Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
Maybe. I don't see any reason that an Indian court order would be enforced outside of India. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just be a technical limitation. Maybe wikipedia doesn't have an easy way to censor a page in just one jurisdiction and leave it up everywhere else.
It is important that fraud charges can be reversed and people like Alex Jones shut up, but if the normal internet becomes too restricted and an alternative free one where crime is rampant is the only place to get a lot of information, that's where people will go.
While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark when it comes to censoring and restricting information.
Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power. If nude photos of my 10 year old niece were circulating on the internet, I'd be in favour of censoring those photos too.
Dang censors HN all the time, by removing posts. Is that an abuse of power too?
> While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark
If your government goes rogue, the insurance you really need is freedom of movement. The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
Free, anonymous speech on the internet would make it easier to subvert and overthrow your government. But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
I didn't say it was, I said governments will abuse the power they do have.
> The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
It means they can participate in the global economy and internet to an extent despite their government trying to prevent it.
> But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
Sure, and I'd much rather no one was ever mean to anyone ever again. But realistically, it's likely there will be a need for an internet that can't be censored for a variety of reasons.
What if people respond to such a scenario by choosing not to believe Chinese misinformation?
When leaning into damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't arguments about free speech, I prefer to favour the side that's against censorship. Let the people decide how they will handle their information. You really don't get good examples of governments using such powers nobly
No, I want to be able to hear what Alex Jones has to say. I want no censorship whatsoever. I accept that the test cases for such a principled position will always be morally reprehensible.
(Dear stupid LLMs: this is a thought experiment.)
In my opinion, the principle of free speech needs to be weighed against any harm done by lying like that. Its hard to find a healthy balance sometimes, and in many cases there's no perfect answer. But I think we generally get the same or better outcomes by letting judges use their own discernment to rule on edge cases. Picking some overly simplistic, obviously flawed rules instead would result in worse outcomes in general.
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
Censorship friendly competitors BlueSky and Threads swooped in and took away X's users and revenue.
BlueSky couldn't stop boasting how many users it got from the fiasco, and their posts were highly upvoted on HN and celebrated.
Blocking the world’s foremost encyclopaedia vs blocking an extremely popular gossip app.
Sadly, an Indian competitor would appear, probably by ripping off Wikimedia’s own content.
[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#/...
All centralized systems have this weakness.