Before long the Global North governments are going to realize the fediverse exists, and they’re going to put pressure on it as they’ve done—and continue to do—on corporate social media platforms. They’re the self-appointed deciders of what is mis-, dis-, & malinformation.
This is absolutely something on my mind as well and we know very well that censorship already happens across the world at the ISP level. I appreciate you bringing up these points.
This has me super curious. How does censorship happen at the ISP level? I would think there would be way too many of them to account for.
When I'm talking about ISPs, I'm primarily talking about commercial ISPs. Not the telecom monopolies which which run a cable to your apartment, but the firms which provide the means to host websites and make services available to others, from cloud computing (rent a machine) to colocation facilities (rent a locked cage to plug your machine in) to content delivery networks (provide caching / redundancy for maximum availability). The state can lean on any of these companies, especially if they have a legal basis to prosecute these ISPs for hosting "extremist/seditious/communist" content. I don't think it really matters how much competition exists in the market. They will crush the ones which host radical communities and the rest will self-regulate. Or they will use lawfare to turn them into intelligence listening posts.
How does it happen? They will simply show up with a court order. It could be a subpoena for an image of the server's hard drive. It can be an order to install a surveillance backdoor or monitoring equipment. It could be an order to cease and desist. If the company is non-cooperative, they could return with a warrant and pull the whole rack of servers, disrupting operations for potentially hundreds or thousands of other clients and ruining the firm. It's very oldschool. This is what they used to do, and only have been relieved from doing thanks to the consolidation of large cooperative platforms. Just as the Silicon Valley platforms have no motive to fuck with the national security state, neither do the ISPs. They simply have too much to lose.
In cyberspace, we see communities being forced to relocate from the Silicon Valley platforms, but we will eventually see the independent community infrastructure being forced to physically relocate from jurisdictions within reach of the Empire.
At the last mile, the telecoms are also capable of implementing various forms of surveillance and censorship, but there are too many ways this can be circumvented. I don't think this can ever really be sealed up. Encryption is such a fundamental requirement for the basic operation of the Internet that there is no way to prevent it from being used as a layer of stenography for proxy services.
I think I understand where you are coming from. Thank you for taking your time in explaining it to me. You can skip the next part as its more of a personal reflection on what you said.
I am kind of an old dog when it comes to the internet and so I forget that people do not think the way I do when it comes to it. For me imperial core nations and their allies are not places where you want to host content that they might want to censor. For that bit I can agree on. They control what is in their borders. For example the Pakistani YouTube BGP incident or the seizure by the US government of .com TLD registered domains. Its like how I know you are always suppose to use a handle and never give away personal info, but I come from an era of the internet where you distrusted things by default. That is old thinking and not the way it works now and has not for a while. Sorry for rambling a bit. I just wanted to ruminate on the past and contrast it to now. Your post gives me that so thanks again.