 27.1 of DoHR. AFAIK the only country in the world that does not have to be embarassed is Finland.
ISPs are to me like infrastructure. They are like roads or power lines. If you ask the ISPs to block malicious activity it’s like asking the electrical poweregrid to be responsible for stopping their electricity being used for illegal activity. Asking the ISPs to block malicious activity is like asking the road builders to be responsible for bankrobbers and murdere driving on the roads. It’s simply just ridiculous to put the responsibility like that.
Then ISPs should be public corporations, until that happens then they’re not equivalent to pubic infrastructures.
ISPs should definitely be owned by the public and regulated like a utility.
Well said. It’s really the endpoints where the burden is.
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the EFF seems to be suggesting that the private sector is policing itself via censorship because law enforcement doesn’t fucking do anything. yea bro
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Yup. To many people don’t get it. They are all for heavy regulations so long as it’s their side doing the regulation, then five years later they’re crying about being regulated.
I understand that censorship can be misused, but I also understand trying to fight faschistic right-wing propaganda and demagoguery is more important than trying to stick to general liberal ideals like “free speach”, if radically following those ideals lead to bad outcomes.
So yes, I am in favor of not giving people that are against democracy a platform to push their lies and propaganda. With the current level of education and media literacy in the broad population, lies are much easier spread than that countered. Ignoring that means giving them their victories.
Facts are boring and feelings can easily be abused and misled.
I don’t have an answer where the line is, and where and how censorship/blocking/deplatforming is effective. I just think that this isn’t a simple issue.
But I would mostly agree that this shouldn’t be decided by ISP companies. They probably shouldn’t have a TOS. And if you ask me, they are infrastructure providers, so they have a monopoly, and therefore they should be non-commercial and under democratic control. Because democracy has proven to be a good way to handle monopolies.
You fight them by blocking them and moving on.
Just because you don’t want to see something doesn’t mean nobody else should.
Blocking people is only useful to protect your own mental health. Ignorance of issues will not solve them on their own.
I don’t see a suggestion here to fix the rise of demagoguery in the west. Pushing people out of the general public perception will help against stochastic violence against minorities.
I agree the situation looks helpless regarding fighting missinformation but conversation is the only viable tool. Failing that, when the topic is important enough, then only the tool of violence remains. A person about to blow themselves up in a crowd likely can’t be talked out of it. Hopefully the situation isn’t so bad that a lot of people are like that. I think it’s better to promote education rather than trusting anyone to draw a line on what speech I can’t hear (or say).
You can have conversations with people, but first you have to somehow stop the constant onslaught of propaganda meant to keep people in an easy to manipulate mental state.
You need to give them room to breath first, then you can start working with them to take their fear away and let them reflect on their preconceptions.
I think improving people’s well-being is the best bet to give people the time to potentially become innoculated against manipulation. Stopping propoganda reaching people may contribute to that. Does getting caught censoring not backfire to a high degree (“they’re trying to hide the truth”)?
Yes, improving the well being is the best way, but doing that is very difficult and takes time. There are so may reasons why people are unwell in the US: suburbia, car centric infrastructure, housing, education, …
If you are transparent about what is censored and why, your aren’t hiding it.
After WW2, Germany created a law against Volksverhetzung and later expanded this into laws against hate speech, which was adopted in similar ways in other countries as well.
The law seems to work well, it is not perfect, but at least the right needs to be much more careful in what they utter. Of course free speach absolutists where concered about it, with slippery-slope arguments, but their concerns where unsubstaniated so far.
When it comes to government instead of a business then I am more certain and am of the free speech absolitish kind. Even though I believe speech can hurt, indeed has killed (e.g. driven to suicide my fellow LGBT people), there is simply no one I can trust to decide what speech I can hear.
I have little faith that any holocast deniers has anything worth hearing but I wouldn’t say they could never have even a grain of truth. What effect are those laws having switch social backlash does not?
The side who censors is always the side that knows it has the incorrect position
Bingo. People forget that rules and laws are always double edged and can be used against you.
