
Internet Association Endorses Internet Censorship Bill - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/internet-association-endorses-internet-censorship-bill
======
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd
party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or
CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of
taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd
party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to
withdraw service.

Now when you use free association to withdraw internet service that you
oppose, you implicitly are saying that you endorse the services you keep.

Now most people agree that if people who advocate Nazism are bad, people who
actually engage in human trafficking are even worse. And if you are ok with
making sure that the former are not on the Internet, you should be even more
ok with keeping the latter off the Internet.

This is the reason why the ACLU has historically been pretty absolutist about
free speech, even defending and making sure that the government does not
censorship even the most odious of speech.

In the past, section 230 made sense as most of the companies had a lassez-
faire attitude to speech on their services. With companies now doing more to
me censor 3rd party speech on their platform, section 230 is seen as the tech
companies wanting to have your cake (bot have any liability for 3rd party
speech) and eat it too(be able to censor 3rd party speech whenever they want).

~~~
IBM
>The Internet companies lost the high ground in regard to censorship and 3rd
party speech when they tried to shutdown Daily Stormer. When Google or
CloudFlare were told that the website was using their services, instead of
taking the high ground with regard to the principle of free speech and 3rd
party speech on their services, they used their right to free association to
withdraw service.

This lassez-faire attitude you speak of never existed. They lost the high
ground the moment they started policing their platforms for spam, adult
content, malware, copyrighted content, terrorist propaganda, etc., thereby
expressing editorial control.

They want to have it both ways, they want to absolve themselves of all
responsibility (and liability) for anything that's on their platform and at
the same time remove anything that is in-line with their commercial interests
(for UX reasons or because their advertisers object to the content their ads
run on).

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> They want to have it both ways

Censorship is one party telling everyone else what they can and can't see.

Prohibiting content is censorship -- it's telling people what they can't see.

Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to
see your thing in place of the thing they want.

Filtering is inherently a weighing of false positives against false negatives.

If you require filtering then the false negative rate has to be low/zero, so
the false positive rate goes through the roof. No Nazis but also no
Republicans or Democrats.

If you prohibit filtering then the false positive rate has to be low/zero, so
the false negative rate goes through the roof. Everyone is deluged by spam and
malware.

Section 230 doesn't apply to copyright and look at the mess that has been --
worst of both worlds. Copyright infringement is still prolific but people use
fraudulent copyright takedowns for things they don't own left and right, and
the platforms execute them because they have minimal incentive to question
anything.

What you really want is the middle ground where platforms have to compete with
each other for users, so they can ban things everyone hates (spam) but lose
users if they ban things those people are legitimately interested in (e.g.
minority political opinions).

The problem isn't Section 230, it's the lack of _competition_ which gives the
major platforms too much power when they decide to censor something. It has to
be the marketplace of ideas, not the monopoly of ideas.

~~~
nnfy
>Prohibiting filtering is also censorship -- it's telling people they have to
see your thing in place of the thing they want.

This reads like a paragraph straight out of 1984. No one is forcing people to
view anything by prohibiting filtering. It simply is making certain available
on the platform.

Now I suppose one could argue that filtering is a form of speech, but thats
still reaching I think.

~~~
sgift
In 1984 you had the Telescreen in every house. You were not allowed to cover
it up and it was used to broadcast propaganda into peoples homes without any
filtering (plus it was a surveillance device, but that's besides the point
here).

~~~
nnfy
No, the point is that in 1984 you had doublespeak, where people used words in
ways that were contradictory to their meaning[0] - in the way that the GP
claims that prohibiting filtering is somehow a form of censorship, when
censorship is literally a form of filtering.

0.[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak)

------
userbinator
_The Internet Association doesn’t represent the Internet—it represents the few
companies that profit the most off of Internet activity._

Reminds me of the similarly misleadingly named "Internet.org" \- Facebook's
walled-garden "substitute" for an actual Internet connection.

~~~
Godel_unicode
You're aware that internet.org provides free access to Wikipedia, yes? How can
you possibly object to that?

~~~
klokoman
Wikipedia is extremely biased and, more important, it is not the internet. If
you teach people that internet is cable tv 2.0 very bad things will happen.

~~~
aisofteng
I'm not aware of this "extreme" bias in Wikipedia. What is it?

~~~
oj-lappi
There is research comparing wikipedia to encyclopaedia britannica which
concludes that wikipedia has more "left code words" per article than EB.

However a) this research is very US-centric b) the paper also concludes that
code word per word is pretty much equal between the two, wikipedia just has
longer articles

1\. [https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-
intellig...](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intelligence-
write-with-more-bias-evidence-from-encyclopdia-britannica-and-wikipedia)

~~~
King-Aaron
I tend to feel that this research is fundamentally bullshit.

------
SturgeonsLaw
As soon as I see a "protect the x" bill with bipartisan support, my knee jerk
reaction is to mistrust it

~~~
nasredin
One party controls all the branches of US government.

