Although I love and appreciate my friends who fight in the political sphere...
Part of me thinks a) we can't win and b) the censorship, the filtering, the copyright, the moral panics - all will ultimately work to our favour.
By "our", I mean us folks who care about decentralization, free software and less corporate ways to exist online.
The more constraints the law puts on Internet businesses, the more compelling the law-ignoring DIY alternatives become.
Bad laws are for breaking. ✊
One caveat: We have to protect cryptography.
Crypto must be protected at all costs, it will allow us to work around most everything else. If crypto is outlawed (as in, users or developers face jail-time), we're completely and utterly screwed.
@HerraBRE I absolutely agree about protecting crypto, but I don't agree about not fighting the political fight. We should build tech that's as immune to bad laws as possible under the veil of crypto, but that's only so possible. These aren't mutually exclusive... fighting bad laws / fighting for good ones should happen in tandem with building good tech.
@HerraBRE I agree with that!
BTW my next post that appeared to be a subtoot of this was well, partly in response to it, but also equally to about 20 different threads I've seen over the last month :)
Yes I certainly agree. Diversified tactics.
There is promise and peril in the current moment.
Worst case, something like Article13 causes ISPs to block all ports, making self-hosting much harder.
On the upside the current dynamics of the technology industry are playing in our favor. Federated systems is shaping up to be the best way to manage online communities, and it looks like the automated methods of Twitter and Facebook will either fail flatly or just produce a highly sterile/boring user experience devoid of anything which might be considered controversial.
@cwebber I would never actually go so far as to discourage people from fighting these legal battles. What if I'm wrong?
I'm just pointing out a silver lining that has a strategic element to it.
If we want to effectively fight the big companies, we need to understand their weaknesses and where we are stronger.