Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.
Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries.
Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams.
And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.
> Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.
Hasn’t the main trend of the past few decades been that, despite limiting our freedoms, everything gets more and more centralized, mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ?
I’m doubtful in DNS ever being replaced with an even more decentralized version. It’s already one of the most decentralized protocols widely in use right now, and the trend has clearly been more centralization of DNS, not less.
mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ?
And as a consequence the user population on average becomes more ignorant, less likely to care, and less technically capable. It's one thing to crush internet freedom when half your users are programmers. It's entirely different when half your users don't know what a "file extension" is.
I guess it would be both, like with Linux on phones and desktops as a reaction to proprietary OSes becoming more restrictive – it fans the flames for LibreDNS and Stallmann-approved Gnu-DNS in some circles like the privacy-conscious subset of HN, and some of those actually use it where possible, but overall they are an inconsequential rounding error, and everyone else gets centralized and non-overridable SecureDNS™.
nothing occurs in a vacuum; as has been well-described here, when Freedoms are fringe, then Freedom-minded people get the strange bedfellows of actually depraved and actually criminal, while the Law-and-Order people isolate themselves and their populations with distrust, circular-restrictions and unchangeable rules. Its not the active people, its the bandwagon that the active people have to live with as a social consequence
No need for decentralised naming schemes, alternate roots or targeting routers with DPI. This article describes only orders against third party DNS providers, not authoritative DNS servers. Perhaps the censors are interested in restricting resolution of certain names by third party DoH providers.
Regardless, failure to remove the names from the applicable registries will mean the names can still be looked up, using nonrecursive queries.
There is a funny aspect to this. Registry and registrars already has a tradition to sell dns blocking registrations for a fee, and when copyright rights holder (or even the police/government) want to block something, that fee is still required and it need to be paid each year. As an example, when it came to piratebay.se the Swedish police budget has been paying it every year since the court made the decision to take it. It not much for a single domain but it does not scale and the police really do not want more of them.
It is for this reason I suspect that rights holders targets ISPs. Supporting a block list is in comparison free and ISP has yet to start to take a yearly fee each time they add a new domain to the list.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but using all of this will still leave the option open for enforcers to go after the registrar or the cdn or host of the endpoint. So there is always a 'secondary infringer' to find, that is capable of removing (the endpoint of) the content.
Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.
Content makers know that some people in the US will pay $200/month for cable. So the price of Netflix, at $15/month, is less than some people will pay.
If every American could access everything for $15/month, they would have to forego the $185/month some Americans are willing to pay. Corporations hate this.
> Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.
Because the economy of it doesn't scale?
When Spotify was new, I was amazed by it. A simple monthly fee and I could instantly access all the music(tm)? Who wouldn't sign up for that?
As time went by I definitely wanted a similar service for video. Basically, the same recipe: A reasonable monthly fee, and I'd like to watch all the video(tm) please.
But that's not what we got, because they are different markets, offering different goods, which has a different cost and which is used differently.
It probably costs more to make a single episode of a popular TV-show than it costs to make 100 albums of music. And unlike music, where people typically have favourites, which they will listen to again and again, most TV-series are watch-once, be-done type of entertainment.
That means that I'll keep my music streaming service forever because I want to be able to keep listening to the music I love, but I will cancel a video-streaming service the instant I've seen the series I signed up for.
So what is a reasonable fee? I agree it's annoying to have to deal with multiple video-streaming providers, but if they were to follow the music-stream model (all providers have all the content), then the price you would have to pay per provider with probably be 10x what it is now. And nobody is going to pay that.
Isn't it more reasonable to pay for what you use, when you use it, and then pay nothing when you're not using it (something which really isn't a realistic option for music-streaming)?
You're missing an important detail, video is arguably a different market but it's still a digital good and it basically costs a company 0 to stream it to a new user. If i had one provider where i could get everything i'd gladly pay allot more than 15$ and i'd probably keep my subscription as everything new would be released on said platform. You could even combine this with a pay as you go model to only pay to stream a certain show without subscribing. My logic is that if you could get enough subscribers 30-50$ a month could be good business.
