Re: Internet censorship, including extorted by government, must cease.

24 Oct 2020


      On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 08:42:38PM +0000, jim bell wrote:
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On Thursday, October 22, 2020, 11:19:55 PM PDT, Zenaan Harkness  wrote:
 On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 06:01:46AM +0000, jim bell wrote:
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This article  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqniEaXwQg&feature=youtu.be    has the headline: "Congressional Democrats Threaten Big Tech To Censor Americans Or Else"
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If this kind of government-threat can exist, then one solution is to declare that communications over the Internet within wires (and fibers) located within the United States are governed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Private companies are availing themselves of a system initiated by a relatively small amount of government research, and developed by other designers and manufacturers.
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Unfortunately as Juan correctly points out so often, gov is usually in partnership with BigCorp.
True.  Which is why I think we need to disable BOTH the Government(s) AND
those companies making up "The Internet" from colluding with each other to
enable censorship, as much as we now know they'd want to do!  People could
talk in the "Town Square", and now that has migrated to virtual space.  I
think it's important to maintain that status.  
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'Fortunately' for us, those Senate Democrats have made the serious mistake of
trying to threaten online services to get them to engage in such
censorship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqniEaXwQg&feature=youtu.be  
 That, and the First Amendment prohibition on "Congress shall make no law..."
clearly shows that the public must be protected from the consequences of
extortion committed by government people inducing private organizations to,
themselves, 'take sides', and extort the public.
Another consideration is that the ISPs were granted exemption from prosecution for publishing, because they were "mere carriers", and thus had no authority over the information carried.  BigTech claims that same exemption.