If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world.
Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.
Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc...
As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.
Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.
> considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on"
That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.
> Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some
This is going back to slippery slope argument issue.
What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies?
Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?
Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivations. Yes, each side works on the basis of self-interest, but what is to say that giving one inch necessarily entials giving up entirely, unless the original premise is that one cannot give up anything (i.e., uncompromising by definition). That doesn't seem to scale in any real-world system, only ideal systems.
> Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?
Because every single time this is what happens. Your argument basically comes down to creating some speedbumps to slow down how long it will take, not whether it will or not create the same predictable outcome.
I'd rather not live in a place like the UK where SWAT teams do over-night raids of peoples houses because they tweeted something mean. The sort of situation I'm sure people said would never happen when the ball got rolling decades ago.
That's the government, not the ISP taking a look at the "traffic" though. If some random british ISP decided to censor twitter, who'd care to stay?
As long as there's a split between powers and a choice, there's just as little need to restrict that as there is to restrict how for example spam filtering works.
> ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.
Up until the point you become disruptive to the service, other customers or third parties for ex. DDoS attacks.
Absolute statements like these are silly. Making comparisons with houses is quite silly if you can figuratively "take your house somewhere else", people don't have to just turn the other cheek.
Though it would indeed be better if law(makers) would target malicious activity, but providing a billboard for it should not be mandatory.
The US supreme court has narrowed down the few necessary exceptions to freedom of speech over 230 years. It's not perfect, but it's better then having ISPs make these decisions.
I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but you're missing the point: we need guiding principles to help us work through tough cases so that we can best avoid setting bad precedent. The EFF made a good move today.
If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world.
Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.
Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc...
As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.
Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.