[Roosh]

For years there has been a battle between ISPs (Verizon, Comcast) and Silicon Valley companies (Google, Facebook). ISPs want to be able to charge companies extra for faster internet access to their sites while Silicon Valley wants an "open" and "neutral" internet.

Since it's clear that Silicon Valley companies are a much more serious threat to our freedom of speech than ISPs (have you heard of an ISP shutting someone down for hate speech?), it's starting to look like we should side with the ISPs and stick it to Silicon Valley.

Good video on the idea:

[Ocelot]

I strongly oppose this.

1. ISPs haven't tried to censor dissident political sites because they don't have the power to do so. If they did, there's no guarantee they wouldn't use it, and in fact it's highly likely they would.

2. In the event that ISPs started throttling dissident political websites, it is far, far harder to enter into the market against them than it is to enter into the market against google, facebook, youtube etc.. You're talking hundreds of millions or billions just to lay down the infrastructure so that you have a product people can switch to from the existing monopolies. At least facebook and google's monopolies are only those intrinsic to network goods: it didn't cost $500m to set up duckduckgo.

The real battle, in my opinion, needs to be forcing giants like youtube/google/facebook to honour the first amendment by arguing that they constitute an extended public space that we all interact with inescapably. By kowtowing to 'hate speech'-style laws, they are forcing American citizens to abide by foreign laws in what amounts to an extended public space.

Imagine if private corporations owned every street and building outside your house, and if you said anything politically incorrect, they could ask you to leave 'their' property, forcing you back home. Well, as long as it's not the gobermunt, right? This is the situation with the internet and the big tech giants.

The difficulty comes in that these could not be sweeping laws affecting the entire internet, or sites like this would become compromised. There is a clear distinction to be made between a private forum, where the administrator(s) decide who is allowed in and what they can say, and typical social media platforms like facebook/twitter/youtube, which amount to a public space. How you'd make this distinction legally, I'm not sure.

Likewise, something needs to be done about all these sites, including google, manipulating the flow of information. Information is a form of power, and google in particular is a bottleneck in the flow of information around the internet. They must be forced to treat this information flow in an entirely neutral manner, somehow. No more redirecting people who search 'jihad' to sites made by muslim apologists to protect the ideology of islam: this is engaging in information warfare against the people using your service, and must not be allowed. Again, the specific legal distinctions made here are critically important: I've not thought through how you would unambiguously word such a notion without inviting massive unintended consequences.

The main thing to remember always, is that it's far easier to do a massive amount of harm, than the same amount of good. Something clearly has to be done at this point, but it would be very easy to transform a bad situation into an even worse one by not thinking things through thoroughly.

[I DIDN'T KILL MY WIFE]

Nah Roosh I'm gonna have to disagree. This is one of those cases where sticking it to your enemies (the Silicon Valley shitlib geeks) will hurt me as well. ISPs aren't our friends, they're megacorps who are salivating at any chance to grab some more power and make some more money. You give them a finger and they'll take your whole arm, charging for "premium" bandwidth, will probably institute a surcharge fee for "troublesome bandwidth" etc. The only reason they aren't doing it right now (or at least not to a noticeable and open extent) is because they're forbidden by law from doing it.

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, even if he annoys my other enemy a bit.

[Suits]

There isn't net neutrality in China and it really sucks. Without a VPN connecting you directly through to a foreign server, it can be difficult to impossible to access website hosted outside of China.

I've had trouble accessing and have sometimes been unable to access RVF on certain Chinese ISP because of this.

I use a VPN service about 97% of the time when I'm surfing in China, because due to throttling, the Internet really, really sucks here, unless you are using Baidu, which I'm sure pays out the ass for the privilege of being at the top of the list.

[Kapanda]

I can't make the jump between giving into weaponizing net neutrality and the thing working out for the user. This fight for freedom of conservative expression has no allies. All companies want to sanitize what we think and say.

At what point in the process would either content providers or ISPs think twice about censoring content?

[Repo]

ISP's aren't going to censor large sites like Facebook or Twitter like this video says, the auther makes a few leaps in logic that don't really make sense. Individual sites like facebook or twitter have no obligation to allow anyones viewpoint regardless of what it is, same as how anyone here can be banned if deemed appropriate by the mods. What net neutrality ensures is that smaller websites with possibly alternative viewpoints won't have their speeds throttled. And given the bannings from many mainstream sites, this is more important than ever.

