> Neither is a mob level targeting mechanism a good or safe idea.

I think we agree on this. Which is why I'm in favor of giving no online quarter to KiwiFarms, a notorious site for organizing mobs.

KF supporters and users are free to say whatever they want in their own forums. The freedom of speech has never implied an obligation for people to listen. And freedom of the press does imply a freedom to refrain from serving as a conduit for someone else's message, as does freedom of association.

Nothing of what KF is doing or saying obligates anyone to provide them the tools to do or say it. They're as free as everyone else; they can print their own leaflets and stand on their own soapboxes. They don't have the right to obligate HE to facilitate them, directly or by proxy.

>KF supporters and users are free to say whatever they want in their own forums.

Thats exactly what is no longer the case. We just created the method to even prevent self hosting.

edit: Its also why this is such a big deal. They were a canary and with how they were dealt with its extremely likely that that was a domino. Because there is nothing stopping people from exploiting this now that its here. How ever justified or well intentioned this was, it wont matter for the cases to come.

How to host an unpopular forum:

1. Run your own server, because you've been pressured out existing sites. 2. Run your own data center, because you've been pressured out of existing data centers. 3. Run your own ISP, because that's the only way you can get connectivity. 4. Run your own payment processor, because you can't get a bank to serve you. 5. Run your own government, because you can't just start up your own bank. 6. ??? 7. Profit? Wait, I think that started when you took control of the government.

If you run infrastructure, not a destination, then you should be a common carrier. Because freedom of speech is more than just the First Amendment. It's not just the government can't tell you what not to say (that's just the 1A). It's not just the ability to speak, but also the ability to be heard. Because for infrastructure, only loons would believe that you actually are responsible for the speech that you care across your lines.

We arent discussing technicalities here but actual consequences.

>I think the burden is on those who think it should be a common-carrier system to justify why that's societally beneficial

Thats a really easy way out of having to address how this isnt going to end in a totalitarian echo chamber. Unfortunately just ignoring it and feeling right isnt a promising strategy.

>And if nobody will host them, it's not a totalitarian echo chamber, it's just "the people's will."

Thats framing that doesnt change the end result. There wont be any cleaving but anything differing from dominant doctrine no longer available. With no regard for who determines that other then the currently loudest screaming mob. That describes a totalitarian society in which truth has lost all meaning because people favor signaling despite knowing better.

I find it highly irresponsible to push for defacto censorship with a complete disregard for very clear threat, namely the power to censor not only getting abused but being by its very nature uncontrollable. Especially in this form. Nobody being able to even describe how this could function without ending in tragedy means its likely impossible. Which should surprise nobody.

edit: China described it as the peoples will as well if i am not mistaken. Which meant having a set ratio of the population that had to confess their reactionary thoughts in front of a screaming mob before being thrown into Gulags.

By definition totalitarian and will of the people are disjoint. Totalitarian systems are centralized. The people deciding, each of their own, to shun that which their consciences tell them is harmful to their society is the opposite of totalitarian. If KF can't find a home with any provider, and if providers they do find a home with are themselves shunned... That's just two tribes circling the wagons. Totalitarianism would look a lot more like some force external to those operators stepping in and forcing them to interact, regardless of their will.

And that's the rub. If we don't trust the owners of the machinery to decide how it is used, what's the proposed alternative?

If we pass laws to tie the hands of corporations on who's data they must carry, then we've taken the cudgel away from the Hurricane Electics of the world and given it to the Richard Blumenthals.

I trust corporations about as far as I can throw them, but I trust them more to decide what bits are on the wire than I trust governments.

Making sure that we have robust system in place that makes silencing dissenting voices impossible. Because it does not work, you have nobody (and no institution) competent enough to decide this. And we will have to rely on this system if history is any measure.

Just wanting this to work is not a valid strategy. You can and should know better.

So your alternative to distributed corp-by-corp decisionmaking is... A centralized set of rules, from a central authority, that corps must abide.

That looks a lot closer to totalitarianism than "KF has to keep changing who it works with because individual companies think they're not a good client."

The only way you can equate censorship with banning censorship is if the death penalty and the bill of rights are also both just laws.

The difference here is that its impossible to push society into a censored echo chamber through banning censorship. You cant create the dangerous blind spots this way that are at the core of totalitarian risks.

You really should read up on totalitarianism. Your definition is quite distorted and you hit a lot of the marks when ignoring consequences in favor of frames. I can recommend Meerloos Rape of the Mind.

You're treating freedom of speech as something beyond what it's protected as.

I fundamentally don't see it that way. It's a useful tool to promote good governance. It's a constraint upon the government's right to build an echo chamber around the leadership, which is comfortable for leadership but eventually leads a government to topple for failure to address the needs of the people.

