To not even begin to poke at the obvious holes in this proposal, in this supposed utopia the government fully owns and runs the entire backbone, ISPs via municipalities, and any service that scales to serve a certain number, including hosting platforms such as AWS?<p>There's people out there who believe this would be a good thing? Really?<p>If we accept this as naive, then we accept the proposer as modernly blinkered and historically blind and can likely be dismissed as such. However, if we accept the proposal as being made with full knowledge of the eventual consequences and outcomes in mind, then we can only label those making such proposals as a danger.
> In this case, a state entity takes responsibility for operating a service.<p>This absolutely terrifies me that someone thinks this is a good idea.
It’s hard to trust the intent behind this Jacobin piece, especially because the article is unclear on what problems it is trying to solve and therefore comes off as purely ideologically motivated. It seems like this is walking exactly the path of past socialist authoritarian regimes, where eventual total public control (AKA party or ideological control) comes into being in the name of empowering the common man and “Democratizing”. But how long before public control starts limiting the freedom of the internet by imposing rules on what’s allowed and not allowed in even more heavy-handed ways? Given that the far left (like Jacobin) have been rallying _against_ free speech and mocking it online with “freeze peach” memes, I am terrified at the possibility of them eventually ceasing control of speech platforms. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of the current state either, with a few companies controlling everything. But we have tools for that - namely anti-trust law. So let’s take incremental steps for change rather than entertaining dangerously radical changes.