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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

And call me unreasonable if you like, but if this thing passes, and they haven't gone nuclear (or some variation thereof), as far as I'm concerned, they are endorsing it.

There are a few times when you have to take a stand. This is one of them.

None of the airlines opposed the TSA like they should have, and I stopped flying american carriers as a result, except where there's literally no other option.

I won't have a problem ending all association with Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter.

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For many of these sites, that definition of "going nuclear" would already be them giving up, or at least fundamentally changing. Google blocking sites that they disagree with politically would (and should) be protested by all of us, yet that's exactly what this would be.

I would be concerned about any of these services using their platforms to promote political agendas (especially those with dominant positions). Do it once and you become a Murdoch or one of the many other media barons.

How about Apple and Microsoft and Adobe? And 37signals and foursquare and Dropbox and AirBnB and literally every other company that has an internet presence and doesn't go nuclear to support this bill?

Start a new Internet.

Is that impossible? Isn't it just a matter of running a root nameserver for the new internet?

It depends what you mean by "new internet," and how much control the government eventually takes over the actual hardware routing the current Internet. Even If the government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that. At the absolute worst, you could go back to basics, and just use the plain old telephone system to dial into known servers.

".. government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that.."

Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication. For example requiring the en/decryption to happen at the ISP or only allowing traffic they can decrypt and check.

(I'm not saying this is likely, but it could be implemented and most folks wouldn't care)

How do you trivially decide what's an encrypted file, and what's simply a highly compressed gzip archive?

You err on the side of "it's encrypted, and you're under arrest." False positives aren't the "bad guy's" concern.

Not particularly serious. A little maybe.

In such a situation, the upcoming SOGA (Stop Online Gzips Act) shall provide a reliable decidability methodology.

> Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication.

Even then, it's impossible to prevent arbitrary communication. You can always hide your message inside of allowed messages (steganography), or an even more basic albeit inefficient technique: just use the timing between allowed messages to encode your hidden message.

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