> it basically costs a company 0 to stream it to a new user
But the company providing the stream need to recoup the cost of making that episode, not just the cost of streaming it.
That means that the costs of making that episode has to be baked into the cost of the streaming-fee you are paying.
> My logic is that if you could get enough subscribers 30-50$ a month could be good business.
You won't, and it's still too low.
At this point, just having 3 regular streaming-services will cost you this much and it still gets you less than half the content out there.
Having it all would be $100+, and I can assure you that at such a price, most people would say "Why can't I just pay for the things I want to watch instead"? You know, before streaming, like people did with cable.
What i'm trying to say is that if you can convince enough people to subscribe, the price could be 20$ but the video media industry keeps clinging to the dream of exclusives which will in turn make people turn to piracy again. It might be much more expensive to produce music, but that also results in allot of music being produced compared to tv shows
A reasonable fee in one country might be completely unreasonable in another. Or between two people. Internet is basically free to provide, the cost per month is entirely dependent on the average salary of a system administrator in the region. Entry level PCs are also not very expensive. This all means you can get Internet access for a reasonable price wherever you live.
There is also the fact that file sharing is just better than buying. If I torrent a movie, I get the best version, with no region locking, no drm, which I can copy to any device. If the service goes away, or the Internet is down, I can still watch my movie just fine. For practical purposes, I actually own files I download, but don't own files I pay for.
Even with a subscription to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Crunchyroll, Nebula, CuriosityStream, I still can't watch everything, and in fact, I've got less choice than even the local library offers in physical media.
And while I'd like to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it's currently not available at all in Germany, not even if I wanted to pay money. Paramount removed most Star Trek content from other streaming services, but their own service does not launch in Germany until 2023, and even then only as part of a very expensive bundle with Sky's football and other properties.
Additionally, when watching TV via DVB-T, only public broadcasters can be watched, as none of the private channels broadcast via DVB-T anymore.
I don't think there's much point rationalising this. If you can't get something legally, you're happy to get it illegally. If you think you have a right to all content, and you should be able to "watch everything" (whatever everything is) then I doubt anything anyone can say anything to change that mindset.
Except: if the library offers more choice in physical media then... just use that.
It's obvious why the content industry is cracking down on DNS providers. If they succeed, the most likely outcome is overblocking with platforms like Netflix, Disney & Co on a curated whitelist.
Targeting DNS providers is only worth it because of the growing power of resolvers like Quad9 and 1.1.1.1. Otherwise they would have to go back to getting orders against every ISP in a jurisdiction, which should be near-impossible in a free country but admittedly European countries have disappointed on this issue. Web browser vendors and Cloudflare decided for some reason that everyone needs to use DoH, and while I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled, Hollywood isn't waiting to use this increasing centralization for their attacks on web users.
True, though in my opinion that's not nearly widespread or impactful enough that people needed to be opted in to DoH by default as in Firefox, or sold DoH as a "safer" option like Cloudflare does.
Again, a politically neutral network is a dream of the 90s that isn't even alive in Portland. The network will enforce the will of whomever puts enough political pressure on it.
A movie can be several gigabytes of data, an IP is several bytes. I don't like their odds of taking on the DNS system if they can't handle piracy directly. Steganography is a lot easier than learning how to use a torrent client.
Next example of spreading costs of defense of interests of a small number of benefactors trying to enforce a business model they prefer over all parties involved in the support of infrastructure used by exactly these benefactors.
I personally think something like Handshake[1] would be ideal.
However, a major problem with most of these decentralized "internet alternatives" (including Handshake) is that they aren't designed to be compatible with the existing internet, which creates a chicken-egg problem where site operators don't want to bother supporting your system because it has no users, and users don't want to bother using your system because it has no (or few) sites.
If someone really wants to replace DNS with a decentralized system, what they need to do is:
1. Develop a well designed decentralized naming system (many have already done this)
2. Buy a TLD on the existing DNS and point it at a proxy server that allows incompatible clients access to your decentralized network through a centralized proxy
3. Work to get support for accessing that TLD through the decentralized protocol baked into browsers, first through extensions and eventually natively supported.
