UN General Assembly adopts record number of resolutions on internet governance
apc.org
apc.org
The only hopeful thing is - it's UN, the biggest bureaucracy in the world! It will take them 3 years just to duke out the name of the Committee and the titles of the bigwigs on it.
The UN has expanded this greatly to positive rights where someone can obligate someone to do something as a right, e.g. you have no right to offend my beliefs.
In general this development is a step towards more centralization, and it is a sign of the central weakness of any centralized system which is that its limited in what it can express by the biological limitations of people that run it.
How is it different?
that's obliging inaction - it obliges someone to not say or do something which offends you - so it is a negative right
However, you are correct that the line can be blurry and right in general should be granted with great caution.
and is exactly the definition of negative rights. right there. that's the definition. that's it.
Now, you're saying that because "right to not be offended" is a bad idea, and you don't agree with it, that makes it a positive right. But your opinion of it does not matter to the definition.
The definition of "positive right" would be requiring someone else to, say, stand when you enter the room, or always address you as "sir" because you're knighted.
Let me also clarify that I very much dislike any "right to not be offended" and also that these definitions of "positive rights" and "negative rights" is clearly not very useful.
A big part of the conceptual problem is that the distinction between positive and negative rights is much less clear than people often assume. GP highlighted a pretty good example: "you have no right to offend my beliefs." It's a positive right if you call it a "right to go through life without being offended" but negative if phrased as "you have a right not to be the object of offensive conduct." And often, preventing something from happening (i.e., enforcing a negative right) may impose some sort of affirmative obligation, or impose seemingly objectionable restrictions, on others.
One somewhat fruitful way to untangle this can be to add another distinction between acts of the state and acts of private citizens. Thus, under the U.S. constitution, for example, one typically has negative rights against some state action or other (e.g., :"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.")
However countries like the U.S. have restrictions on those rights -- e.g. shouting fire in a crowded theatre, because society accepts that actions have consequences, and there's always a balance. You have the right to swing your fist, but not to hit me. You have the right to eat food, but not if it's in my cupboard. You have freedom to move, but not across private land (or borders).
I'm looking forward to the report from the Secretary-General, to get a better understanding on the scope of their intent: Unlawful as per the UN or unlawful as per the member nations.
> Opposition to the resolution came mainly from Australia, Canada, the European Union and the US.
China made their own version of the internet to imprision their citizen’s communication; let the rest of the world manage the real internet.
If the quality of initiatives is as bad as the compat for migration, we're pretty much fucked.
The more work politics puts in to trying to control the internet, the more incentive there is to develop tools to work around politics.
Politics has the force of law behind it, cryptography has irrefutable mathematics. Let's see who wins.
In the end, force wins. Irrefutable mathematics are just a tool. Every right we have has been won through struggle. Sometimes that struggle is non-violent, sometimes it's less so, but it's always a struggle. A lot of people tend to forget that and think that technology will magically solve things. Or if not technology, something else or someone else will do it.
Not always. At some point, the cost of enforcement becomes too high and unfeasible.
An example of what I’m talking about is the black market for dollars and the use of bitcoins by Venezuelans to illegally dodge currency controls.
Thanks for the 2nd Amendment :-) Force doesn't have to be privatized by Governments.
Your AR-15 isn't much use against the Airforce's F15. The world has moved on since 1776, local militias can't cope against national military - even one as an expedition force, and in the U.S specifically entire countries can't cope against the U.S. military as an expidition force, what hope does a local militia have against a U.S. based military?
The most you'll get is a guerilla war and terrorism, and that always works out well./sarcasm
And if the US military ever turned against its own citizens on US soil, you can bet a huge number would defect and hell would break loose.
In addition, as those efforts gain more popularity propaganda from the government will increase, and will make the regular Joe feel like cryptography is for terrorists.
I mean not to be pessimistic, but... :-D
We're seeing quite a lot of episodes of deplatforming lately.
It seems as if payment processors are pressuring everyone down below to comply, but it start with them.
The most probable thing to me is that we'll sooner or later have it as bad a what's currently happening in China: spying via heavy use of face recognition, pre-crime, citizen score, etc. etc.
It doesn't look like people are alert/tough enough to hold on to freedom, governments will continue to slowly take it away from us until we have none.
What about communism ?