Comment by philipallstar
7 hours ago
> but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.
Is the internet that? People have built corporate behemoths on top of it, in world wide web-land, but the internet itself seems relatively neutral.
A swarm of millions of devices (that can be solar powered) could be more resilient than the "few" nodes that the "internet" architecture has. I guess that is the motivation, in theory.
Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
> Internet is not neutral, and hasn't been for too long, many providers offering free Whatsapp or cases like LaLiga.
Not sure why people are so hyper-focused on the La Liga case in Spain, Spain done so much worse censorship, even political one, yet no one seemingly bats an eye. But some IPs getting blocks because Cloudflare doesn't follow Spanish law? Suddenly half of HN cares about it, it makes no sense...
How about when a Women's rights website started being blocked in Spain? (https://digitalfreedomfund.org/case-studies/womens-rights-we...) How about the Gag Law that existed since 2015, limiting public demonstrations? How about when the central government prevented an "autonomous" region from even thinking about having a referendum? How about the laws against "insulting" the crown?
Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
There has been so much censorship here, so much more important censorship than some random piracy stream websites going offline, yet not a single person here seems to remember those more important cases, just as long as a US company involved, then suddenly it's important and worth referencing.
Freedom on the world wide web and the public internet been kind of hanging by a thread for multiple decades at this point, and I'm also on the side of "We need new physical infrastructure if we're gonna have a chance".
Meshtastic, Guifi, Freifunk, NYCMesh and more are wonderful efforts that hopefully at one point can group together, we all have more or less the same ideas and same goals, right now it's all separate networks though.
> Today, in 2026, as a Spanish resident, I still can't access https://www.womenonweb.org/. Why? Who knows anymore. Fucking money + religion owns our digital spaces now, been for a long time, no one seemingly noticed.
I didn't know about this, so I looked it up: it's because they sell prescription-only abortion medication and ship directly to consumers, where it's legally only available via prescription and medical oversight. Fundamentally they're blocked for ignoring medical regulations. There were some appeals, but the argument is that access to abortion medication is already a well-protected right, so that this is dangerous and unnecessary, and it's not possible to block that while unblocking the rest of their educational resources.
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