Keep the Internet free and open (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Keep the Internet free and open (2012)

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75 pointsajr048 comments

Discussed at the time:

Keep the Internet free and open - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4863009 - Dec 2012 (18 comments)

Strangely no one even mentions how evil Google is in the discussion.

2012 was a different time — Google had a better reputation back then.

I remember 2011-2012 as roughly the time when their search results started to decline in quality, correlated with the beginnings of applying "AI" to them.

Now, I guess the Internet is "free and open"... as long as you use Chrome.

There's an interesting comment from the linked 10-year-old discussion that suggests Google have actually changed the article to static HTML from what may have been an SPA at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864426

Vint Cerf was right. The internet is dead. What we have now is the splinternet, where a lot of countries have giant Galapagos intranets.

We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this

> We can all thank China and Cisco with the innovation of The Great Firewall for this

So large Western corporations consolidating the majority of the Internet use in their hands, and then censoring/controlling it through algorithms is ok.

Horrible when governments do any kind of regulation/control. All ok if its done by unaccountable private tyrants for profit...

I read chaostheory's post several times and can't find a way to read it that looks like they're endorsing corporate centralization. In fact, there's no commentary on it at all.

They point blame but they don't mention Western hypocritical censorship.

I’m referring to a Western corporation by name instead of blaming it all on China. What more do you want?

How am I endorsing corporate centralization when I’m lamenting censorship? Censorship is much easier the more things are centralized

I will never understand why private companies curating their platforms is equated with censorship. In China (and elsewhere) a central government curates acceptable speech. If you don't comply you go to jail. In the "West" you might get kicked off a platform, which diminishes your reach, but doesn't extinguish your speech. You can always find another soapbox. Or start your own, as one recent ex-president demonstrated.

This is a good point - Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/etc. don't currently have the ability to arrest, try, and imprison you. The bill of rights applies to the US government to prevent it from abusing that power.

Though a de facto oligopoly in the social media space means that your reach could be greatly reduced (though not, as you note, eliminated) if you are deplatformed. I imagine that some politicians, entertainers, and businesses could see large effects.

Being delisted from Google search could also be an issue for businesses due to Google's search dominance.

Because it's censorship. Getting banned off Twitter, and getting executed by firing squad, are both forms of censorship.

The difference is there can be 100s of twitters, and they require voluntary usage. There's only one government, and you are required to abide by their rules, so restrictions need to be placed on the government.

If twitter and the government work together (e.g. twitter banning people that disagree with the government to get favors or avoid punishments) then that should be treated in a similar lense as government action.

The problem, though, is that there is one ginormous twitter, and the other twitters are pretty much like fleas on an elephantine body. Or it can be Facebook. They deplatform you, and you and your business may as well not exist at all.

It becomes interesting if it turns out that there indeed exists a symbiosis between the US government and social media companies wherein the latter are compelled to do censorship laundering on behalf of the former, maybe in exchange of their balls being not so tight in the regulatory vise. After all, it’s not censorship if a private company does it, right? Right? (wink, wink)

Because a few large companies own all the soapboxes that are worth mounting, so in practice it ends up being a private censorship cartel.

I suspect it may be because your definition of "free speech" is too narrow. You operate from the perspective that free speech only exists in the form that is protected by the US constitution, and therefore anything not covered by that text cannot possibly be an instance of censorship.

The error is assuming that everybody else agrees with your definition.

Let's take moderation out of the conversation. All the social networks isolate their data (which we only think is our data).

Some of that is for a good reason (privacy), much is not. Why can't I copy backup remix my various social network data? Right, corporate control

You might consider the fact that these "private companies" products and funding are significantly influenced by government policy. Besides, you totally miss the point of free speech if you think controlling the audience of said speech is irrelevant.

IMO, the problem isn't that private companies exercise censorship (and it is censorship even if it is a private company), it is the amount of power and influence that individual companies wield.

That’s my point. It’s not ok. This is a trend that Cisco and China started. It’s now snowballed to Western democracies

Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China. Tech companies are not running concentration camps and don’t have nuclear weapons. They want to sell ads, not dominate the world.

