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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

That last bit about politics/laws is exactly where I fear the internet will be a decade or two from now. Virtual borders will be controlled by nations as strictly as physical ones. Every byte going in or out will be monitored and regulated. "Removing [xyz] from the internet" will be a matter of a government clicking a button rather than the laughable scenario it is today. And they will be assisted every step of the way by companies like Cloudflare, Amazon and Microsoft.

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It would be a sad day when that happens. Internet still allows an ability for whistleblowers from ole country to be able to reach out to others. If virtual borders start getting enforced even harder than what we already have, those whistleblowers will be forever silenced.

Isn't this expected? The "real world" is heavily regulated but the internet is open and free (not always in a good way).

It makes it really difficult to deal with crime, cyber warfare, and illicit content. We need "something."

I think people have enjoyed the Wild West of the Internet long enough for governments to want to put a stop to it proactively instead of retroactively, although I don’t think it necessarily should be done.

I'm a little more optimistic in that I think decentralized networks will disrupt all these centralized monopolies (ex: imagine a social network where you own your data and can access it through various frontends, rather than one company owning it all). Hopefully, all the rewards will also get re-distributed back to participants in the network rather than one entity.

People are starting to realize what happens when a central entity can just "cancel" you and as that keeps happening more often (ex: youtubers getting de-monetized, people getting locked out of their google accounts, Trump twitter cancellation, etc), people will be pushed to these un-censorable decentralized alternatives.

Like this?: https://skapp.hns.siasky.net/#/apps/all

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