[hkai]

If Americans can ban their own opposition from their internet (Parler, Gab, and countless people blocked on mainstream platforms), then it's very hard to argue that the authoritarian Russian government shouldn't ban their opposition from the internet.

Perhaps some on-chain solutions will help circumvent the American and Russian restrictions in a few years. Solana sounds like a good candidate for this sort of platform.

[lotusmars]

Why do you always bring up America when we're talking about injustices in other countries?

As a Russian, it pisses me off. It's like saying "black people shouldn't moan, because white people suffer too".

[nightwing]

In this particular case it is very relevant, because Navalny himself was warning [1] that it is a dangerous precedent which is going to help the enemies of freedom everywhere. And he was absolutely right.

[1] https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347960298569928704

[peoplefromibiza]

I see it a bit differently

In my opinion there's a point: if the dominant ethnicity is being enslaved, imagine what could happen to powerless minorities.

In other words, if countries that call themselves free are becoming less free day after day, it becomes obvious to imagine that not-as-free countries will follow the same route, maybe even faster.

they simply started from a different position in the global-freedom scale.

EDIT: apparently from the downvotes someone believes that Russia is a special place were all the bad things happen, while in the west when the US government spies their allies it's progress. If an American company, Apple for example, obey to the free government of the US of A when they ask for more control over the content on their platform, what make you think that they will fight against other more repressive governments? (they have in fact put this specific app down on their store, as per Putin's request) information warfare and content control are the weapons of the future, it is quite naive to think that there will be good governments that won't use it and bad governments that will abuse it. Everyone will use it to their own advantage. what's happening today is just the tip of the iceberg, wait for the day when the internet won't be globalized anymore as it is today and we'll have hundreds of local internets hardly connected to each other, allowing only some highly monitored link to "friendly" nets.

[lenkite]

Navalny correctly predicted that the Trump ban gave authoritarian governments fair precedent. Hey, the US can ban the previous President. They paved the road.

[ookdatnog]

Parler isn't banned from the internet, it's banned from AWS and mobile app stores. These bans weren't ordered by the government either.

[belorn]

To me the negative aspects of censorship is not exclusive to governments. It is any censorship when it comes from the powerful controlling the powerless in order to maintain that power relationship. Government vs citizen is one form of power relation, but so is dominating market holder vs user. A third is infrastructure vs user.

Apple has decided to hold the power of being the gatekeeper of mobile apps. Every time they utilize that power they demonstrate the power relation that they hold over their captured audience. I could be cheering when I agree with their choice and get upset every time they do something which I disagree with, but in terms of power it the exact same thing. I rather choose to oppose the power itself.

[salawat]

You don't see a problem with infrastructure providers cultivating vendor lock-in in order to wield the ace-in-the-hole of deplatcorming when the time is right a problem?

Given, it was Gab and Parker's problem for not going multi-cloud; but there is something specifically untenable to me about this whole "my entire infrastructure is now dead to you in 48 hours" sort of thing that Gab and Parler went through. Yes, it's a matter of contract law because they accepted the ToS as is, but I don't see anywhere that actually services alternative terms pipelines either.

[paganel]

It was similar to self-censure from Amazon, that is if they wanted to still gain lucrative contracts with the military-industrial complex opposed by the candidate that they banned.

To say nothing of the personal vendetta between the owner of Amazon and said candidate, the owner being the wealthyest man on Earth and directly controlling a big mouth-piece of the media (WashPo). The US is by definition an oligarchic state (the previous president was an oligarch, the current one was put in place by the oligarch enemies of the one before him).

[cma]

That effectively means they are banned from having notifications on iOS.

[killingtime74]

lol bit rich calling Parler and Gab banned. They can easily buy their own servers and host it themselves. Or are you suggesting the government force AWS/Godaddy/Microsoft to host them?

[anrtx]

If everyone cuts them off, yes! Free speech laws originally meant that you could stand on a street corner and rant freely (but no one was forced to listen).

It did NOT mean that for a particular person all street corners were suddenly unavailable. We have many de facto monopolies here: Google prioritizes medium.com nonsense over private sites, app stores are monopolies etc.

So while physical hosting and DNS providers should be available by law anyway, I think due to content discoverability and monopolistic issues the same applies to certain virtual market places.

[nabla9]

Difference is that in the US it was not a government. Private enterprise reacted to public pressure. People made them do it.

In Russia it is the government.

[vadfa]

People? What people? Was there a vote held?