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Comment by hoodoof | Hacker News Reader

Governments value higher control and tighter laws over anything else. There will be more.

We should go for decentralized platforms that are harder to control. We should go for local. One Facebook is easier to shut down than 10.000 chat rooms.

Are they? A chat room with 1/10,000th the income of Facebook is “only” $1.5 million profit per year. Is that enough to avoid being made an example of? And would the first set a precedent for the rest?

There could be a loose collective here that decides to defend against these sorts of things collectively, whilst still allowing independent operation.

Heck, that isn't very different from the concept of insurance.

I was thinking about insurance as I wrote my previous comment. All it takes is one that doesn’t have it when the risk is a new precedent. Government would just go after them. (And that’s assuming the government doesn’t just pass a new law, which is non-zero risk, but which I will overlook for now because sometimes one bit of a government will do things against the interests of another bit, such as a recent case in the UK where a specialist was recruited for the NHS and kicked out by the Home Office).

Why doesn't "government" go against bittorrent? Oh, I forgot, they can't! Nevermind.

If any government cared enough (except perhaps the American one), it could ban the the protocol. They don’t care, and the people who do care are satisfied with the existing options for suing copyright infringers.

TOR is much more likely to be regulated than bittorrent, given the whole point of the latter is to remove control from governments.

They used to care pretty strongly. That's a fact. They also didn't do much about it. Also a fact.

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