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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> but we need to go to the dumb wire days of the telephone companies who couldn't control what people say on the phone and if their services were used to do bad things it was the law enforcements job to deal with it.

That is today. You do not get to control Google’s computers.

Buy your own server(s), buy your own bandwidth, and do what you please.

Lobby your representatives to make symmetric fiber internet a utility to each home, and implement ipv6 so you can serve content from your house and not have to depend on bigger companies to get around CGNAT.

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This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.

Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand. Ownership, money, property etc. are all constructs based on a social contract, Sundar Pichai by himself can't have control on more than a suitcase and a vehicle maybe - he can control Alphabet only because as a society we decided to operate in a certain way and sounds he makes and finger movements he does end up steering giant network of people who interact with other networks of people who happen to have control over some machinery. This means, if the social contract isn't working out we can change that social contract to suits our needs better. One change can be about how computers that transmit videos over TCP/IP should operate.

Symmetric fibre internet exists in many European countries, and is readily available to a large bulk of citizens in those countries already. I pay $25pm for 500Mbps symmetric today.

I can’t fly to another planet and terraform it. I can (and do) host my own video streams however.

It's not about the tech. Plenty of people could have built Twitter from scratch, but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.

>but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.

As far as I understand, musk offered $40B for Twitter, unprompted. Is there any evidence that he put out offers to build an alternative for $39B? Because I feel like it would have been taken up given the widespread belief that he was overpaying, and even Musk believed that since he tried to back out.

> This is like saying that if you don't like the planet Earth, find yourself a planet suitable to terraform, go there terraform it, populate it the way you like and live there.

Not at all like that because building a video hosting service is a relatively trivial task, with the only limitation being money. Which the US government has more of than Google.

> Sure, you can do that but you can also solve the problem at hand.

I would rather the government provide the video hosting as a utility rather than commandeer Google’s computers.

The internet is no longer decentralized and interoperable. It's all walled gardens. Want to send an email? Better be on a major email platform or none of your messages will arrive.

Guaranteeing internet access as a utility is a great idea but by itself it's only an illusion of freedom. Access to things like Google accounts / AWS / cloudflare and of course the banking system and payment processor duopoly also need to be guaranteed to some degree all law abiding citizens.

Edit: I don't think this applies in the case here with Russell Brand and demonitization. There should obviously not be any right to be paid by advertisers.

Government should offer email (and identity verification) as a utility. And if the populace wants video streaming as a utility, then that too, although I would rather the government simply provide high quality fiber internet connections as a utility since that is limiting factor in hosting your videos.

That further centralizes, makes matter worse.

Government is also extremely inefficient. To build the service it'll cost them 10x more than private companies doing it. How much do you want to pay in taxes? There will come a point that even if the government actually is trying, that even if the entire GDP is converted the taxes that it'll still end up with a worse quality of life for the rest of us. Governments is easily corrupt and extremely inefficient. Its almost never the answer.

I don’t think so. Email is low barrier to entry, and a constitutionally protected email account would protect people’s ability to communicate electronically, especially if the government is going to communicate via email with you.

USPS can handle it all. SMS 2FA should also be replaced with something that is legally protected no matter what, so it doesn’t matter if you get blocked by Google/Apple/ATT/Verizon/etc, you can still live your life.

Same for an electronic money account.

absolutely, how do i support this

There’s a bit more to it than this. If you run afoul of the big payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, you may find it difficult to even pay for the stuff you mentioned (or get paid).

The ideal of companies being able to refuse service makes sense from a freedom perspective but in reality we have a handful of very skewed markets, and there is often no “municipal alternative” to support those who have been blacklisted.

So the solution is to create those “municipal alternatives”. Constitutionally guaranteed electronic money account and ability to receive and send money, constitutionally guaranteed access to internet, email, and identity verification services, provided by the government.

And any abuse should be prosecuted by the government.

> You do not get to control Google’s computers.

Then why does Google control my phone? Can't have it both ways

That is an unrelated topic.

> why does Google control my phone

Because you chose to buy that phone. Plenty of phones without their software.

Yes I can instead choose to buy an Apple.... much worse

Zayo, HE and Kiwifarms

Then why were you crying the other day that the US needs to nationalize SpaceX to help Ukraine? Can’t they just built their own space based internet network?

I do not recall commenting on that topic at all.

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