{}coin: good enough for election politics?

rysiek rysiek at hackerspace.pl
Thu Jan 30 03:30:50 PST 2014


Dnia piÄ…tek, 24 stycznia 2014 11:40:36 James A. Donald pisze:
> On 2014-01-24 10:42, rysiek wrote:
> > Thing is, today not only authorities have increased power to enforce their
> > prejudices. Multinationals have sometimes even bigger power and
> > possibilities as far as this is concerned -- just consider what Facebook
> > can do in terms of censorship. Or Google.
> 
> Does it not strike you as odd that all censorship by facebook and google
> expresses the same political agenda, that of the state.

No, because it does not, at least not always. For instance, in Poland there 
were several cases of Facebook censoring/removing profiles that bashed large 
corporations for their actions.

Of course multinationals and governments cooperate very closely on this, but 
it does not mean that for such censorship the government is solely 
responsible.

And even if that would be the case -- even if ANY AND ALL cases of censorship 
and self-censorship in large, centralised, corporate communication and 
information platforms like Facebook or Google where government-ordered, my 
take on this would still be that we need to decentralise and spread them out, 
so as to make it so much harder for governments to censor.

Because instead of going to a few one-stop-shops like Google, Microsoft, 
Facebook, AT&T, Crapple and getting 95% of communication censored, the 
government would have to reach out to thousands upon thousands of private 
companies and persons and make them censor their infrastructure.

Some would agree. Some would not. The latter group is why it's worthwhile.

So any way you look at it, large multinationals are dangerous -- either on 
their own account, or through the simple fact that they make governments' 
"work" much, much easier.

-- 
Pozdr
rysiek
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