One of the things that is becoming clear, to me at least, is that the layered model (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) the whole internet is built on, is censorship friendly. And I don't just mean OSI, but the layers in the app layer. I'll unpack.
I pasted that ridiculous Mendez letter into my Reddit thread (), but I think a more culprit for the reddit move against "dangerous" CAD files is that they're afraid of losing their hosting, CDN, or some lower layer services.
If I ran a community site of any kind, and I saw AWS summarily boot @gunpolicy's Code Is Free Speech dot com, I would factor that in with the Cloudfront censorship and the Azure threat against Gab.ai and have a 😱 moment.
If AWS will boot a static site hosting some CAD files with no warning and no recourse, why wouldn't they boot a big community site hosting those same files?
And what is Amazon afraid of? It's afraid of legislators, shareholders, and state and local governments that can hurt it. And the layered nature of the stacks we all use lets those fears & constraints propagate upwards to the user-facing software layer.
We host OpenSourceDefense.org on an EC2 instance. When I spun that up earlier this summer, I had a little trepidation using EC2 but thought, "it's a while before I really have to worry about AWS booting me from EC2 because of a forum post." Alas, nope. The day is here.
The day is here everywhere, all over the web, because the infrastructure is centralized into too few hands, and everyone's application runs on another application that runs on another application that runs on one of about 5 computers.
But guys, the physical infrastructure has been centralized for a long time. That's the nature of it. The further down the stack you go, the less economic sense it makes to have a bunch of competition. The lower levels have always been controlled by very few players.
What has happened in the past ~10 years is that the level of consolidation we used to have with backbone providers and telcos, has just moved up to the base application layer. That's the logic of it, technically and economically.
Anyway, to sum up, the AWS move against @gunpolicy has made it crystal clear that having that specific handful of CAD files on our site is an existential threat to your business. You may not even get a warning -- you wake up and you've gone dark. It's over. That's chilling.
And Amazon is big enough that they could lose any one customer and not care.
The internet doesn't route around censorship as damage. It's the opposite. The layered model + consolidation of lower lawyers means you can censor it all by sending a handful of nasty letters to the right people. The internet is a kill switch on free speech.
I realize saying "the internet is a kill switch on free speech" will strike many as hyperbole. But the phrase "the internet is a kill switch on a free press" would've been knee-slapping laughable hyperbole 10 years ago. It ain't, now. Incentives matter. Market structure matters.