So much ink spilled and so many lives wasted trying to fight a thing that's actually good for the industry. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.
Same thing happens with firearms yet no one seems to care, or actively promotes, the methods "policy groups" use to strip rights away from citizens. Now, the same tactics are being used here. I suspect many commenters will suggest these cannot be compared but I suggest generalizing a little:
The government and people interested in stopping this sort of thing realize there's no legal easy-button they can press to make it all go away. Firearms won't go away, neither will piracy. But, they can do the next best thing. Inundate the companies in the middle with lawsuits, mostly frivolous in nature, in order to tie up and burn capital and (they hope) bring the demise the companies allegedly "involved" in the "crime". This doubles as something that has a tremendous chilling effect on other related services. It starts with DNS, goes to VPNs, etc. It's so effective the government does not even need to enforce laws to make it happen. All it takes is a little encouragement of the right groups of people and the lawsuits take care of the rest. It is de-facto illegal to do something because the alternative is to be mired in billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for any perceived mistake.
This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well. In this case, they're now coming after information. Use your imagination to figure out what is next.
Nonsense. There is no equivalent of MPAA etc interested in taking away guns - on the contrary, firearms is a billion dollar industry with more than enough lobby power to convince everybody to stock up on guns.
I'm not sure what you mean by "equivalent of MPAA", but there are plenty of well-funded anti-gun lobbying groups who fund lawsuits against the gun industry. Brady, Giffords Law Center, and Everytown for Gun Safety are some major ones. But OP was talking broadly about lawsuits, not lobbying groups specifically.
Example: California recently enacted a law to "create a powerful incentive for the firearm industry" by allowing citizens to sue them for "failured to implement 'reasonable' controls", by using a similar mechanism as Texas' bill that enables people to sue doctors who perform abortions.
Senator Portantino: "If Texas can outrageously use this type of law to attack a woman’s reproductive freedom, we can do the same thing in California to hold gun dealers accountable for their actions."
OP said:
> The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well.
Which seems to be exactly what was done in California with its lawsuit legislation that was modeled after Texas'.
I can't help but agree with OP that this is a similar tactic of using lawsuits to bully people into compliance by draining their resources. It's an old tactic, but it's still unjust, regardless of the particular legal issue.
> there are plenty of well-funded anti-gun lobbying groups who fund lawsuits against the gun industry.
Well funded by people for selfless political reasons, not by large corporations: as the parent comment says, the situation with USA gun control is the exact opposite of MPAA-related entities suing citizens.
You seem to confirm that gun control is a relatively healthy political struggle between people who want more or less guns, while copyright enforcement is a struggle between greedy corporations and personal rights.
> I'm not sure what you mean by "equivalent of MPAA", but there are plenty of well-funded anti-gun lobbying groups
I think parent-poster's point is that there's a fundamental funding asymmetry between (A) a political-action group directly sustained by a current money-making industry and its future growth opportunities (B) a political-action group which is not and relies on ideological/altruistic donations.
In the case of media/DRM/piracy, the profit/politics nexus mainly lies with the big media companies and the RIAA/MPAA etc.
In the case of US-gun-stuff, the profit/politics nexus predominantly lies with the gun-manufacturers and NRA etc.
You can't really compare a public health & safety issue with piracy.
Firearms are not freedom of speech. Guns kill. Just like vehicles kill and are therefore subject to regulation (or outright prohibition in many spaces) above individual freedom.
I'm not talking about whether it's justified to regulate firearms, abortion, or piracy.
I'm talking about whether it's justified to bully your adversaries with lawsuits in order to drain their resources. The particular legal issue doesn't matter--it's subverting and abusing the justice system.
This is going to sound harsh, but you need to hear it I think.
Society has done a really good job of allowing people to pretend reality doesn't exist and not die for it.
