If you support unrestricted speech, then you support legalisation of lies, fraud, vilification, threats, child abuse pornography, yelling "Fire!" in crowded theatres, abandonment of copyright, spreading of state secrets, insider trading, you name it. It's not surprising that few dare to advocate it.
As the article discussed, people generally want free speech for the things they approve of, and restrictions on speech about things they think are bad. There are some things that seem to have overwhelming public support, like bans on child porn, terrorist videos, and copyright violation. I'm thinking of specific events like the Christchurch shootings, where there was a lot of public outcry along the lines of "such things shouldn't be allowed on the Internet", and 8chan was eventually kicked off Cloudfare. I guess when people want something banned, they want it gone for good, including from the likes of Tor hidden services. But that won't stop them from going to the same kinds of services to access some information that they think has been unfairly banned.
I also find it ironic to be censored when commenting on topics related to censorship, or at least greyed out to -4, which is about as much as can be achieved without moderator assistance, I think.
A very curious thing happened in Australia wrt the Christchurch shooting.
In NZ, there was a law at the time that allowed the government to basically designate the video as illegal, forcing ISPs to take it down - or perhaps it would be better to say, allowing them to avoid making a choice either way. But that was not the case in Australia. So after NZ took it down, the Australian ISPs voluntarily censored the video - all of them in concert, acting, effectively, as a private censorship cartel. And it was a very intrusive form of censorship - not only they blocked the video itself, but any blog or forum that posted a link to it, and refused to remove it, was itself blocked. There were several large forums that were blocked in that manner, because they had a subforum with an "everything goes so long as it's not illegal" policy, where people can rant and vent and have flame wars. Furthermore, the ISPs refused to publish the exact list of websites that were banned, or even confirm or deny whether any particular one was banned.
And despite it being a country-wide block on some information - much as the Great Firewall censors e.g. any Tienanmen photos - as a private action, it was completely legal, with no third party review, oversight, or appeal. Something to ponder when we're talking about freedom of information in developed Western countries...
ISPs should be neutral information carriers. It should be illegal for them to try to influence society by censoring data flowing through their networks. What stops them from voluntarily censoring everything related to a political party they don't support?
> child porn, terrorist videos, and copyright violation
One of these is not like the others.
> "such things shouldn't be allowed on the Internet"
This is why people created things like Tor in the first place. The internet is not a country. Nobody should get to decide what is and isn't allowed on the internet.
> the reality is every first world country's internet backbone is controlled by the state
We need to move beyond this. Some kind of world-wide mesh network would be great. Perhaps phones will become this one day.
If we don't, the internet as we know it today will be destroyed. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. This will lead to a regionalization of the internet: each country will have its own.
> should information be allowed to flow freely?
Yes. If some information is not meant to flow freely, it shouldn't exist at all. Laws must be enforced before the data is created. Instead of making information illegal, target the activity that generates the information.
There's obviously tension between the typical belief that not all information should be allowed to flow freely, and the limited tolerance of "safe spaces" like Tor, encrypted chat channels and sites like Sci-Hub where information does indeed flow freely.
I can't think of anything less controversial in international main-stream politics than copyright. Pretty much every country in the world has signed up to at least the Berne Convention, even certain so-called rogue states. When was the last time any country reduced the length of its copyright terms? Are there any large political parties, anywhere, that even advocate it?
Countries step out of other treaties occasionally, even major things like the EU, climate change and weapons limitation, but copyright is sacred.
I suspect that some form of state secret law is also found in practically every country, and any political controversy is only in the details of how its used and misused, not in the concept.
Copyright was pretty much imposed on the entire world via trade agreements. Adopting US-style intellectual property laws is pretty much a requirement for trading with the US. They even put countries with lax enforcement on a watch list. It's sacred because the multibillion dollar copyright industry spends a lot of its money lobbying governments.
This doesn't change the fact that copyright infringement is so trivial copyright might as well be incompatible with the 21st century. Actually enforcing copyright requires sacrificing free computing and the free internet as we know it today. Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that computers can remain free. Abolish copyright and let them die if they can't adapt.
My problem is not with state secrets but with how governments prosecute their revelation. Whistleblowers are treated like traitors when they reveal the abuses perpetrated by governments under the cover of national security. Of course, the governed doesn't have the privilege of keeping secrets by using encryption: authorities and judges feel disrespected when they can't get access to information and punish people without proof almost out of spite.
The EU is pretty enthusiastic about copyright too, I don't blame solely the US.
> Humanity should sacrifice the entire copyright industry instead so that computers can remain free.
I agree, but I don't think it's likely to happen. Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information. At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue.
> Free computing would sooner be sacrificed to save copyright, and the other restrictions on information.
True. It's not just copyright though. Free computing is a direct threat to the power of governments. Encryption is powerful enough to defeat entire militaries. They don't want mere citizens to have this power. They want a future where computers only run software signed by the government.
This is likely to happen because electronics manufacturing is extremely expensive and centralized. We can write our own software but we can't make our own processors. Due to Intel ME, we already know how dangerous trusting these manufacturers can be.
Perhaps FPGAs will change this one day. What if people could design and implement their own CPUs? Someone just posted this:
> At best, the current uneasy coexistence will continue.
It's not an uneasy coexistence. It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, people make technology that circumvents those laws. The government must always increase its reach just to maintain the same level of control over the governed. We'll end up with either a tyrant government that considers programmers a threat to national security or an ungovernable population that has access to ubiquitous subversive technology.
Governments wouldn't have much trouble shutting down Tor nodes in their own territory, as far as I know, since they can trace the IP addresses back to physical computers. Generally, they don't, which is the "uneasy coexistence" aspect. Perhaps they have legal reasons for not shutting it down, such as the US constitution, or perhaps they find it useful for their own purposes to keep it running, or perhaps they just don't care because it's not used widely enough.
I can imagine an outcome in which the illegal information is driven further underground and no longer accessible at publicly known locations. Like the hidden ftp sites that supposedly exist in the "Warez scene".
The trend that most people no longer keep their own data on their own devices, but use streaming sites and cloud servers, will presumably help keep information under control.
