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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

Also, they have a point about the free speech. For a system in which free speech is indispensable (the internet), there is actually only a handful of countries that seem to get the whole "free speech" thing correct, the US among them.

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I recently did a lot of research into this as part of a project. As far as actual laws on the books (and not whatever one's political opinion of how they tend to be applied), the U.S. isn't just "one of" - it is literally the only country in the world matching descriptions like "first-world", "liberal", and "democratic", that does not have some variety of broad, nation-level laws against insulting people or groups of people. Aside from the U.S., only a handful of completely random small countries happen to lack such laws.

So, as far as I can tell, the U.S. is practically unique in having the most liberal free speech protections, and actually unique among any countries that could be considered peers.

this is sort of an aside, but even though I wish other countries practiced the same degree of freedom of speech as the US, I think the Germans ban on Naziism might be a valid exception in my book. I only bring it up because I think of it quite a lot.

When that is part of your national history and identity, I think there's a good reason for banning that practice and behavior. Even if it violates free speech. To practice those ideals in the same country where those crimes were committed can do no service to anyone; there is no good outcome, no valid reasoning. It can only harm everyone. That's just about the only "exception" to free speech I can think of that holds up, though I still do question where you CAN have exceptions. Kind of like with encryption, you can't say "it's secure BUT..." you can't say "we have free speech BUT..."

We're so much into free speech, we even have these nifty free speech zones[1] where you can practice it without being subject to immediate detainment!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

We're not talking about some kind of Aquinas Protocol here, but rather who controls the DNS root zone. How much censorship potential is there, really? Especially when it's likely to end up being managed by committee, which basically means nothing gets done unless everyone agrees?

yeah, it looks like this is just a pointless piece of legislation so that in the next big election they can say "well WE created the Internet Freedom Whatchamacallit! Did Opponent support that? NO! They don't care about the cyber .gov DNS IP security what does all that mean."

The DHS seems to have seized non-US domains in the past on disputed legal grounds.[1]

I'm not completely sure, but I'd think a transfer to a non-US entity would make this harder in the future.

[1] http://blog.easydns.org/2012/02/29/verisign-seizes-com-domai...

"only a handful of countries that seem to get the whole "free speech" thing correct, the US among them"

I have to wonder about that, especially with the fight over net neutrality.

I'm not sure that we're among them as much as we'd like to think. Certainly if your speech is "Whistleblowing", you don't want to be in the US.

Well if you whistleblow in the US, you end up in front of a judge (after a probably very unpleasant stay in a cell for a bit). You end up in prison forever. Really bad time. As for the journalists who published what you leaked? Free speech yo!

Whisleblow in China. You don't end up in front of a judge, you end up at the bottom of the ocean. And the journalists who published what you whistleblew? Likewise. And the people who tweet about it, or talk about it at work, and the websites who previous hosted it are suddenly down for maintenance...

So is the US a free speech utopia? Probably not, but I don't know of any other countries where the Westboro Baptist Church could last for so long...

Actually the government here pretty regularly tries to dick over journalists too. In any case, your false dichotomy is neither accurate, nor compelling.

example?

Just a few http://www.rcfp.org/jailed-journalists

And even then, the government agencies most involved in shutting down sites don't have the greatest track record of transparency and human rights.

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