Comment by tpmx
4 years ago
Yeah, this is my interpretation as well. I mean, he formulated "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
4 years ago
Yeah, this is my interpretation as well. I mean, he formulated "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
Funny enough, if I recall correctly, that quote was specifically in the context of USENET.
And the story of USENET since then might be educational... USENET itself, and the infrastructure running under it, are hard to censor, but many of the individual service providers that ran USENET endpoints and provided them for their customers went "This is more trouble than it's worth" and stopped providing that service. It's harder to get on USENET now than it was in the days AOL offered it.
The Net interprets censorship as damage, but a critical mass of service providers concluding something isn't worth the resources can have the same effect as censorship.