> I think people have forgotten how extreme a position this is: the idea that once something is on the internet, national law simply ceases to apply and governments should have absolutely zero control over obscene material, IP infringment, harassment, libel, foreign propaganda, money laundering, fraudulent financial services, gambling, and so on - simply because it's hosted in a different country.

This has more or less been the default position of most internet users and developers since the beginning, until fairly recently. I’d even contend that it’s what drew many of us to the internet in the first place. If the internet ever becomes cable TV, fully regulated, controlled, and managed, it will have lost its purpose as a place for free and open exchange of information.

(Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok. I just don’t think we should be tightening the screws any further.)

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pfortuny 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, yes. But then again, those beginners gave us unauthenticated TCP…

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themafia 3 days ago | parent [-]

"Gave" is the key word. You got TCP for free. There were other competing network protocols. You might ask, why didn't those get used instead?

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pfortuny 3 days ago | parent [-]

You are right, but I was referring to the fact that their ideas are not necessarily the best ones. Edit: because they were too optimistic, they left the security problems behind. Same with this kind of problem.

	▲	iamnothere 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Authenticated TCP wouldn’t have been feasible on early networks due to hardware limitations. But here in the present, you could certainly build it. As long as it works on top of IP, nothing is stopping you.

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3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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remarkEon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Zero control is an exaggeration—the worst lawbreakers still face justice under the current system, and that seems ok.

Doesn’t scale.

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iamnothere 3 days ago | parent [-]

Doesn’t need to. The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero. As long as we are catching the worst criminals and creating reasonable incentives to avoid crime, we are doing enough. Some amount of lawbreaking is to be expected in a free society; it’s literally the price of freedom.

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recursive 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The optimum amount of lawbreaking is non-zero

This is a new idea for me. How is optimality measured here? Aggregate utility for society? What's the independent variable? Is this from the perspective of law-makers? If I was on a desert island, should I do some crime to ensure optimality?

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iamnothere 3 days ago | parent [-]

This idea was explored recently here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

This is just another form of Blackstone’s ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio

The problem itself is an ancient one and you can find a number of texts that explore the idea from various angles.

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recursive 3 days ago | parent [-]

This is from a policy-maker's perspective. It treats the human inclination toward fraud as an immutable force of nature (which may well be reasonable). But it seems the general idea is that policies required to achieve zero fraud would cost too much in enforcement. They would not be purely rational benefits for the organization whose policy is being written.

However from a different perspective, it's those policies that are an immutable force of nature. "Non-zero fraud is optimal" might sound like there could be a population who wasn't committing enough fraud. I haven't done any fraud this year, but I'm trying to be a good person. But that's not the Blackstone perspective. In Blackstone, the populace are thought of as reacting only to policy and basically having no autonomy.

I'm not arguing anything, but just noting how the sound-bite can be (and was) misconstrued.

	▲	iamnothere 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can see how you might have misunderstood. Yes, I was looking at it from the perspective of policy. Any policy designed to reduce crime is going to create some hardship for the innocent, and the question is how much enforcement-driven hardship is the public willing to tolerate in order to reduce crime-driven hardship. In a business context (as in the first article) your customers are not obliged to do business with you; in a democracy they are not obliged to vote for you. In the West we are typically less tolerant of enforcement-driven hardship. This goes back to our Enlightenment ideals about freedom and justice, which are less strong than they once were but are still present.