The fact that they have trouble passing these "protect the children" type laws
__QUICKLY __leaves me in awe of the resilience of the American political
system.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
One party that is arguably one of the most divided political parties in modern
US history.

~~~
mtgx
Both parties are, because people are starting to notice the limits of a two-
party system. Heck, half of Americans don't even identify with either of the
two parties anymore, so it's already pretty crazy that we've gotten this far
without having more than 2 major parties.

There are a lot of hurdles in going beyond 2 parties - hurdles set-up _by_ the
2 main parties - but I think people will increasingly put pressure on this
system until it will break. This could happen for instance through a third-
party presidential candidate that takes at least second place in a general
election, while one of the two main parties is relegated to third place. I
think we're getting pretty close to that happening, but I don't know if it's
going to happen in 2020, 2024, or 2028. But probably no later than that.

There are millions of Americans who have _extreme distrust_ in the two main
parties, so "all it takes" (easier said than done) is for them to actually
organize behind one candidate in an election and refusing to buy the "lesser
evil" excuse that the two main parties have used for decades to keep people
from fleeing to other parties.

------
lowglow
Things like this that worry me and make me diametrically opposed to any of the
big company employees holding seats of authority at any body residing over any
spec or working groups as well. They'll never have the user's interest at
heart.

~~~
ilaksh
The big companies have almost gained complete control of the US: from Amazon
for online retail, Walmart offline, Facebook social et al social, Google
information retrieval, monopoly ISPs, Uber, etc.

So I keep reiterating the solution I see which is to replace these monopolies
with public distributed peer to peer evolving technologies. And no one seems
to support me when I suggest this is possible or desirable.

~~~
zdkl
I'm entirely of your opinion, but what you describe doesnnt sound like the US
way of handling things.

There are some initiatives in that direction from INRIA and other european
groups but aside from GNU and the EFF no one is even talking about things like
Taler in the states.

Vote with your wallets and browsing habits!

------
partycoder
Corporations maximize shareholder value. Corporations are not your friend and
are not patriotic. Don't expect corporations to have your best interest in
mind, or appeal to a greater good. They exist to make themselves more
profitable on a quarterly or fiscal year basis.

------
pasbesoin
Monopoly (oligopoly) 101:

1) Climb.

2) Pull the ladder up behind you.

I think trafficking is horrible. I also think that censorship aids abuse,
including probably trafficking.

Would we even be _having_ this conversation, if decentralized conversation
hadn't brought such topics into broader, public knowledge?

Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run around
mainstream media and their "pulled" stories?

Maybe apples and oranges. On the other hand, law enforcement has earned zero
credibility towards their claims of apples actually being apples.

In other words, where are the stories -- the facts -- demonstrating such
ubiquitous surveillance and censorship actually achieving their stated goals?
As well as not serving other unstated, clandestine goals and mission creep.

Remember when "Internet surveillance" was strictly for and "because
terrorists"? How long did that last?

~~~
comex
> Would Weinstein still be preying, if an open Web hadn't made an end-run
> around mainstream media and their "pulled" stories?

The Harvey Weinstein story initially broke via articles published in the New
York Times and New Yorker, which are pretty much as mainstream as it gets, so…
probably not? Is there something I’m missing?

~~~
tgragnato
Traditional "mainstream" media are not dead, but they struggled to keep up
with the challenge imposed by the new media. Readership habits changed: free
content, physical vs virtual, advertisement model ...

Journalistic freedom and space found (self-censorship) in the mainstream media
are directly or indirectly affected by this. How many articles have not been
published in the past because of the relationships with advertisers?
(Hollywood is a big player in this)

Now there's a different barrier for stories to get published. Sometimes it's a
better thing, other times it's not.

------
yuhong
The most interesting stuff is about state criminal law, where each state will
be different. Of course, SESTA is more than just that, but it is still an
interesting question.

------
arbie
Is it concerning that this could be wielded as an anti-piracy measure? It is
easier to take down entire file-sharing domains rather than DMCA one offending
link at a time.

------
IBM
>Amazon and eBay would be able to absorb the increased legal risk under SESTA.
They would likely be able to afford the high-powered lawyers to survive the
wave in lawsuits against them. Small startups, including would-be competitors,
would not. It shouldn’t pass our attention that the Internet giants are now
endorsing a bill that will make it much more difficult for newcomers ever to
compete with them.

All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier
for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating
money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. It'll be fine. Just raise
more capital from your investors, it's essentially free these days.

The more interesting story with this law is more of a meta story. Here we have
a change to a bedrock law that for over 20 years has granted the tech industry
immunity from any liability for anything on their platforms. Which is just
kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't
have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to
deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the
tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative
externalities they create.

~~~
mcguire
" _Imagine if the energy industry didn 't have to deal with EPA regulations or
manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The
political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly
going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create._"

Imagine if the telephone industry had to monitor phone usage to block criminal
use. Imagine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially
illegal activities.

" _Section 230 doesn’t cause lawlessness. Rather, it creates a space in which
many things — including lawless behavior — come to light. And it’s in that
light that multitudes of organizations and people have taken proactive steps
to usher victims to safety and apprehend their abusers._ "

\-- Alexandra F. Levy, Adjunct Professor of Human Trafficking & Human Markets,
Notre Dame Law School

~~~
Finnucane
>magine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially
illegal activities.

The Postal Inspection Service _is_ tasked with filtering stuff that is
prohibited from the mail, such as child porn, illegal drugs, and nuclear
weapons. While the USPS isn't responsible for illegal stuff that happens
through the mail, they do have a whole law-enforcement branch to deal with it.

