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Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

Honestly we need a NATO of internet.

If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"

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While I get where you are coming from where do you draw the line? If a country sinkholes an IP range/domain name because it is actively being used to defraud its citizens should the rest of the internet drop their interconnects with that country? How about CP? Where should the line in the sand be drawn or should the internet be a FFA for every piece of content possible?

I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?

EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?

People seem to forget every country has its own laws, if you don’t like them don’t move there.

>So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?

The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".

I feel that the US is going very protectionist atm (at least its leaders are), so I'm not very surprised by such statements. though imo even if Europe was completely aligned with the US on free speech, something else would be the reason to threaten military support.

(just a side note: personally I wish Europe as a whole would shift its stance on freedom of speech to be closer to the US's stance on it then it currently is over here, so I'm not going to complain if the VPs statements do actually help kick our leaders up the arse.)

I think you're assuming the leadership of those countries will think this is a bad thing. It wouldn't be. They would get to make the big mean globalists the bad guy and tamp down dissent in their country simultaneously.

They absolutely wouldn't make the globalists the bad guys.

They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".

We're gonna end up with literally every country losing access to the Internet.

And when they want it back, they'll drop the bans!

Or they never try to get i back but have now a conveniently locked down internet for their citizen, nicely packaged with a scapegoat to wag their finger at shouting "look at these evil countries trying to force their will on us, they keep YOU from the internet"

You're so naive...

Nah, just require it by law for the press / media / social media to annotate removed information with who is responsible for the decision.

So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:

This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:

List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)

The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)

Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)

How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)

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