cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56719476
Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country’s communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.
Corporate censorship is not illegal. If you come to my house spouting Nazi rhetoric I have ever right to call you out on it and kick you out of my house.
There are laws deliberately protecting the people’s right to free speech that is not infringed by the government.
Now if you want to talk about how we should remove companies/corps rights as entities, we can have the conversation.
Trump was banned from Twitter and it was a good thing because it was them enforcing their TOS/EULA rules in a reasonable manner that doesn’t play favorites. Because the average person like you or me couldn’t say a lot of what Trump said on the platform and not get banned.
That doesn’t mean Twitter is a good company. There are no good companies. Corporations are not your friend. But they also aren’t government entities and they shouldn’t be. So if the state wants to sponsor the internet as a utility it can create its own cloudflare-like service for the purpose of DNS blocking and block whatever it wants. But cloudflare isn’t a state sponsored utility. It’s a corp. It has every right (whether you agree it should have rights or not) to not operate in countries it doesn’t want to operate in.
Your thinking is so calcified by the specific laws of the united states of America it is frustrating. Laws are written by mere mortals like you and me. When those bunch of dudes wrote the Constitution more than two hundred years ago, they couldn’t have imagined the internet in theirs wildest dreams. And that’s without pointing out that the reason they valued absolute freedom of speech so much can be largely attributed to the historical backdrop at the time.
A long time has passed, something better is possible. It’s time to think again from first principles.