The natural right that exists in the absence of a Bill of Rights is freedom of association - you can say what you want, and someone can tell you to piss off and go away for your trouble. They can also ignore you. And they are definitely not obligated to echo you, nor to do business with those who listen to you. That's the natural order you're alluding to by suggesting I'm saying the Bill of Rights is "just laws."

> The difference here is that its impossible to push society into a censored echo chamber through banning censorship

a) government bans censorship

b) people can say whatever they want

c) people use that liberty to conspire to commit crimes

d) the commission of those crimes, at scale, overwhelms the state's ability to enforce

e) totalitarians exploit this arrangement to depose the previous emasculated government and install their own... Which includes establishing rules to disrupt conspiracy to commit crimes so they are not themselves deposed.

f) society is now a censored echo chamber

The US does not currently protect freedom of speech to the level you're describing. No large functional government does.

There is no evidence such blanket, wide-open protection is actually a virtue for a functional government or society.

I dont care what it is protected as, i am telling you what automatically happens once you try to poke holes into it. It shouldnt be a surprise to anyone with a functioning relationship to reality. Picture it as a shared communication bus everyone uses for navigation where somebody added a hidden packet drop you cant compensate for or detect. If you try to use that thing you are going to crash. Because you have no ability to determine how much gets dropped. And how much bullshit cant be challenged anymore. Thats the line in the sand for cascading failure.

It cant work. Those blind spots cant be detected, managed or compensated for. They are like a metastasizing cancer.

That blind spot is at the core of totalitarian regimes. Group think sets in and suddenly your farmers are told to plant the crops closer together to utilize the proletarian solidarity between the plants. Anyone who doesnt gets gulaged and the rest starves.

Its worth mentioning that my local constitution has a clause that simplified means anyone trying to get the society to e) can be shot by anyone. How ever much of a paper tiger this is, having had two murderous totalitarian regimes in the last 100 years its generally considered a good idea and the way back out.

That you have to rely on a extremely thin argument like it probably being necessary to uphold the rule of law should have you reflect. You are arguing with an abstract model of what ought to happen according to your favorite ought-to-be model while i am telling you what will happen if you dont prevent it. We have seen it times and times again, if you dont try something different the results will replicate. Acting in denial of reality is totalitarian. Thats how we got all those mass graves. They werent created by evil caricatures but stupid people caught up in a drunk fever and Zugzwang with disabled breaks.

If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.

Even if that's true, I don't think you've made the case that allowing them room in the newspapers to coordinate doesn't just give them the opportunity to amass like-minded supporters and overthrow society faster. Forcing the opinions of fringe groups into privately owned newspapers, for example, gives them an air of legitimacy that they don't have if the same information is printed on self-published pamphlets that they're handing out on a street corner.

You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.

>You are also claiming that you are arguing concrete scenarios and I'm arguing abstractions. I'm unaware of any government overthrows that occurred because some people were unable to use the internet due to their past use of it being so heinous that nobody wants to do business with them, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't happened; internet is too young.

I gave you are very direct example for a totalitarian echo chamber becoming murderous. The Soviet and Chinese famines. The officially dictated story became beyond critic and millions died as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

I also mentioned Dallaires pleas to the UN for access to radio equipment to be allowed to air a counter narrative to the genocidal government aligned ones. Something he addressed special weight to in his "Shaking hands with the devil". Which should say a lot about its importance.

>If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.

No, quite the opposite. Trying to ban people you dont like from communicating will result in a totalitarian echo chamber. Thats a slope and you willfully ignore the need for breaks. That quickly turns murderous. Because determining what should and shouldnt be censored and its second and third order effects is an infinitely complex problem that you cant address with intention alone. And will quickly be exploited for monetary/ personal / political / tribal profit. Trying to control discourse is a slope and by making self hosting impossible you are destroying the possibility to erect warning lights. You are willfully heading for a cliff.

Your error stems from being focused on the who of the story and at the same time ignoring practical limits. I am telling you if you are at the point in which communication is restricted enough, there will soon bee armed men and horror if your only safeguards are good intentions. There is a causal relationship, power becomes uncontrollable and slip from your hands as the official story and reality collide more and more and you become incapacitated by it. You trying to solve this with feeling competent enough and more armed men / state control is how that always works. Those are usually the same people who drag you off into camps. After all, you ignored safe use in favor of feeling good about the story and somebody like Stalin or Hitler doesnt mind taking over. The German justice system is a great example, many judges just continued to do their job with their career spanning Weimar, the third Reich and West/East Germany.

