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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

> and reading anarchist philosophy

That's literally how we got here. People got a taste of unmitigated unprecedented freedom online for the last three decades, and found it so gross that they allowed things to swing the other way.

Even one decade ago, the threat of SOPA/PIPA rallied the internet successfully. Just over a decade later, we're at the point of allowing age verification, for morality's sake, without hardly a peep. The cypherpunks are losing, hard, and honestly, deserve failure for how well their utopia turned out.

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What exactly did those people taste that it got them upset so much and who exactly those "people" are? Last time I checked these laws are pushed through as covertly and sneaky as possible and no "people" asked for them. I can't recall any demonstrations with protesters asking to violate their privacy to keep them safe for those evil internet trolls that want to have a sexual intercourse with their relatives.

You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab and desire to fully control the plebs as push from the society. This doesn't sound convincing.

> You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab

Half of US states now have age verification for pornography; three will be requiring age verification to even download apps soon. There is indeed a push from society to get the internet under control, even if the EU is not necessarily connected the same way.

This is a huge, unprecedented reversal of opinion over the last decade that has almost completely gone over HN's head. The EFF, TechDirt, HN, Reddit view of the world has been tried, found wanting, and is being rejected. The EFF which once rallied the internet against SOPA/PIPA... currently is yelling into a void. Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.

Public opinion means nothing in an age of mass manipulation and media control. People believe what the news, the government and the powerful tell them to believe. The first step to passing unpopular legislation is making a media campaign so it becomes popular, or simply just do it and distract us with nonsense for a couple of weeks until we forget.

The worst thing one can do nowadays is blame the masses for their ignorance, thus turning us against each other, while the powerful do whatever they want. Divide and conquer.

> Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.

Civil liberties, like elections and liberal principles in general, are unfortunately only popular when the right side (coincidentally one's own) is winning

There's no utopia. The value of unmitigated speech is in replacing unmitigated violence.

The people you mention, whoever they are, are grossed out by human nature.

How we literally "got here" was Section 230. You can easily stifle free speech by holding Facebook and X accountable for every single post ever made on their platforms. But that would capsize the American investment economy, so we have to protect them just a little bit. It creates a perverse, bipartisan incentive to export the most reprehensible opinions that still qualify as legal.

European citizens (and soon, American ones too) are discovering that they never held the cards. When you ask your OEMs, cloud providers and DNS resolver who's side they're really on, it's not yours. You, the customer, hold no guillotine over their head.

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