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YouTube should not be policing copyright either.
Oof… Yeah this.
When you have a corporation that acts as a stand in for the law, something very wrong has happened.
If you ask me (and nobody ever does for good reason), one of the only times an ISP should be pulling the plug on online speech is when you start linking actual malicious links that have a good chance of your grandma losing her retirement funds or your tech illiterate uncle getting a crypto miner installed on his laptop or something equally destructive.
Your ISP should have no insight in to your traffic at all. Therefore unable to make any judgement on what traffic to block and what not to block. With the exception of volume of traffic and to where it is going.
I remember getting a warning years ago from an ISP I don’t use anymore that my service would be cut off if I downloaded a pirate torrent again. Why the fuck were they paying attention to what I was doing? Even if it was piracy, it was none of their fucking business and they wouldn’t be implicated. I’ve used a VPN ever since.
You’re ISP didn’t care. The production companies are the ones finding out your IP address. Your ISP is just passing the message along.
Although I do agree they should have no insight, I’d rather the insight they currently have be used to actually block sites from bad actors than just spying on you to most likely sell your data.
I don’t know why people are disagreeing with you.
This is like someone setting up a fake stop on a public road to mug people.
You’re telling me that the state shouldn’t have the right to police the road to prevent that from happening?
Lemmy.people, are you high?
I’m gonna respectfully disagree. Free speech is a big reason why our world is so fucked right now.
Tell me that you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
Whoa whoa whoa. Free speech is the reason the world you live in has advanced to this point…
Fucking psycho.
The issue is not free speech. The issue is people think free speech means discourse without consequences.
I’m a psycho because I don’t like how toxic the internet and society has become, and how easily people are manipulated by hate speech and hateful ideologies?
Society has always been toxic. Might I remind you of slavery? Might I remind you of the Holy Roman Catholic Church?
Free speech is what broke those cycles and is what will keep the internet out of the hands of other oppressors. Yes people are vile but we need to learn to manage those voices not wholesale silence them. If a motor is screaming you shouldn’t say, “let’s shove a plug in the muffler.” You fix the motor and maintain it.
I’ll agree that ISPs should not be in the business of policing speech, buuuut
I really think it’s about time platforms and publishers be held responsible for content on their platforms, particularly if in their quest to monetize that content they promote antisocial outcomes like the promulgation of conspiracy theories and hate and straight-up crime
For example, Meta is not modding down outright advertising and sales of stolen credit cards at the moment Also meta selling information with which to target voters… to foreign entities
The issue with this is holding tech companies liable for every possible infraction will mean tjay platforms like Lemmy, and mastodon can’t exist cause they could be sued out of existance
The issue with this is holding tech companies liable for every possible infraction
That concern was the basis for section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which is in effect in the USA but is not the law in places like, say the EU. It made sense at the time, but today it is desperately out of date.
Today we understand that in absolving platforms like Meta of their duty of care to take reasonable steps to not cause harm to their customers, their profit motive would guide them to look the other way when their platform is used to disseminate disinformation about vaccines that gets people killed, that the money would have them protecting Nazis, that algorithms intended to promote engagement would become a tool not just to advertisers but to propagandists and information warfare people.
I’m not particularly persuaded that if in the US there is reform to section 230 of the Communications Decency act, that it would doom nonprofit social media like most of the fediverse- if you look around at all, most of it already follows a well-considered duty-of-care standard that provides its operators substantial legal protection from liability for what 3rd parties post to their platforms. Also if you consider even briefly, that is the standard in effect in much of Europe and social media still exists- it’s just less-profitable and has fewer nazis.
I feel like you can’t really change 230, you need to to instead legislatate differently. There is room for more criminal liability when things go wrong I think. But cival suits in the US can be really bogus. Like someone could likely sue a mastodon instance for turning their kid trans and win without section 230
I’m with you on the legislate differently part.