[Malone]

Nope, net neutrality is needed. Without net neutrality, we CAN'T hurt large tech monopolies. Who else can afford the premiums the ISPs will charge for good service?

[HighSpeed_LowDrag]

The leverage that we need against Silicon Valley's censorious practices would be easily gained by pushing for Congress to regulate major Internet content providers as public utilities, thus forcing them to be subject to the First Amendment - http://www.nationalreview.com/article/45...-utilities

Quote:

In the wake of the outrageous and possibly illegal firing of James Damore for writing a memo that pushed back against Google’s “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence,” the company has been the focus of an eminently deserved torrent of criticism. A fair bit of this critique has gone beyond the particular situation of Mr. Damore to look at the general hostility of the technology industry to conservatives and conservative thought. Unfortunately, what has been lacking from almost all of these cris de coeur is a strategy regarding what to do about it.

Fortunately, there are some things we can do that could turn the tables on Silicon Valley’s leftist censorship and restore free speech to the Internet. But first, some background.

The evidence of Silicon Valley’s hostility to the Right is everywhere. Prominent conservatives from Michelle Malkin to William Jacobson to Dennis Prager (just to name a few NRO contributors) — and an even greater proportion of those whose politics lean farther to the right, many of whom do not have access to mainstream media and rely on social media to fund their work — have seen themselves banned from major Internet platforms or had their content censored or demonetized. In most cases they are not even given grounds for their punishment or means of appealing it. While some more “mainstream” conservatives may not feel excessively troubled by the banning of more provocative voices farther to the right, in taking this attitude they make a tactical, strategic, and moral mistake. They do not understand how the Left operates. When voices farther to the right are removed, mainstream conservatives become the new “far-right extremists” — and they will be banned with equal alacrity.

In my scholarly work, I write primarily about energy policy, in which electric utilities are usually referred to as “natural monopolies.” Government regulation of these utilities has traditionally been justified to avoid having multiple companies building redundant and costly infrastructure and distribution assets.

For conservatives, the time has begun to think of some major Web services — in particular Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter — in the same way. Yes, they are private companies, just as many utilities are. And yes, these Internet monopolies do not have the same physical-infrastructure advantages that electric-utility monopolies have. But because of their network effects, their dominance and monopoly power are in many ways even starker.

If I don’t like my utility I can put solar panels on my roof and an inverter and battery in my garage, and I can still get power. But if I can’t get access to the 2 billion people on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t like my politics, my rights of free expression are greatly curtailed.

And despite the fact that these are private companies, they may be violating free-speech law, as Internet-law professor Mark Grabowski has detailed in the Washington Examiner. In Packingham v. North Carolina last month, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a North Carolina law barring sex offenders from accessing social-media platforms, with the Court repeatedly and strongly emphasizing that social media are now a crucial part of the public square. As Grabowski notes, California’s state constitution protects free speech in some privately owned spaces, such as shopping malls. Arguably, that protection should now extend to social media — and all the major tech companies are headquartered in California.

But even if such arguments are not brought before the courts, the market-dominance or monopoly issue still remains a potent justification for regulation. The value of a social network such as Facebook grows proportionally with the square of the number of people connected to it (a finding known as Metcalfe’s law, promulgated by networking pioneer Bob Metcalfe almost 40 years ago). Eighty-nine percent of U.S. Internet users are on Facebook. Twitter has more than 300 million users and plays a critical gatekeeper and distribution role in the high-speed promulgation of content and news. Google owns 88 percent of total U.S. search revenue. YouTube is similarly dominant in video.

Given their market-dominant positions, these companies control a substantial share of the information that Americans consume and therefore should be run in a politically neutral fashion. Instead, they have doubled down on politically motivated censorship — demonetizing right-wing content providers (unilaterally declaring their content to be unfit to have commercials) or even banning them while doing nothing about politically favored ones.

But there are solutions to this abuse of monopolistic power.

These solutions need not be excessively burdensome or intrusive. They could focus on creating a simple regulatory regime that would ensure these monopolistic companies:

1. Do not censor any content that is compliant with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution; and

2. Do not fully demonetize any user’s content, pulling ads from posts only when the advertiser has requested such action be taken.

In addition, going forward, these companies’ records should be liable to be subpoenaed by the appropriate congressional committees to ensure that they have not abused their monopoly powers in ways that disfavor relevant content for political reasons, which they almost certainly do today. In the electric-utility industry, laws and regulatory bodies exist to ensure that the owners of transmission and distribution networks cannot arbitrarily discriminate against certain generators. The same if not greater standards should apply to speech.

