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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any rhetorical examples that supports broadcasting or mass communication? The USPS has significant regulations around bulk mail and commercial mail, including restrictions on the content of the mail. Likewise there is heavy regulation in the United States of robocalling, telemarketing, and mass texting.

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Those are laws. It is also illegal to distribute libelous material via Tor or Freenet. The relevant point is that the USPS doesn't unseal your envelopes and read your mail and anyone can stick a stamp on that sealed envelope and drop it into a mailbox with no return address and it will be delivered.

In your analogy, what is the equivalent of unsealing envelopes for Freenet, or for that matter, the World Wide Web? I thought what we were talking about was whether there is (or should be) active enforcement of regulations around the content you distribute on a particular medium.

Huh? This entire subthread is about Freenet and moderating the medium. The analogy is that if USPS were trying to do so, it would be absurd.

It also highlights why I think this is nearly intractable. Distributed, censorship-resistant designs lend themselves to resiliency and permanence. I just have this gut feeling you don't get both. And frankly I think the people trying to shove the cat back into the bag are a bit naive.

But unsealing envelopes doesn’t work as an analogy with FreeNet or the web, which are largely not private communication. We’re talking about removing public content, not reading private messages. And my point is that, while the USPS will (presumably) not unseal envelopes, they will go after you if you send certain content via the postal service.

> Likewise there is heavy regulation in the United States of robocalling, telemarketing, and mass texting

And how is that going? After 100 years there is still very little you can do against phone abuse

Robocalls Finally Have the U.S. Government's Attention https://time.com/6513036/robocalls-government-action/

> Around 33 million robocalls are made each day to Americans

Robocall Statistics https://worldmetrics.org/robocall-statistics/

They’re incompetent at enforcing it, but that’s not really relevant.

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