> Please stop pretending that Twitter or Facebook censoring people is the same thing as China

If ~2-3 corporations control the speech, and they censor it according to their arbitrary whim and what the US government dictates as 'fake news' as the government wields the hammer of 'inquiries' that could lead to potential gigantic fines, even breakup over their heads, its the exact same thing with China's censorship.

The US government does not directly censor - it just 'outsources' the censorship to the 'free market' which has to do what the government wants or they will face inquiries, fines, regulations, break up or even persecution of their executives.

The same approach is employed in every other forms of repression and enforcement in US society too: The government does not repress people directly when they use their free speech dangerously. It just gets the police to enforce 'local ordinances' and then the courts make short work of the protesters by imposing fines on them for irrelevant things. Like how Occupy protesters were fined tens of thousands of dollars for 'trespassing' on PUBLIC property. No one's free speech was repressed. Its just that they were hooked up with fines and debt that will have them shut up and keep working like an indentured servant for decades to come in order to be able to pay those fines and debts.

> concentration camps

China does not have concentration camps. We, in the rest of the world have fed up with the constant smears and lies that the US media directs against the enemy they target. Each of our countries have passed from the same smear machine's target sights at least once in the past 60 years. The very fac that you are able to repeat such a smear on the public Internet without hesitating for even a second tells how strong is the censorship and control of 'free speech' in the US and its satellites.

Its not even 20 years after the tale of nonexistent Iraqi WMDS. You people still buy what is sold to you unquestioningly and ironically assert that you have 'free speech'.

One does not even need to mention the doublespeak of other countries having 'concentration camps', where in the US, actual slave labor are just called 'the private prison system'. The former 'concentration camp' de-radicalizes actual head-cutting terrorists, teaches them sciences, trades, and reintegrates them to the society as productive members free of charge. The latter just incarcerates people for trivial reasons to use them slave labor for their life. But the former is a 'rights problem'. Not the latter. You just 'rephrase' slavery differently, and its not slavery.

> They want to sell ads, not dominate the world.

They are appendages of the establishment that has over 800 military bases around the world. Especially around the targeted countries like China. So save that 'not wanting to dominate the world' thing.

So is your office right in Beijing or somewhere else?

> Its not even 20 years after the tale of nonexistent Iraqi WMDS. You people still buy what is sold to you unquestioningly and ironically assert that you have 'free speech'.

Look at this. Here you are on a US website, free to post critical things about the US government with no fear of being put in jail or re-educated.

Why don’t you go to China and post on Weibo about Tiennamen Square and then come back and tell me again how they are the same.

> So is your office right in Beijing or somewhere else?

Is your office in US State Dept. building?

> Here you are on a US website, free to post critical things about the US government with no fear of being put in jail or re-educated.

A lot of Americans who have been kidnapped via 'rendition flights' and tortured for decades would disagree.

> Why don’t you go to China and post on Weibo about Tiennamen Square

Chinese people do that. Nothing happens unless they are backed by NED or they lie.

In contrast, why dont you start posting about the latest US foreign policy initiative and try finding out how much it will affect your life?

Yep, about 9am in China, isn’t it? Your shift just started.

Yep. Youre not a 'paid propagandist'. Everyone else is. Now that will make the inconvenient truth go away. Well done. Nobody ever thought of saying that before.

Nothing you’ve said is true.

Yeah. In contrast, all the stuff you said - which you have copied word for word from the US State Dept. and US media - are totally true. Just like back in 2003...

I’m not arguing with you. You are not an honest person who is interested in an exchange of ideas. You’ve only come here to spread propaganda on behalf of your masters. Be careful, you’re doing a bad job of hiding what you are. Your boss will be angry. Your social credit score is going to plummet.

I will leave you with your grade-school level debate skills and 2003 Iraq War mentality so you wont have to face more cognitive dissonance.

> China does not have concentration camps.

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

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/surviving-the-...

> its the exact same thing with China's censorship.

No, it's not. In a location with adequate free speech protections, posting content against the ruling government's agenda would not by itself cause the poster to face incarceration or worse, even if it is a sensitive topic.

