> the weird thing is if you want to turn off this child safe internet in the UK, you get a letter and they sent you this letter that tells you, look, you opted out of the filtering. Apparently you want to look at adult material.
I've opted out of these filters ever since they have been in place, Most providers will ask you during sign up if you wanted them on or off, I've always turned them off on day one. Since these filters have been in place I have been with (Who have the filters) Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, 3 (Mobile internet) and I have never once recieved a letter from my ISP that tells me that I have opted out of the adult content filtering.
I like Bert Hubert's writing because he always comes across as someone who's unbiased and genuinely cares. One thing I'm surprised he didn't mention is how large corporations operate their own private internets in basically the same way as countries like China and North Korea. Why wouldn't they? It's how the ARPAnet used to work. They only let scientists, engineers, and university students use the thing. I'm sure it was a much more pleasant environment than the spam hellscape of the modern public net. So obviously every corporate and national community who shares the same dream is going to try and escape it. Where is it written that private internets are perfectly normal when a corporation does it, but evil when a country does too? Some are certainly guilty of mismanagement, but I wouldn't judge their motivations, or say they're "controlling" what they're trying to escape.
> Where is it written that private internets are perfectly normal when a corporation does it, but evil when a country does too?
Well for one thing, when you come back from work at your corporation, you can go on the regular internet. Country-wide blocks don't allow that by design.
They even proactively obstruct the regular Internet. It's not a choice, but an imposition, and even if the regular Internet is a clusterfuck, we need to be in control of that choice.
What you describe already exist, governments already have their own intranet. This is about controlling the public internet. I understand what you are saying but the comparison does not make sense, because there's a clear difference between setting up a private corporate network and a country/continent wide net.
Comparing something like the great firewall to a corporate network is just not productive imo. (Plus, just because a private corporation is doing something does not mean that a government should do the same anyways.)
Corporations are voluntary associations of people for some specific purpose, while countries enforce monopoly of violence over certain area. They are not really comparable. Corporations have much higher freedom to set their internal rules because you have freedom to non-associate with them, while countries should enforce just necessary minimum of rules.
Pretty simple from where I sit: if there's Internet, and the corporate internet, that's two internets someone gets to use. If there's Internet, and Sinonet, I can't get on Sinonet (fine by me) and they can't get on Internet, which I think sucks and is bad. We should have less of that, not more.
> countries doing it have track record of using it to hide their misdeeds.
And companies don't? Internet companies are media, so their function is not neutral to the existence and function of states. Constitutions all around the world have specific "free press" provisions because the press is not "just another private business" but it has very real consequences for the existence of states. So do tech companies today, but they are untouchable, they enjoy even more protections than free press.
We still live with memories of the liberal internet of the '90s (even though we know it's long gone) and we stick to this romantic view of the intent of tech companies. The scale of those companies is bigger than indivudual states so i dont think the comparison is apt either.
Freedom of the press doesn't mean freedom for a specific type of private business. It means anybody with a printing press. In other words anybody is allowed to publish and distribute whatever they want.
In reality, corporations hold just as much if not more power over the Internet than governments. Even though a corporation can't physically lock you up, they can (and have, many times) give you a virtual "death penalty" if they don't like you for whatever reason.
This is not OK, and "but private companies can do what they want" really needs to be rethought to reflect reality. We have governments essentially using corporations to get around their own legal restrictions.
There's some discussion of that, but more on the user-facing side, not the in-house networks (which are also a feature of universities, government agencies, etc.).
> "Meanwhile, we have these big technology firms, that control the hardware, the software, and they run their own kangaroo courts that decide who wins and who loses. And there’s no way to appeal that or to have any insights from what they are doing, because they are encrypting what they are doing and hiding it from end users, while simultaneously moving more and more stuff to their control points"
> "This means 1) they have these kangaroo courts and 2) they’re moving more and more control to these kangaroo courts."
That's more about access to their public platforms (things like blocking some users, shaddow banning, algorithmic recommendation manipulation, etc.).
However, corporations aren't yet governments, although there are some indications that 'company towns' are becoming a thing, as they were in the early 20th century, where a company would own every house in a city and could evict anyone they didn't like, essentially becoming a de facto authoritarian government. In that case, banning someone from their private:w network would mean they had no access to any network.
No mention of Cloudflare or Amazon, who arguably control more of the Internet than any of the entities listed in the article. Definitely more than any of the other corporations listed.
