[iamnothere]

Make gambling legal and regulated? Or tell citizens they are on their own and may be violating the law if they gamble, then look the other way and occasionally promote stories about citizens losing their money to illegal gambling.

US citizens living in states without legal gambling can often drive across state lines or to the nearest Native American reservation to gamble. There’s no way of preventing this nor does there need to be.

[intended]

Why make gambling legal just to satisfy people who are circumventing the laws? That too by basing themselves outside of the country, as opposed to state lines.

Indian society is unconcerned, if not outright supportive of this law.

Your counterpoint zeroes in on the specific example, but in addressing it avoids the spirit of the issue.

People want certain laws and restrictions. You are arguing that if people choose to circumvent those laws, tough beans.

Heck, you could just have nations destabilize neighbors by this lassiez faire approach.

[iamnothere]

Because what you’re asking for is untenable in a world of billions of people scattered across countless nations, at least without cutting off the internet outside your borders entirely like North Korea. And trying to force the issue domestically just results in oppression and restriction of human rights. The global digital world is a formless, borderless space; this “freedom VPN” thing, Tor, I2P, v2ray, satellite internet, etc, you will simply never be able to fill all the gaps. Those who want to will get around it.

Even China, who has probably the most sophisticated information controls in the world, can’t prevent leaks through the Great Firewall. They just rely on it being “good enough” to restrain the general public.

Put another way, your country can make all the laws it wants, but it can’t change the laws of another country or force them to change how their network behaves, at least not without a fight. And in a world of billions of people, the global network will always be doing something that you don’t approve of, somewhere!

[intended]

In which case the country with the least laws decides how everyone else functions.

Remember we started are working from here

> If you want to make gambling illegal, then make gambling illegal and then enforce that law. You don't need to resort to indirect measures that go beyond the law (e.g. by preventing me from merely viewing the odds on a gambling website).

From your argument the only option is to not make anything illegal that is legal in the nation of minimum laws.

Are you arguing that nations - voters - should have no say in what laws they want to live under ?

Do note that I am all for less government control. But our current regulatory and rights landscape is not resolving the questions our voters and infrastructure is throwing up.

Eventually, everything runs on some infrastructure. Control will be forced.

If we want to prevent it, we need to have answers to the issues being thrown up by users.

[iamnothere]

There is no answer except to sever yourself from the network. If you could somehow undo all of computing history and rebuild the internet on different principles, using completely locked down and centralized machines, then you could accomplish what you want to. But the tools to escape control are out there and are widely available. The skills to open new avenues outside of control are distributed among millions. The structure of the current network is woven into everything from banking to dishwashers.

You can make certain digital behavior illegal for your citizens, but enforcement is always going to be difficult. If you invasively spy on them to try and force them into your model digital behavior, it will cause unrest. If you try to block specific sites at the border, you will take down unrelated sites and breed contempt for the law. By pushing people farther and farther underground, you eventually connect them with organized crime and foreign governments.

In the long run, your insistence that the network be controlled is going to lead to either civil breakdown or totalitarianism. Perhaps that’s the inevitable consequence of connecting humanity as we’ve done. But I suspect that countries who are more digitally permissive will not face the same dilemma.

(Note that people usually accept laws where a victim can be identified. A digital crime with a real victim is still a crime, and standard policing methods can often track down the perpetrator. No need to break the internet for these cases.)