Shouldn't countries have the right to control activities inside their borders? The order was approved by the courts, so insofar as due process and checks and balances go, this seems fine. This is no different than any other sort of injunction or court order. What should be the alternative? That the internet should be some sort of lawless wild west? Opposing this on the basis of "they'll extend it to political opposition ..." makes as much sense as opposing the arrest of criminals because "they'll extend it to political opposition ...".
Trying to graft the Internet onto physical country borders has been fraught from the very beginning, but they keep trying. When a user in country A, connected to a satellite Internet provider headquartered in country B, through a VPN whose offices are in country C and their VPN server is in country D, looks up an IP address with a DNS server in country E, to a web site whose headquarters is in country F, and request a file hosted on servers distributed across countries G, H, I, J, and K, whose laws should apply?
In the country where the physical person making the request is located would be a logical solution. Not saying it would be a good solution, but that would follow the logic of most international fiscal law. Super hard to implement though.
How is that supposed to work? If I open port 80 on my desktop I'm suddenly liable in every foreign jurisdiction that has user able to reach me on port 80?
"It has an answer" is not how you decide a policy question. It's rather important that the answer be reasonable rather than capricious, burdensome and ineffective.
All the laws that we broke out of were established and had an answer to questions of life: land ownership, slavery, social structure, rights of various groups of people, etc.
The laws that apply on the internet are very desperate attempts by people with no technical knowledge to control something that can't be controlled. They work only because ways to circumvent them are not yet easy to use by the masses.
> Trying to graft the Internet onto physical country borders has been fraught from the very beginning
I’d argue Silicon Valley pretending there is a natural arc of digital history towards freedom and enlightenment if we just leave everything alone is distinctly reminiscent of 90s free-trade optimism. And like that philosophy, this too one finds its tombstone in China.
> Shouldn't countries have the right to control activities inside their borders?
Using the word "activities" implies that something different than what's really happening.
Ask the question like this: Should countries have the right to control information inside their borders? The answer to that question is no.
> Opposing this on the basis of "they'll extend it to political opposition ..." makes as much sense as opposing the arrest of criminals because "they'll extend it to political opposition ...".
If you make it less expensive to do something, you make it more likely that it happens. Incarcerating murderers and rapists is very important and is an effective deterrent against serious violent crimes, so creating prisons that make it easier to incarcerate political prisoners is bad but the thing it's necessary in order to do is more important.
Blocking streaming sites isn't nearly as important and it's also less effective for its intended purpose than it is for the ulterior purpose, because users will go out of their way to bypass censorship of streaming sites whereas inconvenient political content is censored not just with respect to its content but also its existence, and then if you create a censorship apparatus it allows people to be kept in the dark as to what is even being censored. So in that case the badness of the censorship apparatus existing far exceeds its value in being able to inconvenience some minor offenders.
The state exists to enforce the interests of capital against the interests of the people. This is a clear instance of that happening.
Do you really believe that the interests of the people are inferior to the interests of capital? Do you actually believe that the interests of each group are aligned?
The alternative is the belief that humans have some fundamental rights that it's unjust for governments to violate (e.g. the right to private, encrypted communication), and designing systems to make it as hard as possible for governments to violate those rights.
>The alternative is the belief that humans have some fundamental rights that it's unjust for governments to violate (e.g. the right to private, encrypted communication)
In what country is there actually a "right to private, encrypted communication"? At best there's rights for "privacy", which is a pretty woolly concept, but generally don't cover copyright infringement. More to the point, unless you reject the concept of copyright entirely, you have to accept that free speech rights will have to be "violated" to enforce it.
"fundamental rights" implies an ideological belief that those rights should exist for all humans, regardless of whether any country recognizes them or not.
> In what country is there actually a "right to private, encrypted communication"?
I recognize that this is not a popular opinion, but IMHO IT SHOULD BE covered by the "secure in their papers" section in the 4th Amendment in the US, and/or with established precedent regulating encryption export as armaments, by the 2nd & the Heller decision granting the rights afforded by the 2nd to the individual
at least that's the correct interpretation of the founding document as far as I can tell. not that it matters anymore.
Because the internet is purely an information medium, so "borders" on the internet can be nothing other than censorship. Censorship is a human rights violation and is disproportionately useful to oppressive regimes.
Why should it not? What's the point of having an effectively open information network if you're going to just let each nation state arbitrarily censor/manipulate it as they see fit for their own peasants?
You'd agree with say, <insert country> mass blocking sites for their people just because the sites say something about democracy?
