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> Google, Facebook and Amazon

GitHub is Microsoft, which oddly enough has a larger market cap than all of those you listed.

> calls for internet platforms to better police and accept liability

Hollywood has for years been quite transparent that this is a high-priority objective and long-term campaign for them. Establishing "rules of the road" for the "wild west" internet, a thing of "little good" and free-loading "entitled" users, where most traffic is video downloading. It's one advantage of group-think ("no-one honestly disagrees with our position" so why not describe the obviously fair and uncorrupted right thing). It's only the tactics, the lobbying to establish precedents, the press story placement, the taking far-too-respected tech "down a notch", that is less discussed. So the superficiality of press coverage, of competing visions of what the internet is and should become, has long struck me as odd.

Github isn’t anywhere near a startup. It is a big division of Microsoft.

It's not about this case, it's about the precedent

I’ve got to say, I think the “common carrier” argument is suspect if you’re running targeted advertising and recommendation on the page, but GitHub isn’t doing any of those things.

> As someone who thinks the world will be a far better place if we had decentralized dumb platforms

Then you should be very much in favour of assigning expensive liability to companies running these centralized platforms. If it becomes extremely expensive or legally risky to maintain a big centralized database, that opens a window for free, open source federated protocols to fill that gap.

Consider: You can sue Megaupload Ltd, but you can't sue BitTorrent-the-protocol.

Ah, but you can sue anyone using BitTorrent the protocol and sue the creators of the protocol

Yeah, good luck with that. If you're lucky, you'll win a judgement for both the defendant's Playstation and his Xbox. I'm sure white shoe law firms will be beating down your door to represent you in that suit.

So breaking the law is only bad if you have lots of money?

People don't care about principles anymore. Everything is a special case and you have no concern for precedent.

Legally, what's the difference between all the distributed, load balanced servers running a "centralized" database and the computers which host the same data in a "distributed" platform?

This doesn't solve the problem. If anything, it amplifies it. We have to either protect platforms or hold platforms liable, but making everyone a platform doesn't help much.

Are you being facetious? Are you genuinely asking me to explain the difference between SMTP and Facebook.com?

If you make everyone an individual actor, then there is no "platform". Visa can ban a merchant; you can't ban a merchant from the concept of accepting a cash payment.

> Are you genuinely asking me to explain the difference between SMTP and Facebook.com?

Of course not. I'm asking you what the legal difference is between the GitHub we have today and your desktop running a hypothetical distributed federated GitHub.

If your computer takes part in the hosting of some illegal content, wouldn't you be held liable like GitHub is here?

> a hypothetical distributed federated GitHub.

God this is depressing to read. Git (not "GitHub") is already a distributed VCS. This isn't hypothetical!

If you're a random individual hosting a git repo containing illegal content, you might get sued, but much much more likely, you'd just get an angry email demanding you take it down.

> God this is depressing to read. Git (not "GitHub") is already a distributed VCS. This isn't hypothetical!

I feel like you're missing the context in this thread. My parent was giving federated protocols as as alternative to centralized platforms, and my question is what are the legal implications for me if I end up hosting illegal content because of a network sync of some federated git.

Maybe social media is a less distracting example for you. Currently, Facebook is liable if they host e.g. child porn to their site. If some federated social media platform takes off where every user's computer takes part in also hosting, what happens when a child porn photo ends up on the platform?

My point is that federated vs centralized is not a magic bullet for this issue. In either case, there is some platform which can be held liable for content. People seem to think "use open source distributed protocols" solves this legal issue, but it does not.

> Ifyou're a random individual hosting a git repo containing illegal content, you might get sued, but much much more likely, you'd just get an angry email demanding you take it down.

Is this true? I'm genuinely asking. Can I commit the same "crime" as GitHub or Facebook but be treated so differently by the legal system? What's the actual rules here that differentiates us?

I feel like you're wilfully missing the point. Let's leave aside child porn because that's an extreme case and I'm assuming you'd report that to the police if it showed up on your social media feed.

In terms of less extreme cases, there's a fairly good chance that in the course of your normal browsing, you've illegally downloaded copyrighted content. Maybe deliberately, but also by accident if your browser cached some photos or you right-clicked and saved some images you didn't have a valid license for.

Have you ever been sued for this? Do you know anyone who has?

The problem is that all these big surveillance as a service companies are vaccines for the state. Centralized data silos are setting the precedent that there is indeed a magic button that politicians/lawlers can push to control "The Internet".

It seems impossible and foolish to sue a protocol, until the precedent is gradually set that "reasonable" services implement many forms of state and corporate censorship. Then when the next thing happens that they don't like, their question becomes why are "lawless" decentralized protocols allowed to exist.

And obviously a protocol itself still can't be legislated out of existence. But its use can certainly be filtered, criminalized, etc. Even its development can be hampered if its cast as a "circumvention device" against status-quo censorship.

I don't think we're terribly far from having to fight this battle regardless - when consumer net neutrality fails, incumbent ISPs will discover most of their market is content with a default whitelist to save a few dollars. But hastening its arrival is not good.

There’s a giant wave of political support for this. Right now people are talking on the tv about 8chan and mass shooters. GitHub is being sued for content.

The end result will be a (horrifying) market solution m. Site owners will have no choice but to pay outside companies to analyze content for them and auto delete. This will probably end up throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Agreed. I will add that it is both sides of the political spectrum in US seem to push for it though for different reasons.I am annoyed at how many conversations I had with people who think it is not only good, but necessary.

It is the beginning of the end, my friends. Mass governmental censorship to begin in 3...2...1...

They already do this. I see people on Twitter getting banned daily for mundane, reasonable things like "fuck transphobes" while white supremacists spout hate daily and Twitter does nothing.

> Site owners will have no choice but to pay outside companies to analyze content for them and auto delete.

What could go wrong with that process (!) apart from almost everything

It could result in more people hosting their own stuff. Back to the "good old days" that many on HN pontificate about.

> But if the rationale is accepted, it will need to be applied universally to startups and SMBs as well.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

Can you expand on that? There may be selective enforcement but a hundred million ssn’s on any platform causes the same amount of damage. If you’re going to hold the platform accountable for preventing it what’s the rationale for excluding a small player? You’d just drive this activity their way.