The background of Section 230©(2) is an unfortunate 1995 court ruling that held that if you moderate any content whatsoever, you should be regarded as its publisher (and therefore ought to be legally liable for whatever awful nonsense your users put on your platform). This perversely created incentive for web forum operators (and a then-fledgling social media industry) to not moderate content at all in order to gain immunity from liability- and that in turn transformed broad swathes of the social internet into an unmoderated cesspool full of Nazis and conspiracy theories and vaccine disinformation, all targeting people with inadequate critical thinking faculties to really process it responsibly.
The intent of 230©(2) was to encourage platform operators to feel safe to moderate harmful content, but it also protects them if they don’t. The result is a wild-west, if you will, in which it’s perfectly legal for social media operators in the USA to look the other way when known-unlawful use of their platforms (like advertising stolen goods, or sex trafficking, or coordinating a coup attempt, or making porn labeled ‘underage’ searchable) goes on.
It was probably done in good faith, but in hindsight it was naïve and carved out the American internet as a magical zone of no-responsibility.
This is not really what 230 does, sites still face criminal liability were needed, like if I made a site that had illegal content I could still be arrested and have my server seized, repealing 230 would legit just let Ken Paxton launch a multi state lawsuit suing a large list of queer mastodon instance for transing minors. Without 230 it would be lawsuit land and sites would censor anything that wasnt cat photos in an effort to avoid getting sued. Lawsuits are expensive even when you win. If you wanna make social media companies deal with something you gotta setup criminal liability not repeal 230. 230 just protect sites from cival suits not criminal ones.
I think generally we need to regulate how algrithums work of this is the case. We need actual legislation and not just law suit buttons. Also meta can slither its way out of any lawsuit, this would really only effect small mastodon instances.
The problem is that your definitions are incredibly vague.
What is a “platform” and what is a “host”?
A host, in the definition of technology, could mean a hosting company where you would “host” a website from. If it’s a private website, how would the hosting company moderate that content?
And that’s putting aside the legality and ethics of one private company policing not only another private company, but also one that’s a client.
Fair point about hosts, I’m talking about platforms as if we held them to the standards we hold publishers to. Publishing is protected speech so long as it’s not libelous or slanderous, and the only reason we don’t hold social media platforms to that kind of standard is that they demanded (and received) complete unaccountability for what their users put on it. That seemed okay as a choice to let social media survive as a new form of online media, but the result is that for-profit social media, being the de facto public square, have all the influence they want over speech but have no responsibility to use that influence in ways that aren’t corrosive to democracy or to the public interest.
Big social media already censor content they don’t like, I’m not calling for censorship in an environment that has none. What I’m calling for is some sort of accountability to nudge them in the direction of maybe not looking the other way when offshore troll farms and botnets spread division and disinformation
publishers are held responsible.
Internet service providers, as defined in the 1996 cda, are not.
I don’t know what fantasy land the eff is living in, but as great as freedom of speech is, there has to be SOME level of censorship involved in the modern internet, otherwise it would be hell. It’s simply not feasible to run the internet unmoderated…
You didn’t read the article, did you?
Well they specifically calls out ISP’s, rather than the media companies running forums or social media, etc.
The latter SHOULD be policing their platforms to some extent, but ISP’s can’t even do so without being pretty invasive/authoritarian, so they should stick to providing internet service.
No. It’s like expecting construction companies to enforce traffic laws because they build the roads.
Who else do you expect to enforce site blocks?
Host providers, like they already do
The owners of…the sites. How they do that, is up to them. But again, I’ll go back to my construction analogy: There’s a burgaler entering your house, who do you call and why? Not the people that built it.
You are absolutely correct, we should not have law enforcement at all, just ask the people to arrest themselves when committing a crime, i’m sure that’ll go tremendously!
I’ll go back to my construction analogy
I think that’s a bad analogy, isp’s and dns providers have the ability to control mass amounts of traffic, enforcing site blocks at isp and dns level would be the most feasible way to do this. They’re also likely much more capable of moderating the internet than small websites which don’t have time to do so.
