ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

I agree, we&#x27;ve got far too many entities that should just be &#x27;dumb pipes&#x27; trying to play moral police at the moment, and it&#x27;s a very worrying situation when it comes to free speech on the internet. Cloudflare is an often brought up example, as are payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and app stores like the iOS and Play Stores, but ISPs trying to block traffic for a site that&#x27;s not actually illegal feels like a step even further than that.<p>It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what&#x27;s allowed online and in society right now, and that it&#x27;s almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.<p>And while the site in question here is ethically bankrupt in basically every way, it doesn&#x27;t seem too far fetched to assume the same thing could (and potentially will) happen for sites many more people agree with because someone&#x2F;some group at an ISP doesn&#x27;t like them or think they should be accessible.

Glad to see this. Hurricane Electric has behaved in such an incredibly unprofessional manner regarding this entire ordeal. It began here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;IncogNetLLC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1685359845505957888" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;IncogNetLLC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1685359845505957888</a><p>We filed a complaint with the Washington state AG over their actions. HE&#x27;s response was more or less technically obtuse garbage and, &quot;You&#x27;re not our direct customer&quot; (paraphrasing, of course).<p>So what they did, was take it upon themselves to prevent access to an entire &#x2F;36 subnet of IPv6 that our customer had announced downstream of us. Not once did an abuse report get sent to us, or our upstream from HE. Nor did we receive any credible abuse reports sent to us directly from those upset that the site exists. Meanwhile, this actually has no direct impact on the website in question&#x27;s existence as their opposition has learned by now, it&#x27;s never been truly offline. Just temporarily blocked from certain ISPs.<p>From an ISP point of view, it&#x27;s worrying that a transit provider like HE can arbitrarily cancel a customer of yours, or a customer of a customer (, etc) over legal, protected speech. So, from a business standpoint, what does HE have to gain? The people complaining about the site aren&#x27;t their target market, they&#x27;re mostly Twitch streamers, Twitter personalities and folks who have a following on popular platforms that already exist. They&#x27;re not the types to be self-hosting a streaming service who&#x27;ll need rackspace and transit. So, what is there to gain by bending the knee to them? The safest business decision would be to remain neutral, respond to law enforcement requests if presented with one, and otherwise do the job you&#x27;re paid to do. The worst business decision is moderating the content of downstream customers, which is what we&#x27;re seeing now.

It&#x27;s heartening to see the EFF come out sticking to principles on this in a time when other organizations of their stature have not.<p>I hate to say it, but I could easily imagine something like the ACLU opposing the EFF on this.

Once again the EFF is proving that they&#x27;ll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. Taking this difficult position isn&#x27;t easy, but it is the right thing to do and I&#x27;m so glad to see that the EFF has the strength to do it in the face of growing opposition to free speech ideals.

Yawn. Non-telco(*1) Tier 1 provider declines to carry routes for an entity they don&#x27;t like. Happens all the time. This is why you buy from a Tier 2 instead and bypass DFZ(*2) politics.<p>Drop routes from spammers: Spamhaus DROP list. Drop routes from DDoS sources? All the time.<p>Even Google wasn&#x27;t reachable from Cogent over IPv6 for years because of a business dispute. For all we know someone working at HE was targeted by KF and this is a security response (also generally allowed even if you are a regulated provider).<p>*1: Cogent &amp; HE thread the needle around being a common carrier (they don&#x27;t sell voice or TDM service) or a broadband provider, which is why KF&#x27;s WA state complaint will fail (WA&#x27;s law only applies to mass-market retail providers, which HE is not).<p>*2: Tier 1 does not mean &quot;best carrier&quot; it means &quot;carrier that doesn&#x27;t pay another carrier for routes.&quot; DFZ literally means default-free zone as in they don&#x27;t have a default route to another provider.

I hate how Kiwi Farms has become the benchmark for so many important concepts relating to internet freedom. As much as I think the world would be a better place with them being forever banished to the onion realm, I can&#x27;t really defend HE and other service providers drafting their own visions of internet code of ethics, then enforcing them on other people&#x27;s traffic. A smaller ISP would probably start losing business over such concerns, but HE is so large, almost all of internet traffic touches them at some point, so their ability to moderate is not even impacted by their business decisions.<p>Defending a company&#x27;s AUP&#x2F;ToS is reasonable when the company is reasonably sized, but HE is clearly over that limit. When a company gets too big to fail (banking also comes to mind) due to providing crucial societal function, there should be very strict restrictions on what they&#x27;re allowed to moderate. This also applies to big industry conglomerates (oil, pharmaceuticals).<p>Another part of the problem seem to be various lazy officials not prosecuting these sites on the basis of obvious crimes involved in their operation.<p>I really appreciate EFF defending the obviously neutral approach here.

