FreeSpeech and Censorship: Standing at End of Internet Sidewalk, AltTech, KiwiFarms, ED
Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet by Joshua Moon Thursday, Oct 28, 2021 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/24/russias-interent-ready-isolation-o... https://edri.org/our-work/european-parliament-confirms-new-online-censorship... https://1.1.1.1/ https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/the-expanding-consolidation-of-the-consumer-i... https://www.semrush.com/blog/most-visited-websites/ https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow https://oxen.io/ https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2021/nr-occ-2021-8.html https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2021/nr-occ-2021-14.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4828/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7808/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4534/text The Internet is becoming smaller, fragmenting down national borders, and succumbing to regulations imposed by governments and various special interests. An internet is a network made of smaller networks. The Internet is the single international network you are using right now. The Internet is enormous. The Internet spans from research facilities in Antarctica up into outer space. The Internet is how I'm writing this in Europe for a website in the United States which is accessible almost everywhere in the world. The Internet is also very fragile. It has many moving parts and drives the politics of our world today. For this reason, it will die. Our big-I Internet is already being weakened and will soon become many little-i internets. Every large country or trade union will have its own local and strictly regulated internet. Connections between internets will occur on the vestigial remains of the big-I Internet, requiring a special business permits to access. China and the DPRK already work like this. If you want to communicate through the Great Firewall, you must have a registered business and specific need to do so. Russia has recently tested isolating itself from the Internet. The European Union continues to pursue aggressive censorship measures like TERREG, which would allow any member state of the EU to demand a web service hosted in any other EU member remove content within one hour, or be fined up to 4% of their global turnover in the last business year. The Internet cannot survive this sort of meddling for long. While more centralized governments have the authority to shape their internet as they see fit, our politicians in the west have cumbersome obstacles to overcome, such as constitutional protections and a judicial process. Until these can be discarded, the government can simply bypass the courts and have companies to do the job for them. Companies are not restricted by the constitution in the same way as government, so as megacorp and government interests continue to mesh into one giant malaise, one can act for the other without causing problems. Even if the US Government cannot legislate a vague concept like 'hate speech', nothing stops the large social media companies from doing it for them. "Build your own Internet" To demonstrate how delicate the Internet is, I will enumerate the moving parts required to get content to your screen. Keep in mind that if any of these parts break, you're off the Internet until you can replace it. A website can function only with the assent of, and collaboration with, dozens of other companies. Each of these can be a different company with a different ethos. First, you need a server. Most people trying to get a website up cannot afford one, so they rent a 'virtual private server' (VPS) from a company like DigitalOcean or Linode. These are big companies and will censor offensive content. If you're lucky, they won't just delete your VPS without warning. Second, you need an IP address and an 'autonomous system number' (ASN). These are allocated by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). ARIN is the RIR for the United States, and there are 5 in total for the entire world. If ARIN says you don't get any Internet resources, you have no appeals process because they are a private company, and you need their resources. When you rent a server from a company, these issues are handled for you. If you're not allowed to use a VPS, you have to do it all yourself. It's both very expensive and very technical. Third, you need an upstream Internet service provider (ISP) to connect you to the Internet. Your upstream is important, because you have to physically connect your server to their network. Your area has a limited number of available ISPs, and they are private companies which can terminate your service at any time for any reason or no reason. ColoCrossing in Buffalo physically unplugged my servers in 2019 for hosting the Kiwi Farms and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Fourth, you need peers. Peers are other ISPs that talk to your ISP. Peering is how the Internet actually