Comment by ajsnigrutin
5 hours ago
I mean... EU already blocks eg. some russian sites (some countries more effectively than others)... plus all the chat control pressures every year.
Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".
edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
> UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.
There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
I remember giggling at those "oi you got a loicense for that m8??!" memes. Funny, maybe, but not to be taken seriously.
Fast forward less than ten years, and here we are.
One of my favorite Monty Python sketches, the fish license: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lXyup0De7Q
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I remember a popular "greentext" specifically about this...
What if someone is not a certified wanker?
Head down to your local Tory office and prove it.
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> Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.
Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
An even more apt analogy is France in New Caledonia. Back in 2024, the French territorial government used an anti-terrorism law to enforce DNS blocks in that overseas territory, for the express purpose of suppressing political protests (by New Caledonians angry at the French mainland government).
> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
Why during football matches?
So people wouldn't stream the games ilegally... the private entity that owns the rights to broadcasting the games can arbitrarily ban whole subnets.
the end result is well... not good:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
A company using legal action to protect their IP rights is so different from a theocratic dictatorship shutting down the entire Internet to prevent their overthrow. Perhaps you don't follow the news about Iran but these comments are incredibly daft.
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[flagged]
Your upvotes are issued by sheep and wolf in sheep's clothing telling you to not censor propaganda from a country that's been waging war against you.
Yeah, you're right. It's totally fair to compare how the EU treats its people to how Iran is treating its people right now. Good job. :-/
it's a very weird kind of propaganda I see a lot of lately.
Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic. Doubt it? be showered with cherry picked micro facts that on the surface are similar.
This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
This seems to happen a lot.
The UK is doing some shitty stuff and a man was arrested for wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt a few weeks ago, “Palestine Action” being a proscribed group in the UK, and showing support being an offence. When the mistake was realised he was released after a few hours with an apology.
These things are objectively terrible, shouldn’t be happening. The UK government is under popular and legal pressure to un-proscribe the group as hundreds (thousands?) have been arrested and charged.
But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It’s the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.
It’s really weird to watch.
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I live in EU and I oppose internet cenorship, privacy invasion and many other bad things the governments have been doing for years now.
I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there, neither does anyone else commenting here it seems... but many of us do live in EU, and are bothered by EU doing the same thing as iran, even if it's on a smaller scale (for now). You can't support censorship at home and then act outraged when someone else just implements more of it... even though some do, as long as the censored things are the things they personally don't like.
To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.
TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
If not for EU there would already be multiple states with privacy invasive systems seen in UK.. We are close of getting there and they keep on trying, but so far the blocking states are enough as majority.
Sure EU has some fkn horrible sides to it, such as the anonymous vote to get big stuff through when a majority should be enough as democracy depicts, but currently 2 states out of all EU states can block the big decisions...