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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I am convinced NET Neutrality was a push by FAANG companies because they were attempting to monopolize the internet through preventing any company besides themselves to sensor content, the ISPs were the top concern because they controlled the end user experience. Ajit Pai should be recognized by congress as being smart enough to see through corporate greed and went along with his notion to repeal Net Neutrality, especially since the FCC was hardly the correct agency to control the internet anyways.

ISPs aren't very eager to censor right now. The front-end platforms are censoring like crazy, the second-tier platforms - like Cloudflare, DNS providers, cloud providers, etc. - are censoring reluctantly and only when the Lefist activists are particularly inflamed (I don't think anything on the Left has ever been censored by second-tier) and low-level ISPs as far as I know don't do political censorship at all, so far. Of course, this could change very quickly - but as of now, I don't see ISP censorship being something that's on the agenda.

I know of at least one case of ISP censorship. Verizon doesn't allow its users to access the Deepfake porn site http://mrdeepfakes.com because it offends feminists. Try it.

I'm not sure how that would follow. FAANG breaks the power of ISPs, shifting locus of control towards them? But I fail to see how Net Neutrality gets you to censorship--Net Neutrality, as popularly described, doesn't have any implication for censorship other than impedance of traffic/content. And the ISPs still own the actual physical infrastructure at the end of the day.

The whole censorship angle was always more about silicon valley progressives' need to paint Trump as a fascist and Pai as a race-traitor than it was any reasonable reading of the policy.

I really don't think it was about any of that at all. Nobody was calling Pai an Uncle Tom and Trump himself didn't represent anything in the fight.

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