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You've been reading too many old pulp-fiction stories about the Cold War. In the USA, if you can find a willing and gullible publisher [0], you can write a book about just about anything. The actual things that you can't publish [1] are very specific: You can publish a recipe for how to refine uranium, for example, just not in enough detail to allow anybody with a few million dollars to start their own nuclear program.

But, more importantly, we live in today. "full P2P blockchain" and "underground communities of intellectuals" are word salad; if you want to publish without restrictions, Bittorrent has been around for over a decade and is generally not blockable, and Sci-Hub is an aboveground rebellion of intellectuals against the publishers.

You're whining because a DNS registrar, and one of incredibly poor reputation for what it's worth, has chosen to stop hosting a violent hate group. But your own personal ability to publish, and indeed their ability to publish, has not been curtailed. Rather, their ability to use the resource of the DNS registrar to spread their hate is what has been removed, and that was a privilege to which they were not entitled under law.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_press

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret

> has chosen to stop hosting a violent hate group

First off, what exactly about AR15.com constitutes a violent hate group?

Secondly, do you think despots have ever said "We are punishing these perfectly innocent people because we don't like them"? No. It's always a "violent group" or some such other emotional rhetoric.

>First off, what exactly about AR15.com constitutes a violent hate group?

Certainly that would be the routine threats of physical violence against government officials.

Check out r/politics

Checked it, didn't find any comments threatening to kill politicians. (I assume it is because they moderate if a comment is reported?)

This cognitive dissonance by people working in tech who should know better than supporting discriminatory censorship practices regardless of the political entity eschewing those policies is truly the most appalling thing i've noticed about the loud activists in the industry.

First, Parler gets kicked off because "They host violent, imminent threats". Never mind the sheer scale of terrorist groups organizing on Facebook, Twitter and enjoying free high quality encryption thanks to Whatsapp. Are we going to kick them all out of society unless they declare fealty to the ideas of their benevolent tech overlords?

Now, we have a forum of gun owners simply discussing things on a forum that they created to represent their connection through a shared love of a constitutional right.

Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?

There is more power concentrated in Silicon Valley right now than all the governments of the world save for China and Authoritarian regimes. This is scary and intelligent people acting like political puppets is silly and dangerous.

Then use the power of the government to regulate and break up the tech monopolies. The answer is simple and obvious.

I don't want GoDaddy to have the authority to remove arbitrary folks from the Internet. I want GoDaddy to not exist at all. I want large datacenter owners to be regulated like utilities.

However, the same political stance which desires all of the violence and hate against our government is also the political stance which insists that our government is useless and bloated, too big and decadent to achieve victories for the people.

Who do you think gave responsibility to Silicon Valley? Who signed up millions of Americans for Facebook, retweeted millions of context-free quips, opened millions of Google email accounts, and bought millions of iPhones? It was the American public, including the 20% of Americans who voted for an open fascist for president.

If you want an end to censorship, then you should also want an end to corporatism and capitalism. That's the cognitive dissonance that is worth examining.

Breaking up monopolies sounds good in the abstract. (At least, it does to me. Presumably that doesn't go without saying around here.) But these particular monopolies have the potential to make a serious positive impression on the world, now that they've finally chosen to act. Given the state of things we shouldn't rush to abandon that opportunity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trump-is-b...

I haven't seen too much consideration of the potential (more the usual scaremongering) but here's something that popped up earlier along those lines. Social media is a lever for politicians. Why not take the chance to deny that to extremism around the world?

> First, Parler gets kicked off because "They host violent, imminent threats". Never mind the sheer scale of terrorist groups organizing on Facebook, Twitter and enjoying free high quality encryption thanks to Whatsapp

What's with all the whataboutism here? Can you honestly not see the difference? One is an echo chamber of hate with a lot of calls to violence and support thereof, and the platform does nothing about it. The others have shittons of shit ( cat videos, porn, ads, anti-vaxx bullshit, etc) and hate and calls for violence, which are moderated ( not nearly good enough). Apple explicitly asked Parler to come up with a moderation plan or get booted of their store, and they didn't. Twitter, Facebook, Google heavily moderate and ban all sorts of hate-related content.

> Tomorrow, will it be okay to point a finger at any individual and have the equivalent of mass economic sanctions destroy their ability to be a part of society because they disagree with the broad interpretation of "values" these tech companies arbitrarily decide?