Both of the above links (and all of HN) are inaccessible in China without a VPN, and the Great Firewall makes most VPNs and anti-censorship services extremely unreliable in China through heavy throttling and connection resetting.

In between a wiki article sourced from Anglosaxon and Anglosaxon funded sources and the parliamentarians and ministers of EVERY single muslim majority country who went to Xinjiang and concluded that there were no concentration camps there, I will go with the latter.

> posting content against the ruling government's agenda would not by itself cause the poster to face incarceration or worse

Neither in China nor anywhere else posting anything against the government's 'agenda' does anything unless one is backed by NED. At most you get your post deleted.

There is no country that denies the existence of the concentration/"re-education" camps in Xinjiang.

I'm going to trust Anar Sabit's first-hand experiences in the Xinjiang concentration camps over the claims of an HN user who has an issue with "Anglosaxons". Xinjiang itself is a location where citizens are incarcerated en masse for speaking against the ruling government's agenda, and also for much less than that. You have no evidence that the people trapped in these concentation camps are "backed by NED".

> There is no country that denies the existence of the concentration/"re-education" camps in Xinjiang.

Every. Single. Muslim. Majority. Country. Did. And they did it at the UN.

...

This is what happens if people keep getting their 'truth' from the machine that lied to them about nonexistent WMDs for years.

> You have no evidence that the people trapped in these concentation camps are "backed by NED

If they were backed by the NED, it would have been MUCH better. They are Islamist militants who returned from the CIA's botched Syrian affair, or the militants of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which is considered as a terrorist organization by the UN. ONLY the US got them out of its own terrorist list to be able to use them against China.

...

Look... The rest of the world does not expect the above level of awareness about geopolitics from your lot. They just expect you to stop feeding on the lies of the machine that has lied to you many times before. How many times do you need to be lied to until you stop believing lies...

Some countries with authoritarian governments used the euphemism "vocational education and training centers" to describe the Xinjiang concentration camps. They did not deny the existence of the concentration/"re-education" camps in Xinjiang.

The approximately 1,000 people in the Turkistan Islamic Party as of 2022 do not justify the imprisonment of over 1 million unrelated people of Uyghur ethnicity and/or Muslim faith in the Xinjiang concentration camps.

While I agree china share some blame, and Cisco is a terrible company...

One can not overlook what "Big Tech" has done to silo the internet too. In the 90's AOL dreamed to become what Google, and the other "Big Tech" have created.

Sure anyone can create a site and put it on the internet... But can it be discovered? Can it be found? Not with out the blessing and boosting of Big Tech, gone are the days of truly organic growth

as the old saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to see it..... well if a website goes live on the internet but no can find it is it really there?

But China is one country and not representative of most of the world, Cisco are an American company and willingly helped, so who is really worse? :)

Vint Cerf... drinking his own cool aid. Pure propaganda. Centrality can never do what he said. Using a centralized system in a decentralized and free way is bad systems strategy. Why not design for what we actually want rather than try to repurpose a system voted-up artificially by the US Department of Defense?

But we hacked ourselves. I still wonder what the world would be today if we had RINA from the start. Then even one word of that could be true:

"Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the Internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided “lock-in,” and allowed for contributions from many sources. This openness is why the Internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide: the freedom to create and innovate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard."

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

Dare I bring a space cash in to the convo but what do you think about a "decentralized internet" like the TRON project https://tron.network ?

Justin Sun's scam blockchain?

Do you have any sources? Or does blockchain = scam?

Most blockchain stuff does seem pretty scammy, yes, so that's my default assumption. At best, if I'm being more charitable than it deserves, it's failed ideology.

(And don't complain about downvotes. Not only is it against site guidelines, it just makes people want to downvote you more for whining about it.)

“Free and open” is all well and good as long as everyone is super nice. But the people preaching freeness and openness are most often the bad guys. It’s a notion that can easily be abused to pitch totalitarianism to the disempowered because it seems like a good idea in principle, but the world has existing power structures. If you take the state now as “free and open” and attempt to preserve it, you cement those power structures in place.

O Google

Also published as an opinion column on CNN:

https://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/29/business/opinion-cerf-goo...

How the mighty have fallen eh

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