They're describing a border. When I was a teen in the late 90s, the internet without borders was cool (until I wandered into trolls I didn't have the resilience to deal with), but very obviously not compatible with national sovereignty on what counted as "illegal".
Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.
You think that argument stops at Facebook? Why won't it apply to the VPNs people use to get around the geofencing on Facebook, to all the other social media platforms, to all messaging services, and so on? Now you've blocked huge swaths of services and fragmented all the platforms.
I think, if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was remade today, the quote would be:
"…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think social media is a pretty neat idea."
Honestly, maybe it’s time to consider that. Saying “oh well, let’s give up on laws because the internet is worldwide and unlimited” doesn’t feel like a good choice to me.
We have very strong checks on people using roads to cross borders.
I suspect that the same will eventually apply to IP traffic crossing borders. Big companies like google, netflix, meta etc will be approved by default, but anything else will be blocked.
We know how to pretty effectively police roads, but a surprising number of people here seem to think that any amount of internet regulation is impossible. If it's so harmful _and also_ difficult to police, then it's not unreasonable to ask how much death and destruction is too much, is it?
Unless, of course, "it's so hard to regulate" is just a thought-terminating cliché because the SV set also benefits from lax internet laws. But I'm sure it can't be that, no...
I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable. Why can’t we (morally) cut them off also from infecting our Internet? Fuck them. Fix your country then come back and we will reevaluate.
> I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable.
It's actually not completely fine. Sanctions are effectively an act of war, just instead of shooting people and risking your own troops, you have your enemy's civilian population starve and shoot each other. This can be justified in some situations, possibly like the one you refer to; but it's definitely not an action to take lightly.
Ironically, in the originally proposed case of blocking Facebook, this is a bit of a "cut off your nose to spite your face" situation. How many small and medium businesses rely on Facebook as their main, or only, customer acquisition, communication and/or sales channel? For many countries, banning Facebook out of the blue would cause some serious economic issues and lead to plenty of actual suffering of innocent people.
(And yes, businesses will adapt, but let's not forget that adaptation in nature only ever means that the survivors of a mass die-off have more resources to use to bounce back. And it's the "die-off" part that's actually the necessary part.)
Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.