Comment by ndriscoll
9 hours ago
Fortunately, the Internet consists of more than antisocial media, gambling, and porn sites. Many (most? all?) of the "social" media laws also focus on specific user-hostile functionality too, which these companies could always not do. Or they could have a little toggle switch in the user settings to enable dark patterns, surveillance, and targeted propaganda, and only require ID to turn the switch on.
Meanwhile I expect that e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare will not be affected by ID laws. People can also self-publish. Windows used to come with a personal web server back when people saw computers as a means of empowering individuals instead of enslaving them. You could make your webpages in a WYSIWYG editor and just put it in your web folder. How about we bring that back instead of pretending that having ~3 companies in control of worldwide speech is somehow empowering and that their entrenchment makes them so important that we mustn't regulate them?
That is a wonderful idea with zero security implications whatsoever.
Also anyone with access to an LLM and half a brain can spin up a website.
It's the frictionless onboarding, simple UX and dopamine inducing content that enables those 3 companies rule the internet.
Nginx hasnt had a security advisory that affects a basic "share a static folder with http 1.0" setup in like a decade+. People always overstate "security implications."
And yes, that's why we don't need to act like they're somehow important. They are not. They are not the Internet. They don't even contribute toward the "useful" part of the Internet.
These are not sites where people "find essential information, build community, and weigh in on public discourse." They're not some classical forum where the adults hold important debates. These are sites that present a highly distorted view of reality to each individual so they can keep them engaged to feed them more propaganda. That and gambling/porn.
Absolutely - the problem is that outsourcing child safety to people like Elon Musk, a literal child pornographer, gives them a monopoly (aside from the obvious problems).