Comment on The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website
pqdinfo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This discussion is a shit show.
The EFF article has been discussed to death over the last couple of weeks. Their argument makes no sense: they claim the government isn’t enforcing the law, but do not address why, instead demanding it does it. They claim ISPs shouldn’t ever block anything without a court order, but do not explain why except in handwavey frozen peaches ways.
The government(s) cannot enforce any laws here because they do not have the privacy-invading, international, powers they need to actually determine who is doing this. And a good thing too.
People here are literally making up shit to defend the EFF’s position. Most often it’s the slippery slope: if Hurricane Electric can block ISPs when lives are on the line, then surely Comcast can block ISPs when IP rights are on the line, or Texas can when abortions might happen.
None of these are connected. Comcast can, and does, actually block IP infringing content, so I guess a better question might be “If Comcast can block IP infringing content, why can’t HE block attempts to kill transgender people?”
Texas was already proposing laws against abortion information being online, and the US Congress is actively discussing a law that’ll make it illegal to, by implication, put information on LGBT issues online. Hurricane Electric blocking attempts to kill transgender people isn’t a factor in either of these.
Hurricane Electric doesn’t have some history of blocking things it doesn’t like. This is clearly a last resort for an ISP that doesn’t want to be partially responsible for the deaths of innocents, whether it’s legal for them to be a part of that or not. Demanding “the government” be responsible for all Internet blocking ignores the fact the government is not always a positive entity, and that establishing a precedent where the government is responsible for blocking things, and can use that power, is a genuine non-fallacious slippery slope: a fascist government is going to use the tools it’s given to ban content that a left wing, liberal, or mainstream conservative government wouldn’t, and is going to use that to harm people.
And sure, the fascist government will do that anyway, but it’s a hell of a lot quicker if you have the laws the EFF claims should exist by implication already exist.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The question here comes down to 3 choices
Do you want a corporation to be able to decide what you can’t look at?
Do you want your government to decide what you can’t look at?
Do you want to decide what you don’t look at?
And, like most things, people are going to want a little from each column. Figuring out the proper lines is the tricky part. The EFF stance is the net neutrality stance. Your stance is the Section 230 stance. Both are good things in different situations.
In this case, because there is most often no consumer choice in ISPs, net neutrality is the EFF-preferred position when dealing with them. This leaves it to the government (and society at large) to craft and/or enforce specific laws to control the undesired behavior, which is often a mistake, too. But it’s generally a better societal moderator than a single monpolistic corporation is.