Even if you are delusional enough to think that your totalitarian echochamber will be the first one able to overrule reality, people will reliably react and that reaction being unguided as well can easily turn fascist. It was already visible with the various stay behind organizations throughout Europe that were intended as a safeguard against a totalitarian power grab. Or with the KPD as a major topic for NSDAP election run up. Caricatures and bogeymen pose the threat of becoming the lesser evil if the situation deteriorates enough. This isnt a matter of tribalism but one of guaranteed conflict and atrocities. There is no acceptable or safe version of totalitarianism, its by its very nature corrupt, self destructive and brings out the worst in people. Even if "your side" ends up on top, it will be a distorted, corrupt and dysfunctional monster. Or do you think there are many fans of Göring even among Nazis? Large parts of the admiralty of the soviet pacific fleet dying in an overloaded smuggler plane is another good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash

I think we disagree on the totalitarian aspect of the echo chamber. I agree with you that letting companies have freedom to peer encourages echo chambers. For them to become totalitarian, it'd have to be power flowing from the government. The status quo is that individual companies may choose their digital neighbors. That creates echo chambers but not ones that can hook the levers of power. It enhances tribalism, not totalitarianism.

Coupled with a healthy democracy, it if anything makes it harder for a zeitgeist opinion to become entrenched permanently in leadership when the nation's thought is composed of separate tribal opinions.

The EFF is advocating government saying who must and may not peer. Currently, corporations may say. The status quo is diffusion of power, not concentration.

You're using a lot of words to make a slippery slope argument. It requires a lot more defense than your providing. From my point of view, the slope if anything points in the other direction.

What you are arguing for leads to totalitarianism. Here's how:

* We decide as a society that private peering decisions are unacceptable and the government must regulate them. It starts innocent enough; we pass a law that says if you try to de-peer for reasons of your corporate policy were no law was broken, as is the case here, you can't.

* In so doing, we've now opened the floodgates on government, not private corporations and organizations, controlling the shape of the internet

* A subsequent government comes along and, since they already have the authority to regulate peering, passes the law that you must de-peer from sites that encourage cyberbullying. Nobody bats an eye because the government already regulates peering. The key difference here is that since this is now government policy not the policy of a private institution, citizens don't have somewhere else to turn; KF can't find a new host. Their speech has been actually criminalized.

Now we are on the slope with no breaks. Subsequent governments pass laws that you have to de-peer from sites that tolerate racism. The tolerate discussion of self-harm. That tolerate criticism of public health policy. That tolerate criticism of public policy in general. That tolerate criticism of the government. That tolerate criticism of politicians. And now all the gunpowder is piled in the corner waiting for a match.

The power to force a shape to the network is a double edged sword, and I trust it far more in the hands of private actors than in the hands of the government. Even if, in the hands of private actors, It can lead to tribalism and balkanization of the network. Forcing people to carry a message they don't agree with is every bit as totalitarian as forcing people into silence.

Forcing people to peer and forcing people not to peer are as fundamentally different as the bill of rights and the death penalty. One keeps communication channels open, the other closes them.

I choose what you frame as might lead to totalitarianism over being in totalitarianism any day of the week. The moment it becomes practically impossible to self host you are very likely to be on the slope with no way to tell how much further till mass graves. That likely will be the case if Josh ends up at the point at which Kiwifarms cant be turned back on again. Thats why people reference them as a canary. They are among the first that you can expect the wave to hit. With no way to tell up front how the wave is going to look this time around.

Communication channels cant be closed. If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging. Which will get a lot more disgusting then kiwifarms due to tribalistic reactions and people weaponizing the moderation burden, which will speed up the conflict cycle and the race to the bottom even more. Its still not optional. Thats what i meant when i said reactions quickly turn fascist. Making sure that it doesnt is an almost impossible task if you are far enough down the cycle.

The more we even need to talk about this, the more dangerous it becomes. What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.

Not as fundamentally different as you want them to be. They're both saying "This is something the government has authority over, not individuals."

And once that authority is vested in the government, the government shall use it as those in control of the government deem fit. I trust a world where HE can misbehave but there's always another service provider down the pike a lot more than I trust one where the government's dictating who may be compelled to peer; the government, given enough time, always rolls around to being composed of people who de-peer me. Or you. And when they're calling the shots, there isn't a HE competitor down the pipe to turn to.

You keep saying "impossible to host." It's not. KF can still host; they must continue to seek out the coalition of providers that will work with them, the subset of the collective network willing to hear them. It's a big world and they're out there. But it's a vanishingly small group for no other reason than what KiwiFarms does and what they represent. Sometimes, people are all in agreement that something's wrong because it is.

> If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging

That's hardly an argument against the status quo; better point-to-point security benefits the people against oppressive governments. If this provides incentive to build it, good.

> What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.

I used to subscribe to this fallacy. It turns out, cutting communication can be extremely healthy. The government owes everyone a platform for practical reasons. Individuals? They cut ties all the time. Always have. Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?

