Once again we confront the terrible consequences of large corporate powers (e.g. App Store signing) being able to, in an instant upon legal demand or other state threat, function as a government censorship department.<p><a href="https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/" rel="nofollow">https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/</a><p>This is a huge ticking time bomb: insofar as the government can order large, centralized corporations to block, censor, alter, or otherwise impede your person-to-person communications, it's only a matter of time before it's a direct issue for health and safety, whether it be disaster, unrest, or war.<p>Sure, it might be illegal, or might get unwound in court in the weeks or months or years to follow. But in the meantime, you're cut off from friends, family, and information, and your family might not survive the disaster or crisis that triggered the government demand long enough to have the wrong turned right in court, much later.<p>This is an existential threat to a free society. The state must not be able to pick up the phone and have your communications tools shut off in bulk.<p>What happens when there's a wildfire or a natural disaster or a war and the military demands that Facebook disable Messenger and WhatsApp and that Apple disable iMessage in a certain region, on national security grounds?<p>We built a network designed to survive a nuclear war, and then somehow recentralized all of the node-to-node communications edges in an overlay network, squandering that whole benefit.