See, in the past, you had to believe bears were not to be poked or you risked dying from poking a bear. At some point someone had to learn this lesson. Probably Bold Billy poked a bear, his buddy Timid Terry watched the bear eat him, then decided poking bears wasn't a good idea. Timid Terry then went back to the village and described what happened to Bold Billy, showed everyone Bold Billy's remains, and thus was their respect for reality both reaffirmed and their survival increased.
So then the village started teaching its children to be careful around caves and not to poke bears. Jackass Jerry grew up hearing stories by Timid Terry about the time Bold Billy helped a bear make it through winter by allowing said bear to partake of his flesh. Only Jackass Jerry never believed it, so one day, he decided to go poke the bear. Well, Jackass Jerry turned into Jambalaya Jerry and thus the bear once again get assisted in it's preparations for the winter.
And thus was the lesson taught by Bold Billy reinforced years later by Jambalaya Jerry, who wanted to make sure the rest of the village was kept safe by their understanding of reality.
---
Society in general has become so good at protecting its members that many of those members can survive despite believing things that are patently untrue. Today, Jackass Jerry may never have turned into Jambalaya Jerry despite the mistaken belief that poking a bear isn't dangerous. That's just how good the guard rails are.
The point is that your reasoning here is _PATENTLY_ untrue, but you've been allowed to rationalize your way into whatever feels right because the guardrails of society don't force a respect of reality on you.
In this case, the reasons for regulation are many and varied. Something NOT outright killing someone is not, nor has it ever been, a justification for letting it remain unregulated.
You disagree with the poster you responded to. And that's great, it's certainly within your rights to do so. But your rationalization of that disagreement is patently untrue and makes me wonder if we're looking at what would have happened if Jackass Jerry had never met a bear.
Imagine if someone argued theft should be unregulated because no one died.
Get your head out of your ass. Jimmy-and-bear stories are for little children, it's just some weak strawman here. You keep saying I'm wrong, but can't get to the point of why. The theft/death comparison is absurd because theft and death are two different things.
If you wanna own a gun, great, but the regulations should be extreme - just like anything else hazardous, like motorized vehicles. I can't speed in urban areas just because "it's muh freedom of movement" and I haven't run anybody over (yet). Statistics are statistics and guns increase crime, violence, and death.
There is an obvious difference: the right to keep and bear arms is enshrined into the constitution under the regulation, "shall not be infringed". There is no such right for vehicles.
First off, the constitution can and should be updated. Second, the "right to bear arms" is not without limits already. Third, guns will never be eliminated completely, just regulated more strictly.
Yes, the constitution can be updated via ammendment. My point was that, at present, one is constitutionally protected and the other is not.
Also the current limits on arms are all unconstitutional. There's no question about it. But there is a whole host of things that are unconstitutional that don't seem to matter anyway, like social security and minimum wage.
i think you're confusing the massive and well-funded military lobby (the people who make 40mm autocannon) with the mixed civilian/military/police small arms industry (who make your everyday .223 AR-15). it's much harder to make it in the latter as a small businessman due to massively onerous regulation.
edit: tired of this. i own lots of guns and have never killed anybody. i had this same argument with somebody else yesterday over financial KYC: we do not fight crime by stripping law-abiding Americans of their freedoms and subjecting them to increased state control.
Well, anyway, this pro-gun stuff has nothing to do with piracy freedom. Piracy hurts some millionaire CEOs bank accounts, and guns literally kill people.
Yes, looking over to the US the gun fetishism over there is creeping me out. I'm glad we have strict gun ownership. The small number of accidental shootings while hunting is more than enough.
You know what's weird? I associate "my feelings are super special and I will get UPSET if you say things I don't agree with" with people who use snowflake to refer to anything but pretty little shapes.
If you compare to Canada which, compared to all Western countries besides the US, has comparatively lax gun laws and high firearms ownership rates and a similar overall culture:
* US sees 12.21 firearms deaths per capita per year to Canada's 1.94.
* US sees 4.46 homicides via firearm per capita per year to Canada's 0.52.
(The UK stacks up at 0.20 and 0.02, so significantly lower still.)