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don&#x27;t know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn&#x27;t start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs &amp; other providers by <i>going after the provider&#x27;s other customers</i> to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don&#x27;t know what the truth is but it <i>is</i> odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online.<p>I don&#x27;t know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it&#x27;s &quot;uniquely awful,&quot; that <i>the site itself</i> is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context&#x2F;evidence. Maybe it&#x27;s all true in this case, but I&#x27;ve been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heterodorx.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;episode-107-how-the-internet-lost-its-backbone-with-joshua-moon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heterodorx.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;episode-107-how-the-inter...</a>

I agree, and I’m extremely far from a free speech absolutist - to a level that I’m sure most at HN would disagree with. I completely believe in limits to free speech on a case by case basis, online and otherwise. For example, I think HN would be a worse place without moderation, same with Reddit, I think my home country Canada would be a worse place without hate speech laws, etc.<p>Not against limits to free speech online, but I think ISPs are the wrong layer for them. Governments can go after specific sites carrying out illegal activities, online communities can moderate themselves to avoid devolving into 4chan, but ISPs shouldn’t make censorship decisions, it’s just too broad a reach&#x2F;impact for a private company.

&gt; That’s why EFF has long argued that we must “protect the stack” by saying no to infrastructure providers policing internet content.<p>I agree with this, but you need to understand what you agree to. It&#x27;s not just the content <i>you</i> want to see - it&#x27;s also the content you don&#x27;t want to see. It&#x27;s the freedom of the most extreme content imaginable - CP, snuff, murder, doxxing, drugs, etc, etc.<p>People <i>will</i> experience severe issues as a result, but there are other things that can be done:<p>1. Individuals can do more to protect themselves. We have AI now that can quite accurately detect what is in an image or video, it&#x27;s entirely feasible to do live content filtering.<p>2. We need to protect the most vulnerable in our societies. We don&#x27;t give whiskey to a 5 year old, and we shouldn&#x27;t give unfiltered internet to a 5 year old. This also extends to vulnerable adults. If you receive government assistance (money&#x2F;drugs) for a mental disability, a filtered version of the internet should be available to you.<p>3. The punishment for filtering without permission should be severe enough that it&#x27;s not just a tax. People really need to be held accountable, otherwise they will just pay the toll and be done with it.

More nativity from the EFF, I dont think they live in the real world. It’s never worked that at and never will. Why? Because the systems become unusable for everyone.<p>A simple and very very old example is email. Even back in the 1990s days of the Internet, we had spam on email and if your reputable isp caught you spamming you’d be in trouble. Same with shitposting on usenet.<p>Sure there are nuances to consider as to what providers should do and what they should not, but like a lot of things this is a hard problem. The ‘simple’ solutions presented here and in other places will not solve it.

Too bad they didn&#x27;t touch on the net neutrality issues at play here. Washington passed a state level net neutrality law, and KF might end up being the test case. They have filed a complaint with the AG and are waiting for a response.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Je241" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Je241</a>

I would encourage those interested to read up on the individual behind the ISP harassment campaign and what might <i>actually</i> be motivating them to do it. That it&#x27;s being done to protect trans people is highly disingenuous.

&gt; To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.<p>I like this analogy it hits it home.<p>It really should take a court order to block sites based on a legal reason, and you probably don’t need to get the backbone to do it, it could be done by the ISP then escalate up if needed.

Being able to choose which private entities your business materially supports is a natural consequence of freedom. As long as ISPs are private businesses, their operators will and should have basic freedoms. The fact that _people_ are dropping KF left and right is just normal and healthy socialization at work. Lack of competition with American ISPs and whether they should be public utilities are real concerns, but fundamentally has nothing to do with KF being widely regarded as a flaming turd.

Where was the EFF when ISPs were null routing everything on Spamhaus&#x27;s DROP list?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spamhaus.org&#x2F;drop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spamhaus.org&#x2F;drop&#x2F;</a>

Interesting, so there actually was a story behind this unusual HN thread a few weeks ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37060597">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37060597</a>

There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a &quot;service preventer&quot;. Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.<p>There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.<p>Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.

EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They&#x27;re committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user&#x27;s end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet and shows that they&#x27;ve learned very little about how bad actors will abuse systems of that sort and degrade the experience for everyone else.

&gt;To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail.<p>LA actually did this during covid to shut off water for homes being accused of holding parties during covid.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;us&#x2F;los-angeles-shuts-off-power-parties-coronavirus-trnd&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;us&#x2F;los-angeles-shuts-off-powe...</a><p>I don&#x27;t agree with it, but just showing that some people have decided the ends justify the means essentially.

Maybe Hurricane needs to police it&#x27;s own network first.<p>My web server constantly receives malicious probes and invalid requests from Hurricane owned IPs.<p>How does a malicious actor get direct access to a Tier 1 address? The only way I can see is by being inside their facilities.

Serious legal question...What is the difference between an online venue and telephones? Is it simply that implementation of censoring is practicable? Could the telephone companies start &quot;moderating&quot; all phone communications to prevent unsavory communication?

Is this situation like, say I own some commercial property like a mall, someone rents from me, I realize the person who is renting from me is allowing one of the storefronts to advertise the ritualistic sacrifice of kittens. Shouldn’t I be allowed to 1) tell the guy renting from me to boot out the kitten killers; 2) boot out the guy renting from me for letting one of the storefronts of my commercial space be kitten killing?<p>Am I not understanding something here

It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37314499">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37314499</a><p>If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.

Shameless plug, I wrote an essay on this topic years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wannabewonk.com&#x2F;gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wannabewonk.com&#x2F;gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet&#x2F;</a><p>The crux being what EFF is saying now. ISPs and DNS and CAs are too fundamental to free speech for blockage at that layer to occur without legal cause.

Edit: you know what, debating this here isn&#x27;t worth the effort. Sad to see the state of this place.

All the people that fought against Net Neutrality, this is what you were fighting for, the ISPs have no requirement to be neutral.

I hit CTRL+F to find the word &#x27;neutral&#x27; in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled &#x27;We Need to Talk About Infrastructure&#x27;[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded &#x27;internet infrastructure&#x27; these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor&#x2F;Hyphanet an ISP?<p>&#x27;Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral&#x27;:<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;we-need-talk-about-infrastructure" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;we-need-talk-about-inf...</a>

Are there any lawsuits pending against KiwiFarms? If not, why not?

It feels like it&#x27;s pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.<p>Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn&#x27;t matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.

I think the question is not quite so easy as many here (and even the EFF) are making it seem.<p>It&#x27;s easy to talk about free-speech that needs to be protected at any cost when it comes to political speech, but if we look at e.g. spam nobody argues that spam and spammers should be blocked. Now is spam less speech, because it is not political?<p>On a similar note, if I own a large piece of land should I allow a demonstration that I disagree with cross the land because of free-speech? If no, why does a company who carries data, need to provide their &quot;pipes&quot; to the same people?<p>I understand the argument that restricting speech is a slippery slope, on the other hand I agree with Popper, not restricting all speech and enabling the &quot;intolerant&quot; is also a slippery slope (I say that as a German, we have quite a bit of experience with this).<p>I&#x27;m not sure how to draw easy boundaries, but making this into an argument of &quot;easy it&#x27;s free-speech that needs to be defended at all costs&quot; seems much too simplistic.

Counterpoint: the Internet is a network of peers, and if KF can&#x27;t become a peer and can&#x27;t find a private company to serve their needs, then forget them.<p>No support for the activity of abusers.

surely, the attacks from KF against public persons serves to restrict those persons’ freedom of speech.<p>&gt; The so-called “dark web” has plenty of deserved ill repute, however, so although it is resistant to censorship by Tier 1 ISPs, it is not a meaningful option for many, much less an accessible one.<p>that’s a way too casual dismissal. consider the type of person who posts on KF for just a minute (go there yourself if you haven’t), and think if they might be way more likely than your average person to know how to use tor, a VPN, or <i>something</i> to obfuscate their traffic before posting to a forum where they <i>themselves</i> might be harassed.

what is missing from everything visible so far is this is people trying to force HE to carry traffic for kiwifarms when they don&#x27;t want to.<p>I add this so people don&#x27;t have to do extra googling like I did to understand a story.

Agreed. ISPs are the part of the network that we need to demand be free to any speech, other than the explicitly illegal, and even then we need to ask if it should be handled in a different manner.