For what its worth, i do sympathize with your perspective. And yes, in a perfect world we wouldnt want the government anywhere near this.

The problem is that we now are at the point at which it becomes a practical end to self hosting. Not because everyone is convinced and one of the good guys now but because the power structure that is in place. That dissonance to your intention is where the risk comes from and what i am trying to warn you about. You are describing a mechanism of making communication impossible through applying pressure.

Thats less my object of concern then your willingness to overlook the risks doing this poses by focusing on intention over outcome . While tbh i do take offense to attempting the first, the later is where the giant danger is at. You are doing something that fits the definition of totalitarianism and with it you are faced with its risks. Not safeguarding against them means its extremely improbable that you end anywhere but in a dysfunction nightmare. Which means that weapon able to end self hosting will get into the wrong hands reliably which has good chances result in a quite horrific echo chamber. Which in all likelihood means i will be able to use the downtime between work through extermination sessions in the reeducation camp to argue that being sorry unfortunately has similar impact on reality as the initial good intention. But maybe we can then figure out how we prevent yet another repeat after the new regime hopefully burned itself to the ground.

I am hard pressed to not compare the whole situation to an overconfident and careless cave diver getting lost predictably. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRarNBAG6HY The idiot is fine, but the nature of the way we interact with the world means we get less and less direct feedback from the dysfunctional paths people take. After all, they are quite the downer. Which results in a drastic underestimation of the risks some aspects of reality pose.

> If this provides incentive to build it, good.

Leaving out the very obvious risk of it not being feasible, few people are willing to overlook the risk of creating something that has the potential to create quite a horrific future and very direct and individual harm. As well as the very predictable reactions. The only promise accelerationism can make is misery. Unguided reactions are not a viable plan and failures arent predictable or necessarily timely. That might be the path towards a proper dystopia.

Either way, its still further escalation in a tribalistic struggle that brings out the worst in people. I dont want to end up in an extreme and disfigured opposition to a caricature. This is just stupid.

>Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?

You are free to do so already. And a bit off topic, good decision for your mental health. But this isnt about the value that person offers but your ability to communicate vanishing completely. Picture finding a manual reading "To easily revert from catastrophic failure ■■■■■■■■■". That very likely happened to some apparatchik with a case of emergency contact never having existed after the last purge. The second and third order effects always bite you. And the utterly horrific stuff that can happen when a powerful apparatus capsules human misery and censors the reports about it can be seen in stuff like the soviet cannibal island. Or any other big atrocity throughout time.

In the end even feudal kings had jesters around to not drift off into a parallel reality. Reality isnt less important then peace of mind. Willfully ignoring this is really hard to frame as good intentioned.

the "weapon able to end self hosting" in this context is "everyone with access to a backbone decides your content shouldn't be part of the larger Internet."

Everyone. That's a huge group.

The easiest way to test your hypothesis that this scenario leads to totalitarianism is to check if KF is still reachable right now. And... Yes, yes it is, via tor. HE chose not to work with them but they're only one corporation. KF has allies. And the government can't force it offline because the choice to peer / provide service or not is a per-company choice in this dimension, not a government regulation.

Contrast with your proposed scenario, where we hand the government the right to regulate peering and, two government changes-of-hands later, KF (and various other services) are forced off with the teeth of legal enforcement behind it. If the government starts sending company owners to jail for hosting KF, how many fewer potential peering partners will be out there to support them? And not just them, but whoever that government deems unworthy?

You're arguing for government control over personal / corporation control and somehow claiming the alternative is totalitarianism. I disagree, and I don't think we're going to come to terms. So I'm taking this opportunity to exercise my own liberty to end this conversation.

And no government will force me to continue it.

> think it should be a common-carrier system

The law in the state they operate _literally defines_ it as a common carrier system.

That's the basis of the case being argued here (that the ISPs blocking is literally unlawful due to the common carrier legislation which prevails in the state in which they're operating.)

I'm not generally inclined to assume laws are passed on sound philosophical backing (I've seen too many laws passed that aren't only poorly-grounded, but actually grounded in counterfactual to believe one follows from the other).

But from a mechanical standpoint that is an interesting fact and I'll be intrigued to see how HE defends itself here, should the regulators choose to step in.

(They may not. The text of the law says HE may not drop lawful traffic. To a cursory read, it's unclear if that means they can't drop lawful traffic bundled with unlawful traffic, i.e. if criminals start slipping criminal activity into lawful activity, is the whole channel drop-worthy?)

I think it's good to get a case like this on the books and a precedent established because I think the enthusiasm with which some entities are embracing 'deplatforming' is a bit disturbing and some pushback is well overdue.