Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/internet-not-facebook-why-infrastructure-providers-should-stay-out-content

by philippejara • 4 years ago

43 16 4 years ago

hresvelgr• 4 years ago

I agree with the general framework of the argument but as always there's more to it.

If a group of criminals are conducting their business out of a motel room, is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them? Most would say the police, right?

The thing with KiwiFarms and a lot of these other sites is that law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them because there are thousands of them and when one goes, another appears. So in the face of ineffective policing, the people pressure and protest the next entity who could actually affect change, Cloudflare.

The reality is that these sites cannot be effectively and efficiently policed and until someone finds a way to do that in the most minimally harmful way possible, we're still going to see mobs protesting take-downs and companies capitulating to the demands.

DoItToMe81• 4 years ago

Law enforcement is not effective at dealing with them, because the ones in the spotlight haven't actually broken the law, and the "harassment campaign" is extremely exaggerated.

It isn't illegal to store publicly available info on somebody. It is illegal to use it to harass people, but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it, and so far most if not all of it has cropped up on other sites.

claudiawerner4• 4 years ago

but the site in question permanently bans people if evidence comes forward of it

This doesn't fill me with hope; I'm not sure why I should trust the website's claim[0] that they enforce these rules with a one strike policy over the people who say that KF users have harassed them after organizing on KF. The law may not have been broken, but I wouldn't want to live in a society where the bare minimum of "this is legal right now" confers a supposed moral imperative to carry those bytes if I'm someone like Cloudflare.

[0] A website which, uncontroversially, is more than happy to host (and encourage) users who are known to laugh at people for who they are and revel in scooped information, a fact which decreases the trustworthiness of the operators in my eyes.

humblefarmer2• 4 years ago

The reason "law enforcement is not effective at dealing with [kiwifarms]" is quite simply because kiwifarms is not doing anything illegal.

tarakat• 4 years ago

is it the motel's responsibility or the police's to deal with them

Moving past how KiwiFarms hadn't actually broken any laws, let's say for the sake of argument that they had. And that this motel chain owned 40% of rentable rooms across the globe, and a handful of their friends owned the remaining 59%, with 1% belonging to small independent moteliers.

If you leave enforcement to them, then you've effectively privatized policing. Do you want a private police force? Wouldn't that represent a union of state and corporate power, i.e. fascism?

milderworkacc• 4 years ago

This from the EFF seems to create a bit of a circuit split with Electronic Frontiers Australia [0] - though I hasten to add the two are not affiliated.

My only comment is that this stuff is hard. Really hard. Consider that a two line HN comment may not be able to fit all of the relevant considerations and case-law in.

I recognise the irony.

[0] https://www.efa.org.au/2022/09/05/efa-statement-regarding-cl...

humblefarmer2• 4 years ago

It really looks like the only motivation for Cloudflare stopping service to a client is whether it personally angers the CEO.

I think we've had three letters already where he's basically saying "gee I really hate doing that, but I'm doing it anyway".

amadeuspagel4• 4 years ago

It is something that anyone with technical expertise (no platform is guaranteed a right to good programmers) can accomplish.

If a DDoS attack overwhelms the network connection, there's no technical expertise that can protect against that.

In the case of KiwiFarms, they’ve transitioned to using a modified fork of a free and open source load balancer to protect against DDoS and other bot-driven attacks.

That only shows that no one attacking them has enough resources to overwhelm their network connection.

z9znz• 4 years ago

The reality is that not all people should be able to vote, and not all people should be able to speak publicly.

Of course the challenge is in deciding who is worthy of each.

The new problem because of the internet is that critical masses of people who arguably should not be able to speak publicly are now able to. Worse, they can do it anonymously.

Threats, slander, and harassment are often illegal and always undesirable. Platform providers enable these things. So ultimately if people want freedom to speak publicly, then they must be personally identifiable (so they can be held accountable for illegal forms of speech)… or the platform providers must attempt to police the content. It has to be one or the other.

Why Infrastructure Providers Should Stay Out of Content Policing (EFF)

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