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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources,

I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence.

I believe that once a technology becomes widespread enough to become infrastructure it needs to be regulated to allow fair access to it. See examples of railroads, phone lines, etc.

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> I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence.

Did that lobby actually achieve anything? Like, one peer reviewed study that demonstrate causality?

It's been what, 30 years now.

Varies per jurisdiction; some games have "green blood" in Germany, for example.

> Like, one peer reviewed study that demonstrate causality?

Evidence is only weakly relevant to policy.

There have been multiple peer reviewed studies that show that violent video games increase aggressive behavior. Here's a meta-analysis:

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/40/9882.full.pdf

Except in the case of hosting providers (and other services) you have options. A lot of options usually. At what point in the infrastructure stack would you draw the line? Something like AWS is far removed from the ultimate regulation that may it difficult to start such a competitor (running your own fiber?)

Would SMS providers like twilio be considered the same, built on top of a regulated industry?

TBF, everyone has fair access to whipping up any of hundreds of domain servers (including their own homespun server) and buying a domain name to direct to. No one company has a monopoly or oligopoly for creating a public website

This isn't quite like citizens lobbying the government to restrict media. This is a private storage company adjusting their policies on what they allow to be stored on their servers.

This is a "First they came for socialists" argument, but applied at independent levels of tech stack.

- VM hosting

- DNS hosting

- ISP

Where do we draw the line? I'd rather none of the above to be able to refuse service based on thought policing.

Banking? The Taliban should probably have access to both their websites and Afghanistan's wealth, regardless of whether their ideas are illegal in the states

Remember, we are talking about thought crimes here, not terrorism.

It's worth emphasizing that this is already the 2nd escalation, too.

People who didn't like twitter's policies were smugly told "go start your own twitter". So now we had these Parler guys on AWS, they actually did it, oops, turns out starting your own twitter is also not ok.

I hate to defend Parler, but like you said, first they come for..

Off topic, but is your username a reference to the overton window?

No, but it totally should be, I managed to defend both Parler and ISIS on this thread.

Taking up the banner from the ACLU, who now suck.

> People who didn't like twitter's policies were smugly told "go start your own twitter".

I really don't see how there could have been any other response. Twitter is a private company holding private assets and letting people use them in exchange for showing those people ads. What kind of free society would tell them that they can't decide what kind of content people get to put on their stuff? Should I be allowed to write KKK speeches on my work computer?

Unless we're going to declare social media a utility[0], what people are asking for is basically to have the government tell you what to put on your website.

[0] Which I personally think is ridiculous and entitled, but I'm open to the argument.

To the extent that our media and politicians live on Twitter, its become the public square and their policies are de facto policies for American public discourse.

I personally would prefer that they didn't all live on Twitter, but they do and so here we are.

My domain was ceased for operating a fast growing covid/ flu tracking web app early in the pandemic.

The powers used to cease it was emergency powers granted two years earlier to stop terrorist content from circulation online.

The domain was released eventually but the damage had already been done.

In what country?

New Zealand

Shit!

Websites crash all the time, but a domains being ceased is another level you don't have access to your email or any accounts with that email, and all customer support is gone.

4k plus new users a day loose access their health information.

Before this I always assumed the DNS layer was untouchable considering many deplorable websites still have a domain. But this protection only applies to certain top level domains. .org for example

Funny how the power to stop terrorist content is being used to prevent the free flow of information.

> I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence.

And you know what happened? Exactly what Amazon is doing now. The industry moved to regulate itself. Games now have ratings on them. Amazon is taking those steps right now. I wouldn't be surprised if you don't soon see the same standards applies to most other providers.

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