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Comment by mimikatz | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing how fast net neutrality people disappeared when this was the topic

There's a mix here. I think I'd be more on the side of net neutrality if they were kicking a person off the internet, not a website. Like if the guy was running it through his own home connection, maybe disconnecting it would be harder to defend.

Of course, he wouldn't do that, because then he'd be able to be IP-geolocated, and he knows all about how posting people's real addresses in a room full of people who don't like them is evil :)

Consistent principles are far more rare than one might imagine from the number of people that claim to have them.

Net neutrality is about regulating ISPs to prevent them from double-dipping by charging content providers for preferred access to their audience. It is not about giving reactionaries a platform they don't deserve. The net is not politically neutral; it arcs toward progress. Transgressive, anything-goes edgelordism was the right answer in the 90s, when the people seeking to muzzle speech were the moral busybodies on the right. But we've learned some important lessons since then: that speech can oppress, it can harm, and it can even cast the world into a new fascism -- especially when such speech is given the swift wings of a global computer network. So when those oppressed and harmed by online speech speak up and demand that the network not carry the speech of those who seek to harm or even eradicate them -- our job is to put aside the libertarian platitudes that created the current hellscape, shut up, and listen to their experiences.

Net neutrality is about regulating ISPs to provide the same delivery service regardless of the content being sent.

What you're describing is just a single implication of net neutrality involving self-bias of ISPs.

>The net is not politically neutral; it arcs toward progress

Humble the assumptions you make on the direction of progress

Protecting trans people from those who would harass them, even to the point of suicide, is progress.

Have you noticed something about Hackernews? So many of the coolest hacks featured here are created partly or entirely by trans, nonbinary, or genderqueer folx. Asahi Linux, Cosmopolitan libc, bsnes, frickin' ARM processors! And this seems to be only increasing with time. The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered. And the trans/binary/genderqueer/neuroqueer contingent are increasingly in decision-making roles at tech companies and the internet infrastructure itself. If we were to lose them, we would lose perhaps the biggest wellspring of talent in the whole tech sector.

Kiwi Farms has attacked them and in so doing, attacked the network itself. The network is fighting back. It thrives on diversity, nonconformity, and those who question everything, even the identities assigned to them at birth. Kiwi Farms is making those people suffer. Do not expect the internet, which is basically a set of peering relationships maintained by very vulnerable humans, to carry their traffic and thereby condone further harm.

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