The irony of course is a large segment of the people who are against net neutrality are exactly the people[1] who would have their online speech censored then complain about it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;net-neutrality-repeal-republican-districts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;06&#x2F;net-neutrality-repeal-re...</a>

&gt; <i>But just because there’s a serious problem doesn’t mean that every response is a good one.</i><p>This is a fantastic line, one that I&#x27;m tucking away for future use.

do people here consider comment moderation to be online speech policing? Seems pretty clear that there are certain things hosts don&#x27;t want on their platform<p>there&#x27;s an economic bottom line where advertisers drive a lot of the need as well. users themselves aren&#x27;t paying for the service.

In the meantime both EU and Italy play fast and loose with censorship normatives: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euronews.com&#x2F;my-europe&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;online-platforms-targeted-as-the-eus-biggest-ever-shake-up-of-digital-rules-kicks-in" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euronews.com&#x2F;my-europe&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;online-platfor...</a> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.it&#x2F;article&#x2F;pirateria-online-legge-anti-pezzotto-senato-errori&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.it&#x2F;article&#x2F;pirateria-online-legge-anti-pez...</a> (italian)

This has been a clear danger for a while now. Beyond just mere danger at this point in fact. You guys are late to the party but it is nice to see you guys catching.<p>This is the literal death of the internet if nothing is done to stop it.

“ The cops and the courts should be working to protect the victims of KF and go after the perpetrators with every legal tool at their disposal.”<p>It seems ridiculous to me to float this as something that is going to happen.

I would extend this to include everyone that isn&#x27;t actual law enforcement agencies.<p>While it&#x27;s perfectly reasonable for websites to decide what content is shown, it should also be possible to decide to show ALL content, except very obviously illegal content like CSAM and actual threats (which can be notified by LE and even automated).<p>I am aware that this line gets blurry very quickly, but we&#x27;re leaning way too much on the side of censorship. We are just sweeping the ugly under the rug and hoping it goes away, while instead it festers, until it goes viral.

Surprised by the huge outpouring of support here, yet when X puts forward the exact same values of &quot;freedom of speech but not freedom of speech,&quot; it&#x27;s met entirely with criticism.

They don&#x27;t have to police it, but they don&#x27;t have to facilitate it either. ISPs should be just as free as any other company to decide who they want to do business with.

Why should an individual’s speech limit a business to being a dumb pipe?<p>I’ve never gelled with this aspect of “tech” (startup?) culture.<p>Why shouldn’t an ISP or any company be able to limit for any lawful reason?

Huh, so what’s EFF’s stance on spamming and phishing block lists? If ISPs are going to deplatform spammers and DDoSers where are they going to go?

The EFF is absolutely in the wrong on this. ISPs are private businesses, and they have every right (and responsibility!) to enforce their own Acceptable Use Policies&#x2F;Terms of Service. Anyone who cries &quot;Freedom of Speech&quot; either hasn&#x27;t thought this through, or else has no idea what they&#x27;re talking about... Hurricane Electric is not a government entity.<p>We are living in Popper&#x27;s &quot;Paradox of Tolerance&quot;. Nazis need to be punched, but de-platforming them is pretty good, too.

ISP is a no-go, but are there any successful online speech moderation mechanism?

Doesn&#x27;t Hurricane still buy v4 transit from Telia? It&#x27;s strange that everyone is uncritically calling them a Tier 1 here; I&#x27;m used to endless bickering over whether they&#x27;re a Tier 1 or a Tier 2.

As a victim that has been doxxed and attacked in real life, over a rumor that some idiots spread about me on the other side of the planet (that I am trans?!?), I wholeheartedly disagree and I now know what all the feminist movement is talking about when they write or talk about that they don&#x27;t feel safe, be it online or offline (due to the technological &quot;upper hand&quot; being on the side of the doxxers).<p>This incident changed my life, and I changed my pacifistic views because I cannot stand by and do nothing anymore.<p>Why is it that people have the right to decide what their standpoint is over this, especially in regards to legal actions...but victims don&#x27;t even have the right to change their names in order to feel safe again?<p>I thought long whether or not I should write about this, because honestly, I&#x27;m in Europe and I don&#x27;t give a damn about your shit-smearing American radicalization tactics in political campaigns. But I realized that it&#x27;s over here nowadays, too, and it&#x27;s a lot bigger than anyone not involved might assume.<p>Team Jorge, AIMS, Killnet&#x2F;Xaknet&#x2F;Legion&#x27;s psyops, troll factories with fake education foundations as a cover story, etc. if you want to know more about it. Aleph from the occrp if you want to do more research on the legal structures and how their money flows.<p>The right-wing (&quot;alt rights&quot;) are the fools of modern warfare, and they don&#x27;t even know who it is that is playing them because they are blind of hatred and despair. And that&#x27;s what&#x27;s wrong with our society.<p>Autocracies on the planet realized that the weakness of democracy is that it tries to find a compromise. &quot;Divide and conquer&quot; is literally what they&#x27;re doing, and we are too busy discussing our moral stand points over this while they infect our societies with hatred to make it impossible to govern.