You don’t. Censorship is evil
Users need more control over the kind of content they want to see. The problem Lemmy has is very similar to the main problem with the internet as a whole: the current model is that of a “regulator” who controls the flow of information for us.
What I’d like to see is giving users the tools to filter for themselves, which means the internet as a whole. Not interested in sports, let me filter it all out by myself, instead of blocking individual parts piecemeal.
The problem is that no company has an incentive to work on something like that, and I wouldn’t even know where to start designing such interface tools on my own, but there is, for example, a keyword blocker for YouTube that prevents video that contain said terms from appearing on my timeline. I’ve used it to block everything “Trump”, for example. I’d like to see more of that.
The idea sounds nice in theory, but there is a reason people bring their car to a shop instead of changing their own oil. There are a lot of things we could/should take responsibility for directly but they are far too numerous for us to take responsibility for everyone of them. Sometimes we just have to place trust in groups we loosely vetted (if at all) and hope for the best. We all do it every day in all sorts of capacities.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
I’m talking about internet content. Maybe this is where personal assistants can come into play at some point.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to “reputation servers” which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
That’s putting too much responsibility on the average person, who doesn’t have the time to become educated enough in biology and pharmacology to understand what every potentially harmful product may do to them. What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Also, though you’d like to think this would only harm the individual in question who purchases a harmful product, there are many ways innocent third parties could be harmed through this. Teratogens are just one example.
This kind of laissez-faire attitude just doesn’t work in the real world. There’s a reason we ban overtly harmful substances.
What if they never even hear the FDA recommendation?
Then the FDA isn’t doing a very good job, are they? Ensuring that people hear their recommendations (and trust them) would be among their core goals.
The rare fringe cases where someone is affected indirectly without personally having choosen to purchase the product can be dealt with through the courts. There is no need for preemptive bans.
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No, I am not okay with bans like that. You should be able to knowingly buy products with mercury in them. Obviously if someone is selling products containing mercury and not disclosing that fact, passing them off as safe to handle, that would be a problem and they would be liable for any harm that resulted from that. But it doesn’t justify a preemptive ban.
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That isn’t a middle ground. You’re just saying the state can publish a recommendation, which it always has been able to. That’s absolutely in the “unregulated” / “no safety nets” camp. It’s caveat emptor as a status quo and takes us back to the gilded age.
To put it another way: The middle ground between “the state has no authority here” and “the state can regulate away a product” isn’t “the state can suggest we don’t buy it.” It still puts the burden on the consumer in an unreasonable way. We can’t assess literally everything we consume. If I go to a grocery store and buy apples, I can reasonably assume they won’t poison me. Without basic regulations this is not possible. You can’t feed 8 billion people without some rules.
Let me be clear, I agree with the EFF on this particular issue. ISP’s should not regulate speech and what sites I browse. But it’s not the same as having the FDA. For starters, ISP’s are private corporations.
You misunderstood. It’s not a middle ground between “can regulate” and “cannot regulate”. That would indeed be idiotic. It’s a middle ground between “must judge everything for yourself” and “someone else determines what you have access to”. Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it’s worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).
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It takes me several dozen hours every 6-12mo to keep up with the arms race that is privacy. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who are less technically inclined. It must be a completely impenetrable problem.
4 years ago everybody told me to get on Brave. Look what happened lol
Arguably the most well known VPN is Nord. Yet you can find dozens of posts on HackerNews and other sites saying not to use it.
It’s one thing to diagnose and try to solve the problem, but then you need a bunch of technical knowledge and knowledge of where to find good answers to even know what solutions are viable or are just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a total minefield sometimes, it’s hard to not simply land with someone else who wants to take all your data and strip away your privacy.
It doesn’t help that the ISPs are run by media companies, who put the content on the Internet…
That’s why the policing is even happening in the first place.
A fascinating read. I’m sure there will be plenty of people complaining about their “centralists / fence sitting” takes, but what they’re saying it’s perfectly valid. These top level providers shouldn’t be interfering in arguably critical infrastructure.
