| I appreciate your engaging, and doing so respectfully and open mindedly. I never took the impression you were unreasonable or that our dialogue would be unproductive. I do think you're mistaking a mistake that I see many free speech advocates make, which is to confuse criticism with compelled speech or compelled silence. A critical benefit of free speech is to make an argument that something is bad, including even that something shouldn't be said or done. But when people use their voice to do that, sometimes free speech advocates get confused and think this is limiting someone's rights. But it's actually the very discourse and truth seeking process that speech is meant to enable at work. I'm not asking for compelled speech or silence, I'm making the case and hoping people will do so voluntarily. And if they don't, then I'll simply repeat my objection, incorporating new evidence and better arguments. Reading between the lines, I think perhaps you're worried that governments may use this metadata to limit the distribution of media? And that's a reasonable concern, but I'd describe that as two separate problems; the need for metadata, and the tendency of overzealous regulators to react to something once it's been made legible to them, despite it not previously being an issue. (Just a note, I apologize for the phrasing "I'm puzzled by your objection", I edited it to make it clearer that it was my not understanding and not something wrong with how you expressed yourself. That your quote uses the older version shows you spent quite some time considering this. I appreciate it.) |