And that doesn&#x27;t go far enough. On the modern Internet access to an ISP connection and nothing else is fairly useless.<p>Without access to a large email provider you won&#x27;t be able to send to anyone. And, no, you can&#x27;t just set up an SMTP server. Not if you expect anyone to get your emails.<p>If you don&#x27;t have access to messenger apps you basically can&#x27;t communicate with people outside of the US which is the only country which still uses SMS.<p>If you don&#x27;t have access to hosting services and something like cloudflare, you basically can&#x27;t build a website.<p>If you don&#x27;t have access to payment processors, you can&#x27;t run any form of online business.

I&#x27;m confused because the issue seems to be about Crunchbits but most of the article seems to cover Kiwi Farms and only mentions Crunchbits once.

Indeed. Companies should be able to just rake in profits regardless of social, cultural or environmental impact without taking any responsibility.

Case in point, www.rt.com is blocked by all major ISPs in all EU countries. That&#x27;s not the right way to deal with Russian propaganda.

I think it’s kind of incredible that Kiwifarms has become the poster-boy for abhorrent content, when Stormfront has been right there for decades and seems to still be going strong. Somehow they are perceived as worse than literal Nazis.

Do ISPs block spam? Spam is clearly legal speech

Those of us purchasing bandwidth should boycott HE. I know I will be and I&#x27;m a potentially significant customer of theirs. They&#x27;re completely off the list of providers unless they completely change their tune.

What if we allowed all speech online, no matter how vile?<p>The problem would be that people want to avoid seeing some things, and they really want to avoid their kids seeing things.<p>So what if we define a group of flags that can be set to say &quot;This content does contain X&quot; or &quot;This content does not contain X.&quot; If the flag is not set, we don&#x27;t know. Then web filters can just block content that lacks a flag saying &quot;This content does not contain X.&quot;

This is an old-school leftist approach that is no longer welcome, imho.

Will they take a similar stand for VPS providers and CDNs as well?

Unfortunately, the media demands censorship and incites people to demand it as well.<p>The ultimate solution if something bothers you online is to locate the power button on the device, press it, then proceed outdoors to hang out with your friends.

This thread was linked to on the Kiwifarms website and people are coming in here astroturfing for Kiwifarms. That&#x27;s why this thread is such a garbage pile.

These days everyone is a story teller and witch hunter. I sometimes think the rotten people&#x27;s mindset what made me afraid leave my house

...except when it&#x27;s copyright infringement.... because that&#x27;s literally how they operate right now.

The ACLU has changed to only defend speech they agree with. Will the EFF take over the role that ACLU had?

Interesting link, thanks!

Wouldn&#x27;t this action eliminate section 230 protections for Hurricane?

I see ye ol’ “but HE is a private company they can do what they want” argument surfacing again. Something that is easily missed: internet providers benefit from government protected monopolies because you can’t just dig up cities and lay cable wherever you want. They’re seen as privately run public infrastructure. Therefore there’s an expectation that they indiscriminately carry traffic, because their position as an ISP is <i>too powerful</i> to allow them to be short circuiting the courts and making value judgements. This isn’t just a hypothetical concern, it’s real.<p>I don’t know HE’s specific situation with regards to being a common carrier, but I’m surprised there isn’t a conversation about the expectations we have of utility providers who receive privileged operational power over necessary public services.

It appears this is the source of the complaint adding context to what is being discussed by the EFF, no reason it should be dead.