This pattern holds over basically all numbers relating to rates of violence at every level of division.
Also, the type of firearms owned are different. In Canada, firearms are mostly for hunting whereas in the United States, they are mostly for protection.
In Canada, less than 12% of firearm-owning households have hand guns whereas it is at 72% in the U.S. In Canada, 95% of firearm-owning households own long guns. Long guns are more inconvenient for committing crimes or murders than handguns.
i assume you're using some larger unit but saying "per capita" because it's not possible to have more than 1 death per capita.
regardless when will y'all understand citing death statistics will not convince us to ban guns? we oppose it because we believe it's wrong to restrict a basic freedom not because death figures are under some magic threshold where we'd support it if the number went over.
By this metric, the US is better off that much of South and Central America. I bet if the stats were normalized by deaths/100K guns instead the US would look pretty good. (~17% drop for US, as we have more guns than people, but every other country has significant increases)
The right to bear arms is absolutely not under threat. Gun rights are the strongest they've been in decades, and that will not change until the supreme court drastically changes. Changes to the 2a would take groundswell of political support (super majority in congress or 2/3rds of states ratifying an amendment? but I forget the specifics). Given the political divide in the country, I do not ever expect to see the day. If this law has any teeth I fully expect it to be defanged as soon as they 'break the skin'.
I don't like this; I grew up with guns, but even I find the rabid fetishization of guns to be a sad reflection on our society, but I have precisely zero allusions of any change, any time soon.
there's absolutely people pushing for stricter gun laws especially at a state level. things are getting better but have a long way to go, we still have the FOPA, NFA, GCA and tons of other awful laws on the books.
One could argue this is a fault of the juidicial systems involved. Laws should be written clearly enough for any judge on whose desk such lawsuit lands to throw it out or face ridicule from their peers.
this is a stretch but let's assume the post is in good faith, and that the post-writer does care deeply about their issue. The tactics described here do make some sense. It may be that proponents in political-marketing and policy-activism do in fact, plan and execute this kind of thing. But let's be more specific. It is a sophisticated legal action, takes patience to implement in steps over months and years, requires valuable know-how to execute the lawsuits, and for all of those reasons requires funding over time and planning. Let's notice that groups of lawyers are needed for this.. and that groups of lawyers seek paying work. Average active citizens and wage-workers, people with young families, peoples with chronic distress, primary caregivers, lots of others .. can't think of and execute these plans.
This is specialists work and there are a finite number of specialists in even large society. I propose that daylight rules, disclosure of funding and declaration of activity, would do quite a bit to take the threatening nature of this kind of thing away. Let groups work toward their political goals, yes. But in the open.
>I’d give up apples if it meant gun violence would stop’ is a perfectly valid statement.
Gun-Violence have other root's, the constant fear of being threatened, the media and the country who is the only one with a declining lifespan[1] (exceptions are country's with war). The Gun's are not the problem, the state of mind of this country is.
Howto change the US mindset to a positive future instead of a "near in the future zombie apocalypse's and jeff bezose's at the helm of it" i don't know.
But i know that having constant fear to have a "safe" life is not a good way of living, and maybe have look at you...your fear of schools shooting's...that would never come to my mind (for example in Switzerland...with full automatic military riffles in nearly every 20-35yo men closet).
It's the Culture (Dog eat Dog?), Media and Mind plus the politicians and the "military complex" because they LOVE IT!
[1] The US is between Ecuador and Malaysia year 2020 so without real Corona impact:
Restricting freedoms to make everyone free-er doesn't actually increase freedom.
Your children already are covered by laws against murder. Banning guns may decrease the rate of school shootings, but it won't guarantee they cease. You'll never live in a world worry-free of gun violence, especially now that anyone can 3d print them at home.
you should be more worried about your kid walking by a busy street to and from school.
people have wanted to take our guns for a long time and this is just the latest cause to hang it on. ronald reagan tried it with racism. roosevelt and company tried it with mob violence. this is just the latest excuse.
Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.
Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries.
Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams.
And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.