Such a proposal is hardly pie-in-the-sky — in fact, a version of this idea has reportedly been pushed privately by the White House’s Steve Bannon, who, not coincidentally, has been among the most Internet-savvy voices on the right.

Even before the Damore firing there were plenty of ominous signs. YouTube had promised “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.” The supposed focus of this effort was videos promoting terrorism, but right-wing content providers were immediately affected, with their channels banned or demonetized in many instances.

The stakes of inaction are clear. In a major profile in the The New York Times Magazine earlier this month, YouTube was referred to as “The New Talk Radio” providing right-wing and conservative content not available in mainstream sources and as a result serving as a rallying point for those on the right. The Times highlights Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson, Ezra Levant, and Stephen Crowder as among the dangerous rightists on YouTube. Sophisticated watchers of the Right will recognize that these individuals belong to very different groups with different relationships to the conservative mainstream. But they should all be able to speak freely.

While I understand and share the concern about allowing government interference in private businesses, even those with monopoly power, we should not allow the conservative ship to be wrecked on the shoals of philosophical abstraction. What is needed is not regulation to restrict speech but regulation specifically to allow speech — regulation put on monopolist and market-dominant companies that have abused their positions repeatedly. Regulating these monopolies for the purpose of protecting free speech is a far different matter than regulating them to restrict free speech. To argue otherwise, to quote William F. Buckley in a different context, “is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”

As bans and financial threats have become increasingly frequent, some on the right have moved from Facebook and Twitter to new platforms such as Gab. But while I wish Gab well and think it is vital that the Right build its own social-media ecosystem outside of leftist control, that is no substitute for the ability to speak to and interact with the mainstream — where people who might not be exposed to the ideas of the Right can be engaged with and persuaded. We need to be able to tweet to the unconverted, not just the choir.

YouTube promotes its “Creators for Change” program by writing that “no matter what kind of videos we make, we all have the power to help create the world we want.” But if Silicon Valley has its way, that won’t be true for conservatives. I personally know some executives at these companies who are politically open-minded. But taken as a whole, I don’t trust them to offer a free, open, and politically unbiased platform. And neither should anyone else.

That’s why we need to make sure that these monopolies and platforms — which have been shielded with their privileges, such as the Safe Harbor provisions of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act — respect the free speech of all Americans, not just those who agree with them. This administration can drain the Silicon Valley swamp and create change. To do it is going to require investigations from conservative journalists, legislation from Congress, regulation from appropriate regulatory bodies, and ultimately the support of President Trump.

The notion that social-media companies are utilities (and therefore might be regulated like utilities) did not originate in the fevered minds of right-wing policy analysts. For many years Mark Zuckerberg described Facebook as “a social utility” made up of “lots of separate networks.” He also described Facebook as “more like a government than a traditional company.”

“What we’re trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information, and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component,” Zuckerberg said. But increasingly these platforms are making it as hard as possible for those on the right to communicate and share information.

Facebook, Google, and their ilk are indeed utilities, utilities that deliver public benefits and not just private ones. It’s time for Congress and the Trump administration to start treating them that way.

Even better would be if we could get the Supreme Court to do the work for us via federal lawsuit. As mentioned above, they have already recognized in Packington vs. North Carolina that social-media companies operate as utilities, and that social media is part of the public square now.

[Extinguished Light]

Regulation as public utilities is the correct solution if we can get it done. I suspect the lobby of these massive companies is too strong for anyone to push it through.

If not possible, we need net neutrality because the next best thing is to build our own critical infrastructure. Hosts, registrars, DDoS protection, social media networks, etc. The biggest bottleneck would be mobile operating systems and their controlled app stores.

[John Michael Kane]

ISP need to be regulated like common utilities. Read http://www.broadbandreports.com and you'll see the Indian dude Trump put in charge of the FCC is a corporate stooge. Trump made a huge mistake there. Hopefully he fixes that. ISPs are often mixed in with television programming. They should force the cable companies to sell off their television business if they want to do internet as well. Too much power in too few hands. Looks like the AT&T and Time Warner deal is going to get approved. This is a mistake.

