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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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jacquesm

So it does work. It doesn't really matter where you break the chain as long as it gets broken.

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It only works if you somehow remove entire China from the Internet.

No big loss.

Maybe for you, but there are millions of people that work with people in China everyday.

That would be the kind of signal that would be hard for the Chinese to spin in such a way that it would make them look good, and the economic effect would be pretty much instantaneous.

There is plenty of historical precedent for this: spammers' IP ranges would be blackholed to send a message to their ISPs that such behavior wasn't tolerated. That the Chinese authorities decide to play this game at the nation state level should not give them a free pass, but should result in a nation state level response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)

I'm not sure 'We have the technology to censor the internet, and it's okay to deploy it' is the message you want to give the CCP.

That's not censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

The criminal co-opting of networks and nodes on those networks is not speech by any definition.

That's not the issue. The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware, which should not be systematically censored. (Though any individual is free to do so for themselves.)

> The issue is that there is speech accompanying the malware

I'm either misunderstanding what you're saying, or it doesn't make sense. If a bunch of people take signs (with legitimate messages, free speech) and hang them off a bridge over the highway (causing accidents), then those people go jail. The fact that their message is free speech is irrelevant. The source of the message is being punished/jailed, not the message.

Am I mis-representing your statement?

Another iteration of this and we'll have bullets with text on them and killing someone with those bullets will be an expression of free speech. The degree to which the 'free speech' analogy is contorted is amazing, more so because the original scope was quite narrow, both legal and geographical.

The problem is closer to a ne'er-do-well taking someone else's signs and hanging them off a bridge over a highway. The person producing the speech is having their speech hijacked for malicious purposes by an MITM; that doesn't mean that it's not censorship when the sign's/webpage's creator gets caught in the censorship crossfire during the attempt to take down the malicious actor.

To put it another way: if someone steals my car and uses it to rob a bank, even if that car is now evidence in a criminal investigation, it's still my car. The police have every right to confiscate it from the thief—it's not their car—but that doesn't mean that it suddenly belongs to them; it belongs to me. In both this case and the above case, I have a right to not be unduly punished for the actions of an unrelated third party (by having my website taken down; or by having my car permanently confiscated, respectively.)

The context here is very similar to a story that was on HN just yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671579). Banning a site from the internet for happening to be MITMed by China is very similar in its ethical implications to banning a site from the Internet for happening to have a domain-name that fits a pattern used by a botnet.

The point is that technology could _also_ be used for censorship.

I'm sure spammers feel very much censored when they are blackholed. Tools are usually dual use.

There are innocent users outside China who like to view innocent websites inside China. If you block the connection, you make the innocent users, and the innocent websites, mad. They might very well interpret it as censorship.

Not really, it is more like "if you behave like a malicious actor similar to a spammer, we will treat you like one".

We're kinda already past this?

At this point we really need to start doing the "You wanted a Great Firewall? Enjoy. You now have no connection."

Removing China from the internet would also likely cause things that phone home to China to break. That would actually create some consumer awareness to boot.

The spin would be "US cuts off global internet in a petty attempt to interfere with China's management of its own network". Justified by a technical backstory that approximately nobody understands, I don't think it would play well even outside of China.

Who cares? China is a net negative on the Internet, they can stay over in their intranet as far as I am concerned, nothing of value would be lost.

Ohh no! Human to human connections are far too important to maintain in today's glocalized world.

It is possible: De-peer AS4134 (China Telecom) and reject all of their routes. They are the only international ISP that lands into mainland China. They are extensively peered around the world.

It's not just them. AS4837 (China Unicom) and a few others who have intl permission to route in and out of China. That said, you're going to hurt a lot of non-china multinationals who operate there.

> That said, you're going to hurt a lot of non-china multinationals who operate there.

Not my problem. Figure out a better way than getting in bed with fascist countries and then complaining when the inevitable door swings shut due to rightful backlash.

China can easily operate any number of servers outside China.

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