works. When data traverses the Internet most of its route is done through third party networks, not your upstream directly. If your content is offensive enough that peers start refusing to deliver content to or from your IPs, you can essentially be cut out from the world wide web. NTT refuses to peer with any company that peers with my subnet, for instance. Fifth, you'll need a domain name. All the above simply routes traffic to an IP. While you can run a website with just an IP (see 1.1.1.1), most people would prefer to type in "zerohedge.com". This requires the blessing of two more companies: The registrar which leases the domain to the customer, and the Network Information Center (NIC) which owns the top-level domain. As an example: ZeroHedge uses EasyDNS as its registrar, and all .COM domains are controlled by Verisign. Getting permission from Verisign to sell .COM addresses costs $3,500 and an additional $4,000 a year. Without this permission, you must rely on a 3rd party registrar for your domain, and they may seize your domain for any reason or no reason at all. When DreamHost (a company I bought my first domain from when I was 16 in April 2009) tells me "you can't host kiwifarms.net with us anymore and we're closing your account with us in 14 days", it puts me in a difficult spot. If I just dump Kiwi Farms's domain on another company, then they may be less kind and simply seize the domain name. Nothing stops them from doing so. I've moved the Kiwi Farms domain to Cloudflare's domain registrar. This is a very risky decision, because in the past the mob would direct its noise at both Dreamhost and Cloudflare. Now, there's a more centralized point of failure. I am ordinarily afraid to even say the name Cloudflare, as if speaking it aloud could remind them I exist and compel them to step on me. Why is Cloudflare special? To recap: I own my own servers (roughly $20,000 in equipment). I also own my own IPs and ASN ($2,000/yr). I have my upstream ($500/mo). I could become my own .NET domain registrar ($3,500 + $4,000/yr). I have, to the best of my ability, within the limits of a 28-year-old's budget, "built my own Internet". Despite all that, the Internet has one more weak point: Denial of Service Attacks. These attacks use compromised computers to send massive amounts of junk data to a single point, blotting out legitimate traffic and potentially overwhelming target devices. DoS attacks are cheap. Botnet resellers are easy to find. They're easy to use. However, they are not cheap to mitigate. A 10Gbps attack costs less than $100 for a month, but a 10Gbps line costs $750/mo. 10Gbps-capable routers costs thousands. That is already excessive, but attacks frequently top 100Gbps or even 1000Gbps. Few companies can handle this job. Those companies come under intense political scrutiny. Cloudflare is the biggest, and I use them. Websites that many people would prefer to stop existing, such as mine, are kept protected by the whims of one man. I've never met him and I've never spoken to him. I am sure he knows I exist only because of the outrage directed at him that my website causes. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, is an outlier in the elite of Silicon Valley. He is the one person whose default position on censorship is "no". Cloudflare has removed two websites explicitly aligned with neo-Nazism, but ordinarily, they refuse to buckle to the mob. Why? I don't know. Maybe he's just libertarian. Maybe he wants the Internet to be free, like it used to be. Maybe he's a government informant (there's a popular conspiracy theory that Cloudflare is a large man-in-the-middle spyware operation). Even if he is, I don't care. My website is legal and there's nothing on it that's not public anyways. Prince is just one man, however, and I have no doubt that when he retires he will be replaced by less of a man. Some political activists who endeavor to censor the Internet are simply waiting for the day he's gone. There are other DDoS mitigation services, but they're much smaller, often not as capable, and not in as strong a position to say "no". When he is out of power, it will cause a vacuum that will negatively impact the health of the Internet, and he will not be readily replaced by anything. What few alternatives to Cloudflare exist are politically active. Voxility, Path, X4B, and others are competitors. Voxility is one of the worst in terms of being politically active. X4B is in Australia and beholden to strange, foreign laws about speech which are irreconcilable with the United States. Path peers with NTT and are unavailable to me because of NTT's embargo on my subnet. DDoS-Guard is a Russian alternative, but dealing with Mother Russia has its own issues. "Build your own Internet somewhere else?" The Internet is developing its own herd immunity to controversial material. Once a certain number of ISPs say they won't peer you, you're screwed. These companies are consolidating all the time, your list of options are smaller every year, and the group of people actually