This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Platforms should, like how we had to shut down our shit posting community for CSAM.
ISPs are a privatized infrastructure and should really be run as utilities. Like trains or water should be.
The world has been treated as a for-profit endeavor and this has many regrettable consequences.
exactly. switch my packets, and shut the fuck up.
the water company isnt trying to upsell me on premium water services, i would like the same from my isp thankyouverymuch.
I'd say "don't give them ideas", but they only have a few they like and that's one of them already
Nestle: "Write that down, write that down!"
think of how much money could be saved not having to advertise alone.
we literally have a pretend market for who owns the last mile to force competition into a market that shouldnt exist. insane
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ISPs shouldn't be doing anything other than providing internet service.
And it should be a utility.
ISPs are to me like infrastructure. They are like roads or power lines. If you ask the ISPs to block malicious activity it's like asking the electrical poweregrid to be responsible for stopping their electricity being used for illegal activity. Asking the ISPs to block malicious activity is like asking the road builders to be responsible for bankrobbers and murdere driving on the roads. It's simply just ridiculous to put the responsibility like that.
Yup. To many people don't get it. They are all for heavy regulations so long as it's their side doing the regulation, then five years later they're crying about being regulated.
Bingo. People forget that rules and laws are always double edged and can be used against you.
This was literally the Net Neutrality debate from 2013-2016ish... And yall can correct me if im mis-remembering what the argument was. IIRC it was if an ISP wanted to be classified as a public utility or private service and the outcome was something along the lines of.
Public utility > protection under title 2 of The Communications Act of 1934 (ammended in 1996, its not that old, and could NOT be sued for the content they transmitted) > they could not police the content, otherwise they were liable for what their customers used it for.
The reasoning was you could not sue a public utility for someone using them to do something illegal. However if it was a private service.
Private service > not protected under title 2 > could police content as it was private infrastructure. The fear was if Time Warner or someone throttled connections to streaming platforms to ruin the expirence so people would go back to watching cable. This was kicked off when Netflix, Level 3 and Comcast all got into a spat over content usage, data volumes and who was responsible for paying for hardware upgrades.
The issue was that they were poorly classified at the time (unsure if that changed) and had a habbit of flip-flopping classifications as they saw fit in different cases (ISPs claimed to be both and would only argue in favor of the classification that was more useful at the time). I dont think this was ever resolved as it was on chairman Wheelers to-do list but 45s nominee to the FCC was a wet blanket and intentionally did nothing. Now the seat is empty because congressional approval is required for appointees and were doing the "think of the kids/ruin the internet" bill again... /Sigh.
Y'all know the drill, call your congress critter n' shit, remind them not to break the internet again. And if your in a red state, just fart loudly into the phone, its funny and they wont do anything constructive anyway, even if you asked nicely. (Sorry, im just tired of this cycle of regulatory lights on, lights off)
Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
Man, this is so wierd reading from post-soviet country. Here red state/region meant in 90-ies region with communists majority. And they probably would be for public utility.
Anyway now it doesn't matter in personalist resource autocracy.
I don't want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.
But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.
Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as "flash worms" or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it's causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.
And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn't speech; it's fully-automated malware activity.
¹ From Andy Warhol's aphorism that "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes", a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
Yeah ok, that's like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.
A fascinating read. I'm sure there will be plenty of people complaining about their "centralists / fence sitting" takes, but what they're saying it's perfectly valid. These top level providers shouldn't be interfering in arguably critical infrastructure.
We keep seeing Moral Guardians create more problems than they solve
Users need more control over the kind of content they want to see. The problem Lemmy has is very similar to the main problem with the internet as a whole: the current model is that of a "regulator" who controls the flow of information for us.
What I'd like to see is giving users the tools to filter for themselves, which means the internet as a whole. Not interested in sports, let me filter it all out by myself, instead of blocking individual parts piecemeal.
The problem is that no company has an incentive to work on something like that, and I wouldn't even know where to start designing such interface tools on my own, but there is, for example, a keyword blocker for YouTube that prevents video that contain said terms from appearing on my timeline. I've used it to block everything "Trump", for example. I'd like to see more of that.
The idea sounds nice in theory, but there is a reason people bring their car to a shop instead of changing their own oil. There are a lot of things we could/should take responsibility for directly but they are far too numerous for us to take responsibility for everyone of them. Sometimes we just have to place trust in groups we loosely vetted (if at all) and hope for the best. We all do it every day in all sorts of capacities.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
the EFF seems to be suggesting that the private sector is policing itself via censorship because law enforcement doesn't fucking do anything. yea bro
It doesn't help that the ISPs are run by media companies, who put the content on the Internet...
That's why the policing is even happening in the first place.
If you ask me (and nobody ever does for good reason), one of the only times an ISP should be pulling the plug on online speech is when you start linking actual malicious links that have a good chance of your grandma losing her retirement funds or your tech illiterate uncle getting a crypto miner installed on his laptop or something equally destructive.
Your ISP should have no insight in to your traffic at all. Therefore unable to make any judgement on what traffic to block and what not to block. With the exception of volume of traffic and to where it is going.
"ISPs should monitor and censor bad things!"
"ISPs shouldn't be censoring free speech!"
We already see how bad stuff gets censored or punished on social media with things like bots that cast such a wide net that lots of innocents get caught with no human to appeal to.