[Number one bummer]

It is my understanding that allowing the continuation of net neutrality or its affirmation will destroy the smaller ISP's and create even bigger ISP corporations. That being said I can see that not having net neutrality could do the same thing as well as pricing rural areas out of the market.

That being said, I believe Google has plans to become the biggest ISP as they've shown with their push of google fiber. It suits them to create a system where no new ISP's can hope to ever enter the market. Net neutrality would help a bigger corporation such as google because they can afford to pay and buy up the smaller ISP's. The libertarian idea of more competition doesn't work when you have public utility level infrastructure that costs billions to install. Once google has a firm hold on the market I could see them lobbying against net neutrality as they have in the past.

Its an issue where I don't see a clear right answer. I favor whichever keeps internet cheap and fast. I also believe some of these issues could be addressed if we actually enforced anti-trust laws.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Domains need to be legislated to either declare themselves as public spaces or private spaces.

A declared public space means that the operator cannot restrict third party content but also cannot be held liable for that content.

Conversely a declared private space means that the operator CAN restrict third party content but can also be held liable for that content (slander etc).

Technically if some asshole says white people are evil in a Youtube video I can sue Google (if I could find a court that would hear the case). People have successfully sued Google for simply returning search results that contained slanderous information about them, even though Google was only dredging basic news article descriptions into their search result.

Roosh for example could run a search of his name and if Google returned something, even on the tenth page, that claimed Roosh was a rape advocate then he could sue Google for slander, even though the reference was simply pasted from a left wing blog run by an anonymous cat lady. The premise being that anyone who googled his name would be confronted by this slanderous information. Whether google intended it or not has been proven in several cases to be irrelevant.

It would be relatively easy to engineer such results and if a common precedent was reached in the courts then the search engine giants would be absolutely begging to have first amendment protections put in place. The key would be holding your elected representatives to making sure that freedom of expression trickled down to the end user.

[The Beast1]

(08-20-2017 07:25 AM)Suits Wrote:  

There isn't net neutrality in China and it really sucks. Without a VPN connecting you directly through to a foreign server, it can be difficult to impossible to access website hosted outside of China.

I've had trouble accessing and have sometimes been unable to access RVF on certain Chinese ISP because of this.

I use a VPN service about 97% of the time when I'm surfing in China, because due to throttling, the Internet really, really sucks here, unless you are using Baidu, which I'm sure pays out the ass for the privilege of being at the top of the list.

That's not net neutrality, that's out right censorship.

China's got a massive internal internet and firewall set up to block western access to the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project

[Repo]

My conspiracy theory is that all of these tech giants like facebook and google secretly are pushing for the removal of net neutrality while virtue signaling publicly, supporting it.

A couple points to consider:

1). They would actually stand to benefit as the removal of net neutrality would raise the barrier of entry for new competitors

2). There is no way that with all the lobying power the companies that claim to support neutrality have, that the battle should even be close. Its essentially all giant tech companies against a few ISPs.

[Higgs Bosun]

We've not heard of ISPs shutting people down over hate speech because net neutrality laws prevent them from doing so*. Removing net neutrality will simply add another tool to the enemy's arsenal in its battle to silence the right.

*It's also much harder to figure out which ISP any given "crime-thinker" is using and pressure it, compared to finding out the web host or domain registrar.

[Suits]

(08-20-2017 10:22 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

(08-20-2017 07:25 AM)Suits Wrote:  

There isn't net neutrality in China and it really sucks. Without a VPN connecting you directly through to a foreign server, it can be difficult to impossible to access website hosted outside of China.

I've had trouble accessing and have sometimes been unable to access RVF on certain Chinese ISP because of this.

I use a VPN service about 97% of the time when I'm surfing in China, because due to throttling, the Internet really, really sucks here, unless you are using Baidu, which I'm sure pays out the ass for the privilege of being at the top of the list.

That's not net neutrality, that's out right censorship.

China's got a massive internal internet and firewall set up to block western access to the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project

Incorrect. While China does outright block certain websites, others work intermittently depending on the time of day and the ISP being used. Inability to access those websites have nothing to do Internet censorship.

Two different problems, both incredibly annoying.

[ivansirko]

One group sends bits and bytes from one end of the internet to the other. Another group gathers those bits and bytes for the purpose of selling advertising and data mining our lives. To me they are unrelated. Both ISP's and Silicon Valley are of the same asshole coin....like comparing National Socialists and Communists (State Socialists).