making decisions shrinks with it. No company has management with spine. People just want to make as much money as possible and with as little noise as possible. Few companies will take a financial hit on principle. The mob takes advantage of this to censor the Internet with great effect. This is a precursor of things to come. What if I moved everything out of the US to a 'free' country like Russia? Now I have Russian hardware, Russian IPs, a Russian upstream, Russian peers, Russian DDoS mitigation, and a nice .RU domain to top it off. What happens next? Assuming there were no issues with local laws and government (there would be) and assuming I would not be extorted by officials, it would only kick the can down down the road. Just as moving VPS companies kicked the can to the next VPS company. Just as getting my own IPs kicked the can to upstream. Just as getting a stable upstream kicked the can to DDoS mitigation. This would kick the can another few years down the road to the upcoming Internet schism, where my website will suddenly be on the Russian side of the new regional internets. I have spent thousands of dollars consulting with attorneys, solicitors, and advocates across the world regarding the legal protections of Internet services in their countries. Whatever is out there, it is not better than what is back at home. We must resolve to fixing the problems we have here in the United States instead of trying to offload the responsibilities of the Internet and our freedoms onto a random country. Russia will not go out of its way to protect American's free speech. "Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." — Dwight D. Eisenhower The Broader Impact In 2007, thousands of websites competed for traffic. By 2014, that number was 35 (source). In 2021, Google and YouTube (subsidiaries of Alphabet LLC) make up enough traffic by themselves to beat the next 30 top websites combined. ISPs are consolidating too, and telecom as an industry is harder to break into. You will need to lay cables to do business, and most areas have one-company rights for those cables. Meanwhile, Google and Amazon set up their own infrastructure and get what they need. Google's Cloud and Amazon's AWS are nation-state sized internets by themselves, controlling a massive amount of global traffic. We have a competition crisis. Think of all the startups hoping to compete with Google, YouTube, and Twitter that have come and gone in the last few years. Nobody can stand up to this tide, and the few willing to try are destroyed by the whims of these mega-corporations (enriched with government contracts) who have no interest in seeing ordinary people challenge their absolute, totalitarian control over all online media. For every Kiwi Farms, Gab, 8chan, and Bitchute which tried to deal with these problems head on, there are a hundred others who (wisely) realized at the first set of hurdles that this was a challenge out of the budget and reach of an ordinary person. Our Internet could be so vibrant and healthy if the artificial limitations imposed by third parties were removed. What can be done? The Legislative Fix Section 230 protects all of these service providers from civil liability for hosting my website. Few of them are willing to wield it like a shield to resist censorship, but rather as a sword to cut down with impunity. 230(c)(1) gives them immunity from civil action from what they do host, while 230(c)(2) gives immunity to civil actions from people they choose to censor. The legislative solution (altering Section 230 to discourage censorship) requires editing Paragraph (2) without killing Paragraph (1) in the process. This requires a surgical precision. While there are many proposals for changing Section 230, they are terrible. Republicans tend to clumsily address the issue while either not fixing the core problem or just creating new ones. Sen. Hagerty's bill, for instance, rewrites Section 230 as Section 232 and provides sweeping common carrier rules and consumer protections, while exempting broadband providers. Thereby, he encumbers providers while not addressing the core issues at all. Democrats tend to hijack the issue, making services liable only for 'extremist content' and 'hate speech'. See Sen. Mark Werner's "SAFE Tech" act. I am extremely hesitant to ever suggest modifying Section 230. However, simply striking or modifying a single paragraph - 230(c)(2) - would be enough to allow us to sue businesses interfering with our business. There are some proposals to try this: Sen. Kelly Loeffler's 9-month-old Stop Suppressing Speech Act of 2020 with zero cosponsors. This removes vague wording so that providers can't remove everything they want. House counterpart H.R.7808 has some traction. Sen. Wicker's Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act, which has a similar 230(c)(2) rewrite and more cosponsors. It also modifies a definition so that upstream providers are more liable for censorship and business interference. These bills are now mostly idle after Trump left