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by tlogan 1786 days ago
I do not think that it is up to Google or CloudFlare to police the internet. If a site is doing something illegal then report it to appropriate gov agency. If gov agency does not anything then get involved into political process to fix that.
4 comments
hackbinary 1785 days ago
If Google, or CF, or whoever are fronting illegal activity with their services, they are absolutely responsible for damages the party they are proxying.

Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.

One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.

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fstrthnscnd 1785 days ago
> Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.

> One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.

The highway is used both by those visiting their friends and those doing mass deliveries. Is it the job of the highway maintenance crew to control for what purpose their network is used?

I would like to know if the above analogy stands.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994831

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zizee 1785 days ago
The "owner" of the highway is the government, who regulates commercial traffic differently to personal traffic. The government places strict rules on who is allowed to use the highway, and how it is used.

The highway maintenance crew is akin to the person installing racks for CloudFlare.

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hackbinary 1777 days ago
Highway are a poor analogy for information broadcast systems in general. Highways are closer to a one to one transmission system rathe than a broadcast system of one to many.
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franga2000 1784 days ago
They're already removing things they don't like. I see no reason why they shouldn't remove things that are objectively 100% harmful.

Like seriously, is there a single person on the planet that's going to defend online scams? It's immoral, it's illegal, it benefits no one and harms thousands. And it's not like it's very hard to detect and block either.

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xorcist 1785 days ago
If someone were to tell AT&T that this call center customer of theirs is in the business of extorting people for money, they'd at least look at it and help law enforcement accordingly. Cloudflare has a talk-to-the-hand attitude until actively forced by law enforcement. That's an important difference right there.
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pdimitar 1786 days ago
Gov agencies and political processes take ages to do anything at all.

At this point I'd still like the internet companies doing partial policing of content. At least they'll achieve something.

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