Comment by jchw
4 years ago
The problem isn't that nobody understands that free speech is not limitless, the problem is that literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech and how to enforce it; there is no perfect answer. Cloudflare was taking the position that it's not their job, and they're not alone as far as internet services go. There are, in fact, other hosts that do basically the same thing, see Nearlyfreespeech for example.
My point isn't to weigh in on this specific decision, but I want the rhetoric around this stuff to evolve away from pretending that defining the boundaries of what speech should be protected is super easy and objective. It's really not, and it never will be.
> literally nobody wants to be in the business of defining the exact boundaries of allowed speech
That's because there shouldn't be one global boundary enforced centrally. This kind of problem is a direct consequence of the scale and alignment miss-match between the technical structures (here cloudfare) and the scale at which there is political cohesion (apparently much lower scale here, since there is such an irreconcilable disagreement). Each politically cohesive group should have the ability to make their own policies. That's how federated things work (email, mastodon or bgp). Hence these kind of clashes we get regularly because of the size of most things has become so huge which is completely nonsense imho (eurozone, food/simple goods production, media).
Are you suggesting that large services like Cloudflare shouldn't exist, and instead there should be an ecosystem of DDoS-filtering reverse proxies? I do agree to that, though I think the problem remains that most of them do not want to be in the business of trying to decipher law and morality. So at the end of the day, the buck does stop somewhere.
And frankly, the example of Mastodon doesn't inspire confidence. Mastodon instance-level blocks have turned the platform into a huge mess. I genuinely would not be surprised if there was no single instance I can sit on that will allow me to interact with everyone I know on Mastodon, and as far as I've heard, if I choose to host my own instance and not to block certain instances, this will lead to my instance being blocked on some instances. I could be exaggerating a little, but this seems quite annoying.
Admittedly, e-mail works a bit better in this regard, but it's certainly not without issues (SPAM, deliverability, etc.) Still, it's perhaps possible that platforms that deal with public broadcasting are inherently more sensitive to cultural clash than ones that only deal with more or less direct communication.
Consolidation of power into platforms like Cloudflare is still a problem, but even if we fix that, we still have another service that has a lot of people all in one big amorphous zone: the Internet. I do wonder a lot if the Internet will ultimately wind up unifying a bunch of cultures, or if it will wind up creating even more bifurcation than it eliminates. It's starting to feel more and more like it creates more bifurcation, just a bit.
I don't understand trying to hide behind an argument other than "my tribe is in power here so you submit to our rules". The post you linked falls apart with how you define various concepts (how you define the terms of peace, etc.). The argument is eventually settled (like nearly all of them these days) by who is in power. They'll define the terms of peace and in a way that paints their causes as good and their enemies as evil.
If this is how you view someone using their weight to protect people from literally being stalked, harassed, and driven to suicide for fun then gods help us all if that ever stops being the case and the next tribe decides that it’s fine.
This act is evil and morally wrong in all political reference frames. Anyone who’s arguing that it’s partisan or woke is focusing too hard on the victims, trans women, and not hard enough on the perpetrators.
There are established ways that we as a society, determine what to tolerate.
Most people would say the legal system is the correct avenue for this.
This is a nice platitude, but I'm not seeing the relation. Service providers that follow the law will in fact, stop tolerating a client when law enforcement tells them to do so.