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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.

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.

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While I agree with you, I think it's inevitable that governments, maybe eventually all, will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.

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.

> I think it's inevitable that governments [..] will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.

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.

> Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power.

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.

The opposite of censoring is putting out information at scale. What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it? Advertisements work, do they not? Saturate the internet with speech, so much speech that speech loses meaning.

> What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it?

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

You don't get to decide the governance, especially in countries you don't live in. The collective action problem is too hard. Technological solutions can be implemented by anyone with sufficient skill and scales easier. Governance always defends the powerful, whereas technology enforces the laws of physics and mathematics and in this case it defends the free flow of information.

> We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.

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.

How far do you go with that? Do you think libel and slander laws should be abolished? Would you be ok with me lying to everyone about you? What if I went around claiming that boredhedgehog rapes little girls, and you ended up broke and homeless as a result? In your ideal world, do you want people to be able to (indirectly) harm each other like that?

(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.

>Good, trustworthy governance.

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?

> they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.

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.

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