Comment by bognition
1 year ago
In the last decade Tech has become part of the establishment. They are one of the dominant controlling forces.
The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had.
Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because they already have control.
Tech has always been part of the establishment, funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems. The only part of tech that really deviates from this is the free software community, which has always been hostile to capital. The blackout day emerged from people, not the industry, and people have changed.
idunno, I remember when everything cool I found on the internet was on a .edu domain, because that's almost all there was. But yeah, capitalist tech has always been part of the establishment. A lot of the good stuff comes from non-profit-related motivations, fortunately.
I remember how I used to call a BBS rather than go to the internet because there was much more than just universities and their research - took a long time until there wasn't a reason to call the BBS, around the point when all the people moved their content.
I wouldn't really call "cool stuff on the internet" the tech industry, as much as I'd love to claim it.
> funded by capital trying to solve capital's problems
Is this parody?
Should we start against the trade unions and German barbarians next? (The latter to avenge Varus and recapture the Eagles.)
Parody?
It's obvious, and common sense.
A parody of what? I don't get the joke.
This is the right line of thinking. My interpretation is slightly different - I think the tech companies have run afoul of various norms when it comes to things like the privacy of customers, anti-trust, taxation, etc. Because they are now reliant on these unethical ways of holding onto economic power or growing their economic power, they need to not get into trouble with governments. This means playing nice with them so that they do not become subject to legislation that will rein them in.
There's also the nuance that while SOPA/PIPA were bills being legislated for potential passage, France is citing laws already in effect.
For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be any consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
But to your point, this is one of the reasons it's important to get these laws off the books and keep them off the books. Once you have the law, the government gets to choose the test case. You know perfectly well they'll be using it against dissidents and false positives tomorrow, but the test case is going to be some loathsome terrorists or a commercial piracy operation with no shades of grey, and then that's the case that sets the precedent.
They should never be allowed the opportunity.
> Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.
Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.
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The correct link for that Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d... :-)
> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
Except when <x> is ruled by <y>, in which case you impose a small fine as to not upset <y>.
Yeah! Like Uber, or AirBnB! wait, hold on.
If they had control they wouldn’t comply
What? The tech ( dns in this case) is as neutral as you can get, these are french courts ordering the block, and the dns technicians are controlled by american corps. Dns just executes the orders of the corp, which in turn obeys the local courts.
Tech is under corp in the chain or command, which in turn is under national law.
Gross lack of extra-technical nuance here.