I don't know why you've suddenly decided that if doing X to Y is okay today, doing X to Z will be as well tomorrow. That's not how regular people work in most cases, and if tomorrow "SV"( if you're so intent on throwing them all together, as if they aren't composed of many people at different levels ( employees, managers, CxOs, shareholders) in different countries, with varying political affiliations or views) decide to deplatform something people disagree being deplatformed, people will complain, same as what people are doing together to defend the hate speech spewing fascists on Parler.

Lesson to take folks:

Always prominently list your IP address! Further, go static, and v6! More than enough for everyone. The solution to centralized nameservers mucking up your visibility? Kick them to the curb. Build your own net location database and share it with your users.

Other tips:

Prominent standing out combinations of web content. Non-DNS sites do still get indexed by search engines. Keep something unique searchable on your page, and people will always be able to find their way back.

Set up a pipeline of communication to your users, and you can dynamically change what that content is in order to prevent trivial delisting by search engines.

You have the right to say whatever you want; you have no right to demand an audience. The way that this works on the Web is that you have the right to publish whatever Web server you like, but no right to be indexed by somebody else's search engines.

This is a common slight of hand from folks with your political leaning: The constitutional right to speech is conflated with the right to popularity, a narcissistic delusion.

It would be lovely if the structure of the Internet did not require having an address. This seems to be something of a fundamental technical problem, though, and not one that can be fixed via strong political opinions.

I am not Russian and did not live during the USSR, and maybe you did and experienced some things I know nothing about, but I can say that the claims you've made are not uniformly true across the history of the USSR.

One counterpoint is from 1964, not exactly the most thawed period of relations, when the Strugastky brothers published "Hard to Be a God"[1], which was a thinly veiled criticism of Beria (who was then deceased) and also of some key ideas about the material development of history. It was not particularly well received, but also was not stopped, and they were by no means blackballed. It was regarded as a silly story, albeit clearly with some satirical bite.

One of the brothers wrote about the experience and the climate at the time[2], and their notes were published along with a recent 'Masters of SF' edition that was published.

It's an enjoyable book. To be clear, it is not critical of 'communism', it's critical of some ideas that (as I understand it) formed part of the conventional wisdom of how Soviet communists were expected to see history, as a largely unflappable progression toward communism -- one take on the point of the Strugastkys was that all it takes is a certain kind of selfish brute to slip any society down toward fascism, regardless of where they were on their journey through history. If it could happen early (which they investigate in the book), it could also happen late.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God

2 - http://www.rusf.ru/abs/books/bns-03.htm (comments by Boris Strugastky in Russian, but google's autotranslate makes it quite readable. Very interesting perspective from an intellectual and author who was somewhat openly critical at the time of the more reactionary and traditional elements of the state, and just about their process!)

I'd say this is arguing semantics when, by large, we may all be in agreement that soviet style censorship is terrible.

Can we find one or two examples that go against the trend? Sure. Does that disqualify the argument by the commenter above you? I don't think so.

USSR went thru the periods of warming and crack-down on art. An example of "soft" Soviet censorship from the same "good period" as the above, and the same authors, is Escape Attempt; it involves a prisoner from a concentration camp. In the original version, according to the authors, it was a Soviet labor camp; but of course, even after Khrushchev more or less denounced Stalin and his activities, you couldn't just remind people about Soviet labor camps. So, it had to become a German concentration camp.

A more funny (and sad) tale I remember from someone non-famous, is them trying to publish a children's book, and the censors saying it's good, but doesn't have enough communist spirit. Like, instead of there just being kids helping little animals, it could mention that the kids were members of the local communist youth chapter, etc. The author decided to not publish the book.

That is partially correct. You were free to write anything but GLAVLIT made sure nothing they did not liked was printed

>In USSR you were free to write any book or newspaper opinion column.

It's not a book or a newspaper column until it's printer as a book or in a newspaper. You were free to write a manuscript, even then you could get in trouble.

>More subtle creations, where criticizing is expressed via proxy of science fiction or abstract ideas...

could make you unemployable, locked up in an asylum, banned from major cities or imprisoned or even shot as an enemy of the people or a Hungarian spy, depending on the current leader.

>That’s when you would have to go full P2P blockchain with SAMIZDAT...

Which meant a single untrustworthy node in the chain could take you back to the previous paragraph.

>But if your unbaised view on USSR party/leaders/direction/methods was aligned with the party...

There was very little chance an unbiased view aligned with the party on anything important, especially party/leaders/direction/methods.

>Another artifact of the USSR is a mandatory line in your CV and references - that you were never involved in any anti-USSR meetings, protests and movements.

Unauthorized university poetry clubs, however removed from politics, have been classified as above.