Here is why:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-21...-his-story

Quote:

One Statistics Professor Was Just Banned By Google: Here Is His Story

Statistics professor Salil Mehta, adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science and whose work has appeared on this website on numerous prior occasions, was banned by Google on Friday.

What did Salil do to provoke Google? It is not entirely clear, however what is clear is that his repeated attempts at restoring his email, blog and other Google-linked accounts have so far been rejected with a blanket and uniform statement from the search giant.

Here is what happened, in Salil Mehta's own words.

Don’t do a googol of evil

Freedom is not free unless corporations who exert a large influence in our lives believe in our well-being. I am a statistics professor and understand that there needs to be reasonable standards to control a large social network and make sure everyone is able to enjoy it freely. Invariably people disagree (we all see this), but some principles, such as simply showing probability and statistics with the sole hope of educating others, should be acceptable and in the middle of the distribution. I am for a higher standard, and a higher purpose. There is great care that I have taken to make sure that people treat one other well, admit faults, and present math and probability education to a wide audience.

On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning. A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident. Here are some examples commented from best-selling author Nassim Taleb, and they have been retweeted by government officials, and the NYT and WSJ journalists.

My ads-free blog itself is a probability theory site, with 27 million reads and has somewhere near 150k overall followers. It’s been read by Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nobel Laureates, multiple governments, celebrity athletes around the world, deans of many universities (on the syllabi of same), and a number of TV news anchors. So it’s been a great boon for Google to be noticed so kindly by essentially a charitable site promoting math education. What great people from all corners of the world and at all levels who can enjoy Google, until it suddenly died Friday afternoon.

My background is clean, and without a political or social agenda. I am not promoting any specific viewpoint. I teach probability math and that’s it. Have worked with both the Obama administration and advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign, am an adjunct professor at three top universities, an editor of the peer-reviewed journal of the American Statistical Association, and wrote a best-selling statistics book (all the proceeds of which I gave to charity!) https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Topics...1499273533

The NYT has a popular print article this weekend and they cited my Google blog, but alas it not links to an embarrassing malfunction, for many to see: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/busin...-last.html

This doesn’t look good. Now instead of mathematics, reporters have turned to this latest circus nightmare from Google as an example of how they are compounding bad decisions on good people anywhere and at any time.

Can they not differentiate me from an evil person? Can they not see the large and reputable people and institutions that have relied on my work? Do they have better people who can coach them on how to make decisions with much better taste and finesse? What’s next, all CEOs and professors and politicians are going to be shut down from social media whenever it is least expected? Overnight hi-tech lynching squads are a thing of the past. We can’t have kangaroo courts and hope to lead with moral authority.

There is a lot of energy being spent right now thinking about how this happens to your best customers, just like that. Fear is running wild about who is next and on what other social media platforms. Have used Google for 11 years with no issue. Have driven enormous free traffic to your products and properties. But now that’s been severely damaged as the trust/reputational value has been crushed, and I have to re-emerge quickly elsewhere and deal with this fall-out. I have many students, family, coworkers, etc who typically send me e-mails each day and all of it is vanishing with a kicked-back “user doesn’t exist” error. And that’s totally unacceptable. Through my many companies have business accounts on different social media and have no issue getting a marketing line, but one needs to know who they are dealing with and not treat them this badly. The wrongs here are not being done by me.

Again, a math site. An academic site that you can see from the various header tabs of the archives (http://web.archive.org/web/2017051818165...ite.html). These are applications of formulas and shouldn’t be subject of limitations of free speech. A lot of great people like it. Hopefully Google needs to take huge step back and reexamine what went wrong and how the product could be better for others going forward, so that they and all of us grow well. People’s faith in democracy is on the line. Faith that technology companies are looking out for our good first.

I have followed their common “appeal” form but no response for three days. Also connected with one of the VPs over the weekend and it still takes time until receiving this today! Just more of a reflection of how cold a company can treat someone very poorly: without any information, and lack of ability to move forward in their life (can I get real reasons if any, can I get advance notice, can I get my contact list back from gmail, and why are university properties unrelated to my blog shut down?)

We are going to be looking back on this time in Google’s history and those of other social media and know that they have done some very immoral and confusing things, and it has hurt their public reputation with decent people who wanted to grow into the next future with them

Was he practicing math without a license? Maybe math is racist? Would net neutrality help this guy?

Do we really believe opposing one or the other would prevent this guy from having Damnatio Memoriae practiced against him?