Google chairman: Internet blacklists make us more like China | Hacker News Reader

Google chairman: Internet blacklists make us more like China

arstechnica.com

85 pointstimwiseman13 comments

Oh. I've seen this episode! The government asks for broad powers in order to solve a specific problem and then just adds those powers to its bag of tricks to use whenever convenient to creatively prosecute "bad" people. (1)

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(1) Its either that or the professor builds it out of coconuts and they don't get off the island. Either is equally likely.

These new laws are brutal and scary. It's nice to see individuals and companies fighting this. I agree with their sentiments and their point of view.

However, playing the devil's advocate, I'm not sure I'm 100% convinced by their (or my own) arguments. What happens when you apply the argument of shutting down parts of the Internet, even for a seemingly good reason, is still censorship to more socially unacceptable things? Messages of hate, tools for murder, child pornography?

Doesn't Google already sensor the internet for such things? Are we just trying to avoid heading down a slippery slope (which I fully support)?

I guess I'm just trying to get a sense for how this differs from those other cases I mention, and how the arguments being made apply in the context that things are already censored.

It is tax-funded protection for IP owners.

It threatens internet safe harbors and requires intermediaries to act as law-enforcement.

The potential for error is huge and any false positive can be disastrous to online business.

It sets a precedent for government censorship of the internet.

It is hardly a perfect solution, it will not stop 'piracy'.

The problem in question is highly exaggerated and very much self inflected by the same industry that is lobbying for these measures.

If you take out your first sentence and your last phrase, which are both subjective, isn't the rest true for all forms of current censorship?

I'm having a hard time reconciling my thoughts that censorship is bad with the fact that I'm thankful that some stuff is censored. Is the only difference between the two that I want to pirate stuff but I don't want to look at child pornography?

Also, I still think that if you're going to call out all forms of censorship as something bad, that the ends never justify the means, than you better be prepared to answer why you're already censoring stuff.

There are things that overwhelmingly tip the right and wrong scale, things that are morally reprehensible and harmful, copyright infringement isn't one of those things.

By your logic, we should all live in government-run internment camps, just in case anyone wanted to produce child porn. Solitary confinement and constant State supervision would prevent that.

It would also prevent everything good that has ever come out of a free society. Art. Medicine. Literature. Technology. All gone forever.

Is preventing child abuse so important that it's worth trading in our humanity?

Messages of hate, tools for murder, and child pornography are the downside to having a free society. What's good is that we can stamp out child abuse and murder in ways other than censoring the Internet. (After all, murder and child abuse happened long before the Internet or computers were invented. We dealt with it then, we can deal with it now.)

When giving someone a freedom, you have to balance the good that freedom can do versus the bad the freedom can cause. The freedom of speech is important because the benefits outweigh the risk. Being able to freely discuss election results is more good than someone selling murder-for-hire is bad, because the functioning of society as a whole is more important than one person's right to not be murdered. (Imagine if the Internet were censored. Would we have heard about Diebold's faulty election machines? Would we have had a recount in Florida? Probably not: nobody would have been able to talk about it for fear of losing their domain name or Internet access.)

Censorship is the opposite of a freedom, but the same rules apply: will the "bad" that censorship prevents be worth the "good" that is suppresses? It's not going too well for China, so I'm not sure why we think it would be good in the US.

> Doesn't Google already sensor the internet for such things?

Irrelevant. Google's biz choices shouldn't be law.

As I've been saying for some years now, China is/was the prototype.

Well in a way the proposed regime is more restrictive. China doesn't really care that much about intellectual property rights for instance.

When I started saying it, I was thinking more in terms of technological control.

Although (extra-)legal developments in the U.S. are making the legal aspects in some ways more similar. Increasingly, "everything" is illegal (or, at least, verboten), depending upon the government's interest in pursuing/prosecuting/punishing a particular case -- or not.

(I know the two environments aren't at anything like parity, but the trends worry me.)

Not exactly related to this story, but...

A friend in China is taking the GMAT, and was confused about a question, and asked me to word it differently for her. When she typed out the "critical reasoning" example (Given A and B, deduce which of the following is true,) it was something to the effect of:

"The computer industry's estimate that it loses millions of dollars when users illegally copy programs without paying for them is greatly exaggerated. Most of the illegal copying is done by people with no serious interest in the programs. Thus, the loss to the industry is quite small, because__________"

The answer being "most people who illegally copy programs would not purchase them even if purchasing them were the only way to obtain them."

Kinda blew my mind that this was on a test. I mean, sure, it's true, but still.

Hey, this coin has two sides. Most of the illegal copying is done by people with no serious interest in the programs. Most people who illegally copy programs would not purchase them, when it means for considerable sum of money and lengthy sign-up and payment process. Therefore, if there is a way to sell programs with easy price tag and via authomatic painless process, it's possible to sell N times as much.

Where N is the "old" ratio between piracy and purchases.

That's how iPhone economy works.

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