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Comment by hexator | Hacker News Reader

Feels more and more like we're at the end of an era when it comes to the internet.

How so? This is just the UK. While the UK really does want to enforce this globally, they really have no enforcement power against non-UK citizens who do not reside in the UK.

Certainly it's possible (and perhaps likely!) that the EU and US will want to copycat this kind of law, but until that happens, I think your alarm is a bit of an overreaction.

Similar laws are being written elsewhere, Section 230 may not last the next few years. It's not just the UK.

Well the attacks on section 230 from the right are about removing censorship not adding censorship so I'm not sure section 230 is a good comparison.

You mean moderation. People are freaking out because they were banned from places for saying awful shit. Removing section 230 removes the right to moderation, which would kill the internet as we know it. It would become like cable internet.

EFF summary on Section 230: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

Moderation wouldn't disappear, it would just become controlled by the user.

Yes, it would. Any site offering moderation capabilities of any kind would be open to legal attack. That is enough to make it infeasible for any smaller site to have moderation, unless they're big tech of course (which is why they're OK with this)

There's no reason moderation couldn't happen on the users machine.

A lot of people who travel internationally occasionally transit through UK jurisdiction, such as a connection at LHR. This potentially places forum operators in personal legal jeopardy. Would the UK authorities really go after some random citizen of another country for this? Probably not, but the risk isn't zero.

USA has backdoor laws afaik. Sweden is targeting Signal to force them create a backdoor. And this is only from regular news, I'm not even reading infosec industry updates. All govts are targeting privacy tools and the clock is ticking for them. I'm only hoping that one day these fuckers will be targeted themselves via exploits they have forced on us.

First they came for the British And I did not speak out Because I was not British...

By Internet do you mean Western Civilization?

I was gonna say looking at world affairs, it's starting to feel like the end of the Westphalian system.

Any pretense of the Westphalian system in most of Europe ended with the European Union.

Then how come the UK has left the European Union? This is a common misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding nonetheless. Any country in the EU has full sovereignty and chooses to exercise it by combining forces with other countries in order to strengthen their combined influence in the wider world.

>Then how come the UK has left the European Union?

Are you suggesting that if the European Union were post-Westphalian that the UK wouldn't be able to leave? Not sure how that follows. That the EU is a post-Westphalian system is not a new idea.

fair point, I’m just a bit tired of people falsely claiming countries give up sovereignty by joining the EU. Thought you were making a point in that direction, but today we need to stay together and stay strong.

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