office, but they're still there if you're eager to write your representatives. The Financial Fix The issue of financial censorship, which I wrote about in Section 230 Isn't The Problem, Payment Networks Are, is present here as well. In summary: MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and Amex controls almost all consumer spending in the United States, and they will frequently stop payments to specific websites, companies, and individuals with intention of destroying them financially for political purposes. A lot of small companies don't have to choice to say "no" to the mob, because payment networks will say "yes" for them. Regulating these payment networks, setting up an alternative (the Federal Reserve is trying to set up an instant bank-to-bank transfer service called FedNow), and mainstreaming alternative currency payments (cryptocurrency or even precious metals) are ways around this financial censorship. At the very end of the Trump administration, the Comptroller of Currency passed regulation titled Fair Access to Financial Services. The week Biden entered office, it was put on permanent hold. This would have been a huge step towards alt-tech gaining a foothold. The Onion Fix Some people suggest moving to a .ONION domain on the Tor Network, which requires a special browser to access. However, I believe that all US legal content should be accessible by a regular person with an ordinary web browser, and found without hassle on search engines. Allowing our speech to be covered up, hidden, and sidelined is a losing strategy. Tor is great for protecting people accessing websites. By hiding the route traffic takes, people in non-free countries can find censored materials safely through Tor. Websites can set up what's called a "hidden service". Having a hidden service bypasses requirements for domain name registration and hides the origin of traffic, making it effectively impossible for anyone to do anything about content hosted on Tor. There is some wisdom in this, but hiding minimizes the accessibility of those services and simply yields more ground to the mob. Mainstream browsers like Brave natively supporting access to the Tor network is helping on this issue. There are Tor-like services attempting to use cryptocurrency concepts to create a strong, private network which has all the benefits of Tor, plus built-in tools to circumvent financial censorship. I pay attention to OXEN in particular, but it is not yet a drop-in replacement for Tor or a ready solution for general purpose websites. The Real Fix The most powerful and readily accessible fix to censorship is also completely free and available to everyone. More than anything, what our free Internet requires to stay free is for free men to have the courage to stand up to the mob, and use their positions to be the change they want to see in the world. We need more than one Matthew Prince if we are going to keep our big-I Internet. All anyone ever needed to do is tell these people is "no", as in: No, I will not take down anything without a court order. It feels good to say it, trust me.
Using US Courts to Burn Money, for Free, Forever Saturday, Nov 06, 2021 by Joshua Moon https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 I have been sued by the same woman six times pro se in forma pauperis. Pro se in forma pauperis means “for yourself while poor”. It is a combination of two distinct legal terms: pro se, when representing yourself without a lawyer, and in forma pauperis, when you file and are unable to pay court fees. The United States strives for equitable justice; we permit people too poor to hire attorneys to represent their own legal interests, and we allow the poorest people to avoid paying court fees when they docket a case. Melinda Scott, the litigant, is a Virginian who converted to Judaism and has had several children with several different men. She calls herself a matriarch and the head of her household, but is financially supported by taxpayers. She has very little income outside of her welfare and her only ‘business’ is new age garbage catering to a sect of Judaism which she has invented herself as a self-purported “Torah scholar”. She is worth nothing. Her personal income is nonexistent. The social security money she collects for her children cannot be garnished. Her primary residence and vehicle cannot be collected to pay the financial damages she causes. Melinda represents herself, pays nothing to file, and spends her worthless time writing worthless legal arguments which must be taken as seriously by her targets as any other lawsuit. She has attempted to sue me or my LLC at least once a year every year for five years. For the first five times, she failed to state a claim and the judge threw out her cases sua sponte — without me needing to respond at all. The courts operate on an honor system. If the plaintiff files a complaint which cites a law, alleges facts by which they are owed relief under that law, and dockets it in the right court, that court will presume the claims are true. For