Technically cloud flare and aws provides tools for internet. I don’t know much about cloud flare but at least aws has a solid way to contact them in case of issues, except when Amazon thinks you are fraud, in which case you are banned forever
How are you banned forever? Can't you just buy another computer, get another connection to the internet, and get around the ban? Or do they ban by credit card? Or does that just mean the particular domain name is banned?
I've got around many a ban by just switching out my computer and getting a new internet connection.
If you don’t have your own ASN you’re just renting someone else’s access, so there’s an easy answer - they control your access and could cut it off if they wanted.
In Liz Truss' first PMQs yesterday one of the questions was on pushing for a return of the online safety bill for further "regulation" of the internet, which Truss said is going to come back, for the under 18s of course.
Exactly - there is no default blocking of adult material in the UK, it's scaremongering based on proposed legislation that will probably never make it to the statute books. Some ISPs and telcos have implemented their own systems to protect children, which is a policy matter for them and them alone. There are plenty of ISPs who give you a raw unfiltered Internet. As a result of this inaccuracy, it weakens the rest of the talk for me - how much else is being made up?
So the wikipedia article [0] is wrong? It says the big 4 (TalkTalk, Sky, BT and Virgin) all implemented it. Or do you say that because some tiny ISPs don’t that it’s scaremongering?
They were told by the goverment "If you don't do it on your own, we will make you do it", so the big ISPs did (BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk). This was back in 2012.
> But ministers have always been clear that if industry did not go far enough or fast enough, the government would consider further action - including potentially regulation.
The filter is turned on by default from the biggest ISPs however each one of them asks if you would like to disable it during the onboarding process.
Same goes for mobile internet, the only diffence there is if you are using PAYG you have to validate your age via a credit card or using a form of ID at your providers local store.
>it's scaremongering based on proposed legislation that will probably never make it to the statute books.
As someone following this horrendous bill, can you tell me what gives you that impression, given that it's passed two readings in the Commons and HL doesn't seem to be particularly vocal about slowing it down?
Okay so preaching to the choir about how things are bad while almost everyone in said choir will be working full time on making things worse. Honestly it is perplexing. We have a massive incentive problem and the cheapest place to look for a solution is in cyberspace, I don't want to write this essay several times; http://datalisp.is.
Governments control everything.... they are slowly trying to block crypto too.
The Internet in 20 years will suck even more (they don't really like free speech even if they claim they do).
Edit: Since HN doesn't allow me to reply to the child comment because "I'm posting too quickly", here is the reply to CharlesW.
Stealing is already illegal.... I like how they don't know how to use current laws and flood us with new ones to make their job easier... The truth is that they think that Crypto-currencies are a threat to USD and are trying to stop them. The least they could do is destroy one law every time they add one.
His reply was "CharlesW 40 minutes ago | parent | next [–]
> Governments control everything.... they are slowly trying to block crypto too.
I'm always amazed that anyone thought cryptocurrencies would somehow be the one form of currency that wouldn't be regulated.
It's clear that crypto can't self-regulate, and continues to actively hurt lots of people. As of July, $1.9 billion in crypto has been "stolen" — up 60% from a year ago¹, in quotes because we know a good percentage of these were inside jobs."
> Governments control everything.... they are slowly trying to block crypto too.
I'm always amazed that anyone thought cryptocurrencies would somehow be the one form of currency that wouldn't be regulated.
It's clear that crypto can't self-regulate, and continues to actively hurt lots of people. As of July, $1.9 billion in crypto has been "stolen" — up 60% from a year ago¹, in quotes because we know a good percentage of these were inside jobs.
>I'm always amazed that anyone thought cryptocurrencies would somehow be the one form of currency that wouldn't be regulated.
Right. Me too. If a government bans it, like USA or Australia or whatever, then that's that. Sure you can still use it, but you can also not stop for stop signs or you can sell meth or you can not pay income taxes. And maybe never get caught. But if you DO get caught....
"The Internet" is just everyone's computers (all those who are connected to the Internet at least, including yours and mine). It's a "network of networks". This is just a fact that most folks have either forgotten, or were never taught in the first place, and your ISP doesn't really want you to know or remember what the Internet really is, because then you'd know how badly you're being "shafted" by most of the ISPs out there these days.
I've opted out of these filters ever since they have been in place, Most providers will ask you during sign up if you wanted them on or off, I've always turned them off on day one. Since these filters have been in place I have been with (Who have the filters) Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, 3 (Mobile internet) and I have never once recieved a letter from my ISP that tells me that I have opted out of the adult content filtering.