> What do you think you're going to solve by introducing yet another platform (centralized or decentralized)? You think you're going to be left alone from those in positions of power (whether it be the mainstream media or government bodies)?
The idea is to envision an internet where there is no specific target to leave alone or not leave alone.
If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible, then the internet will have achieved a substantial milestone in solving the legal, cultural and regulatory problems you correctly identify as underlying causes.
Is it a complete solution? No, of course not. But it's worth the time and effort of our species, and is an important part of facilitating the emergence of ever more genuine human rights in the information age.
>If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible
I no longer believe that. Your page is going to be hosted somewhere. Some registrar will need to maintain your domain. Your DNS records will be registered by someone. You're going to be interacting with payment processors. You're going to buying power from some utility company. Your spouse may be working in a brick-and-mortar location. All of those (and more) are vectors for attack for censors whether they be government or activists. They just need to label your speech as dangerous or evil or something ridiculous and publicly shame you, your spouse, your spouse's employer and anyone that does business with you to see how little protection a new technical platform gives you.
We've gotten away with this up to now because of the meteoric rise of the internet, but it's been figured out now.
It wouldn't exactly be hard to run the web on anonymous and/or distributed hosting.
But content censorship is a social and political issue, not a technical one. And it has many problems, from organised political manipulation to dealing with bad actors of various kinds.
Absolute free speech is an interesting goal but solves none of those problems. (Everyone is for it until a radicalised kook firebombs their house.)
>It wouldn't exactly be hard to run the web on anonymous and/or distributed hosting.
Uh huh.
This requires a little qualification. We have all the technical pieces to enable individuals to communicate, with some effort, with privacy almost guaranteed (you'll never beat, for example, a government agent with immense resources that targets you specifically). But these methods are neither mainstream, nor scalable - which is what this article is about. You can't create a large-scale platform to democratize speech and content without running into the same walls that social media is now running into. Worse for you, the big guys (governments and media conglomerates) are no longer ignorant on how to control a new platform like the Web. Put another way, the internet was figured out and now we're in a persistent decline where control and censorship mechanisms are incorporated into every part of the infrastructure, from DNS, to registrars, to caching proxies, to cloud providers, to social media companies, etc.
>But content censorship is a social and political issue, not a technical one.
My point exactly. So the creating of another technical solution will do approximately nothing.
>Absolute free speech is an interesting goal but solves none of those problems.
Nobody is talking about absolute free speech. That's a straw man of my argument or at least a red herring. What we're seeing is big media backed by corporate conglomerates reasserting their traditional status as gatekeepers. We're seeing an entire American political party push for censorship of their opposition under the guise of protecting the public from 'fake news'.
I have no solutions. The only way this works is you have societal agreement that news democratization is good, but we don't have that, especially after the moral panic that set in with Trump's election. A moral panic which targeted social media for control and increased censorship to stop unvetted information dissemination.
The idea is to envision an internet where there is no specific target to leave alone or not leave alone.
If publishing and consuming content are low-friction events, and censoring that content is impossible, then the internet will have achieved a substantial milestone in solving the legal, cultural and regulatory problems you correctly identify as underlying causes.
Is it a complete solution? No, of course not. But it's worth the time and effort of our species, and is an important part of facilitating the emergence of ever more genuine human rights in the information age.