example: “I was injured in this way, and I am owed damages under this statute, and this is the right jurisdiction for this claim”. Melinda has failed to meet this low, low bar of entry five times in a row. Lawsuit number 6 comes and the courts allow it through for the first time. Through trial and error, she succeeded in passing the sniff test. Then, she lied by claiming I was properly served at a virtual mailbox. I was never served. I didn’t reply to the lawsuit, because I had never been served, and she automatically receives a default judgement a few months later. She had finally won — at least temporarily. I later receive a letter at my virtual office notifying me that I’ve lost a lawsuit. So, I lawyer up. I’m fortunate to have an attorney, Matthew Hardin, who sympathizes with this sort of injustice. Pity only goes so far when it comes to legal expenses. Even being billed for fewer than half the hours spent working the case, it is still thousands of dollars. A typical retainer is $5,000 and that covers just overturning the default judgement. There’s still work to win the case. I run a website called the Kiwi Farms. It is a forum about eccentric people on the Internet. Users of the forum were discussing a man who had been stalking Melinda. He joined to defend himself, and in these discussions mentioned her by name. She finds out about this somehow and immediately threatened me with legal action unless I deleted every post made by this man. I told her I would not censor my website and that she should be using these posts to augment her legal arguments against him. In the process, I become the first person to ever tell Melinda “no”, and she has been busy filing lawsuits against me ever since. There are some other problems with hosting a contentious website. Primarily, it is impossible to monetize. I’ve written extensively about this issue. See: Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet and Section 230 isn’t the problem, Payment Networks are. The total lack of monetization options make legal expenses especially painful. Meanwhile, Russell Greer is suing me in Utah, again pro se in forma pauperis. This time, it’s for contributory copyright damages and false light (a kind of defamation). Russell Greer is an ex-Mormon who considers himself a civil rights activist because he has a paralyzed face from a congenital disability (Mobius syndrome). He wants to legalize prostitution so that people with disabilities can pay for sex. That’s not what makes Russell Greer a laughingstock. Instead, it is his obsession with famous women. He has sued both Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande for not taking him out on dates. He would send them gifts, such as original lyrics for songs, and then expected them to reciprocate by giving him something he wants in return (a date / sex). He also has been convicted of cyberstalking a woman local to him. After losing his first case against Swift, he self-published a book called Why I Sued Taylor Swift: and How I Became Falsely Known as Frivolous, Litigious and Crazy which included a full-color comic where she literally stabs him in the heart. He’s a very funny guy, unintentionally. Greer’s other creative work is Yo, Yovanna!, a love song directed at Yovanna Ventura, a Dominican actress and model. It’s a generic sounding pop track he wrote the lyrics for, but paid someone else to perform (his condition prevents him from verbally articulating himself clearly). This song ends up posted on the Kiwi Farms and is harshly criticized for being creepy. Greer responded to this criticism by sending me a DMCA complaint demanding that the song be removed. I refused and told him that it’s being used fairly for the purposes of criticism and ridicule. He escalates the matter to the courts by suing me personally and “Kiwi Farms, a website.” Greer tends to use the court system as punishment. Displease him, and he will try to litigate you into doing what he wants. Humorously, when he sued Taylor Swift, he took her to small claims court. These courts typically try to keep costs down by forcing people to represent themselves instead of hiring attorneys. His strategy was to force TayTay to show up in person and deal with him. Instead, Greg Skordas was allowed to represent her, however, and Greer never managed to set up his romantic date in a Utah small claims court. Greg Skordas is a Utah attorney and was the Democratic nominee for Utah Attorney General in 2020. He has represented Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and yours truly. Greer thusly considers Skordas his nemesis and has harassed his family over Facebook. Greer’s complaint against me was two-fold: he alleged that I contributed to theft of his song by allowing it to be posted (using Napster as a comparison), and that I put him in “false light” when a sentence alleging Greer had “victims” was featured on the front page of my website. His actual legal argument is: he was only convicted of cyberstalking once, so he has only a single victim, thus claiming he