[cletus]

I personally find "the open web is dying" to be a tired cliche at this point ("X is dying" in general is a trope). In the author's defense he even calls the term "overused" but I find these definitions of what the open web actually is to be unsatisfactory at best.

Regarding censorship, there will always be corner cases where reasonable people can disagree or even where most people can agree a decision is wrong. But what's the alternative? It's certainly not a free-for-all as that quickly devolves into a cesspit of pirated content, porn and illegal content.

The value in a property like Youtube is that it is somewhat curated and not the Wild West. That's why users go there and there's no right for anyone to be hosted on and distributed by Youtube. Nor should there be. People may want a distributed or even federated alternative to Youtube and I know you should say it's never going to happen but... it's never going to happen. It's a naive pipe dream.

Now the biggest problem I have with this:

> ... think we can all agree that this level of invasion of privacy should never be tolerated.

Nope. No sale. If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2 era is the rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to the point that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-sighted way is like a badge of honour. Maybe it's part of the rise of anti-intellectualism? I don't know.

I'll say it: there exist situations where the public interest overrides personal interests. Shocking I know. In Australia we now have a government-issued app for contact tracing (edsentially). It's entirely opt-in and has had a ton of downloads (>1M IIRC).

Not every surface is a slippery slope.

Effective contact tracing is.a necessary precondition to easing pandemic-related restrictions and even with that we'll still be stuck with social distancing for awhile.

I actually think using that device almost all of us carry everywhere (ie a smartphone) with a Bluetooth receiver to achieve better contact-tracing is a genius idea.

And I really don't see what any of it has to do with the "open web".

[DeathArrow]

>But what's the alternative? It's certainly not a free-for-all as that quickly devolves into a cesspit of pirated content, porn and illegal content.

It's not for monopolistic corporations to take actions about illegal activities but for law enforcement agencies.

Banning some video on YouTube because you disagree with it is just not right.

If they continue on that line, they will lose customers.

> If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2 era is the rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to the point that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-sighted way is like a badge of honour.

What individualism has to do with protecting people's freedom and refusing mass surveillance and censorship?

[0-O-0]

> That's why users go there

Users go there because it's free, easy to use and has wide variety of content. Users don't go there because some content is or might become randomly unavailable.

[masswerk]

Regarding slippery slopes, the problem here is the personal unity of enforcing gatekeepers and the providers of communication technology, who become by this effectively sovereign entities. This is much like what had happened in Europe in the 19th century with state control(1) and which eventually resulted in the civil/liberal revolution.

Arguably, measures of a state of emergency are best left to the sovereign state, which is kept in bounds by the constitution and an elaborate system of checks, which arose because of these exact problems.

Edit: (1) Meaning, nationalized, now state controlled postal services in combination with sovereign censorship were, apart from taxation, how most citizens were confronted by the state on a practical level, often so for the first time. Most of our ideas of civil rights resulted from this confrontation.