The ACLU will absolutely oppose this. If not for the reason they stand to make a lot of money suing ISPs for &quot;not doing enough&quot; to stop the big-ole-meanies online.<p>I see ISPs blocking &quot;mean speech&quot; to &quot;protect people&quot; as another symptom of the enshittification of the internet. I legitimately cannot understand problems in this arena because you can just...walk away from your computer. Or turn off the website. Or hey, maybe don&#x27;t TIE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND REAL IDENTITY TO THE INTERNET. I suspect the prominent use of pseudonyms 30 years ago prevented most forms of ongoing harassment. Narcissists need the validation and so now big brother needs to step in to protect them.<p>I think society is getting a little too comfortable with the idea of big brother and it&#x27;s making me really, really uncomfortable. As an old man yelling at a cloud the internet really was better 20 or 30 years ago.

Tell that to Google. You could almost feel how sexy the censoring people felt during 2020 at Google. Must have been a blast of a time.

I think it might be impossible to avoid having to make moral judgements.<p>You might wish to believe that you free society can exist without any morality but I don&#x27;t think it can really.<p>So what is &quot;ok&quot; and what is &quot;not ok&quot; - would you censor the NAZI party in the 1930s or do you think that letting theim air their views fully would convince Germans not to accept them? 10s of millions of lives depend on your choice.

&gt; Cloudflare is an often brought up example<p>And Cloudflare are nearly as well behaved as they could possibly be. The simple fact of them being everywhere makes them a major target of government pressure to censor. This is purely an end run around the constitution, not the desire of companies to control speech.<p>&gt; It feels like private companies are de facto writing the laws about what&#x27;s allowed online and in society right now, and that it&#x27;s almost become a loophole for censoring free speech on a whim.<p>And I don&#x27;t think that the companies have any particular desire to censor. Zuckerberg would only censor speech about Facebook and himself personally. Dorsey seemed entirely blindsided by the pressures from the administration, three-letter agencies, and individual Congressmen based on the Twitter Files, and pushed back plenty. The three-letter agencies just placed dozens and dozens of people (who decided to quit the CIA, NSA, and FBI in their 30s for some reason and change careers) in the executive suites of every social network.<p>It&#x27;s being done in the open, and they&#x27;re simply daring us to see corruption there. Hell, they&#x27;ve become conspiracy and foreign propaganda <i>scientists</i>, and they can detect the influence of the evil Russian and Chinese enemies of the state even in people who have no connections to Russians or Chinese people. It&#x27;s their <i>Russian and Chinese ideas</i> that need to be eradicated, and all good communications channels and payments processors should be happy to help unless they are also secretly Russian.<p>Wow did they go from coordinating banning Alex Jones to banning the last President in record time. Let&#x27;s see how long it takes them to get from Kiwi Farms to The Grayzone or Rumble, or any newspaper that contradicts a government press release.

What I&#x27;d like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions?<p>And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn&#x27;t it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?

Tell that to the Amazon engineers that conspired to shutdown Parlor during the height of its popularity.

Few things are more inhumane, abhorrent, vile, digusting, and sickening as war. Yet every ISP permits news businesses to spread content about, and even promote, wars. Clearly they do not actually object to &quot;offensive&quot; content, but are cherry-picking to suit their own ideology.

Why is trust the default here? If governments, ISPs, and other tech entities behave this way in a single instance, why assume that it&#x27;s the only instance? Why not just migrate the infrastructure to a country like Belarus and strip away the leverage of whatever shitty jurisdiction you&#x27;re living under?

I&#x27;d argue that there are legitimate safety concerns that trump speech in this particular case.<p>But I think EFF would have a stronger case if we had common carriers following net neutrality laws. Content decisions are in the hands of upstream ISPs because we don&#x27;t have the right regulations in place.<p>EFF has clearly tried here. The case is strong. But it&#x27;s the edge cases where we need the net neutrality regulations most.

I think it&#x27;s fine for the ISP to police online speech over their network as long as it&#x27;s clearly stated in their service agreement that they can cancel&#x2F;interfere with your service if they think you&#x27;re too mean and as long as they also lose all safe harbor and assume liability for everything transmitted over their network.

Why does it have to be absolute&#x2F;binary?<p>If I can&#x27;t have full, unfettered free speech, then it&#x27;s the end of the world.<p>Let&#x27;s put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.<p>Shouldn&#x27;t a more realistic approach be something like &quot;give me speech as free as is possible&quot;, with considerations that are negotiable, such as, &quot;does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on&quot;, etc...<p>As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can&#x27;t (or shouldn&#x27;t) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.<p>Yeah, it&#x27;s messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.