has multiple victims is defamatory. This is not a joke. The court upheld that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects me from damages caused by user generated content on my platform. Section 230 is important and provides protections for alt-tech just as it does for big tech. Any proposals to amend Section 230 should be considered very carefully. Skordas’s firm has competently represented my interests in Utah. Greer’s case was dismissed, and so were his post-mortem motions to have the case reopened. He is now appealing the decision in a higher court. Skordas has also been generous in not charging me for all billable hours, but even half of an attorney’s bill is a lot of money. Melinda’s lawsuit has also been thrown out and she is also appealing. She actively posts on my forum, despite suing me over alleged emotional distress it has caused her. In these posts, she has stated intentions to appeal all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. When they refuse to hear it, she will file a new lawsuit. If she can’t file in Virginia, she’ll do it in a random state, where I would have to find a new attorney who may not be as sympathetic towards my situation as Hardin and willing to save me on billable hours. I am in a difficult position. I could try to get a judgement for attorney’s fees. Ironically, this costs money to file. Once I have my judgement, I have to go back to court to try enforcing it. With Greer, I believe he works a job and I can garnish his wages. He might also have money I could try and take. His family is wealthy and they might choose to bail him out of debt. I could also ask for the rights to Yo, Yovanna! and write that off as part of his debt. Then, I could make money with it. My users would probably buy a vinyl press of Yo, Yovanna! and it would be good fun. With Melinda, it’s not so simple. She has no job, she has no supporting family, she has nothing but her children (and indentured child labor is off the table these days). She has two books I could win the rights to, but nothing as funny as Yo, Yovanna!. I would have to actually physically repossess her belongings after winning the power to do so in the debtor’s court. If I send a debt collector into her home, I would ask he wear a camera. Maybe a video ‘wall of shame’ on the site would deter future pro se in forma paupis litigants. Maybe it wouldn’t. It’s a gamble, and it’s a gamble with money I don’t really want to gamble with. What other option do I have? There is no point in moving my company out of the US. As long as I am American and I have property in the US, a default judgement can be used to take that property or garnish my income. Labeling repeat offenders as “vexatious litigants” is hard and it’s infrequently used. A vexatious litigant has limitations on how they may litigate (for instance, they can only file litigation with an attorney representing them or must have all complaints reviewed by a judge before they can be filed with the court and served). This would not stop them from simply litigating in a different jurisdiction. A vexatious litigant in Utah can still file lawsuits in Nevada. It would also cost money to litigate each person and ask they be classified as a vexatious litigant, and it would not be a guarantee to win. There is no criminal element. A judge could find a litigant in contempt of court, but the judge would first have to instruct them to do something they refuse to do. Simply abusing the court system like this does not result in criminal charges. I could represent myself pro se to try and reduce expense. I cannot, however, represent my LLC pro se. Any lawsuit involving an entity that is not my person cannot be represented by me. These lawsuits usually identify an entity which is not myself. It is still a gamble. What if I do a bad job, then lose? I would have to hire an attorney and still be stuck with those bad legal arguments made out of naivety. Fighting my own words could end up costing more than an attorney would have to begin with. I have loss conditions. I can only spend so much money. They file for free, and there’s no way to recoup losses. Unless I simply make enough money to deal with this forever, it will be a winning strategy, eventually. Our country rewards only its biggest burdens. Scott v. Moon (2017) Wise/Norton General District Court (GV1700529-00) Scott v. Wise County Commonwealths, et al. (2017) U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia (C2:17CV00023) Scott v. Moon (2017) Wise County Circuit Court (CL17000827-00) Scott v. Carlson, et al. (2018) U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia (2:18CV47) Scott v. Moon, et al (2019) U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia (2:19CV5) Greer v. Moon (2019) U.S. District Court District Court for Utah, Central Divsion (2:20-CV-00647-TC) Scott v. Wise County Department of Social Services, et al. (2020) U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Big Stone Gap Division (2:20CV00014)
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