It would be cool if we had net neutrality, but we have a bunch of laws which already fly in the face of that. Maybe work on dismantling those? Maybe make your blog posts about the minorities which are having their voices already removed by the existing system? Maybe talk about how police fail to follow-through? It’s weird to be focusing on defending a website which proliferates hate and causes real harm, when you could instead be using your limited resources to help out people who deserve it. KF isn’t suing. No one is suing the tier 1 ISP. Why make the stand here? It reads as completely tone deaf to me.
I’m not saying that they can’t point this out as an issue and I’m aware that it’s in line with their absolutist beliefs on the internet being a public utility, but they spend an awfully small amount of time discussing the real and tangible harm that KF has brought to this world. They could also have spent more of their words on these other issues when bringing up KF. As I stated it’s about how tone deaf this seems to me that’s so off-putting about it.
I agree that the internet should be a public utility, but it’s not, and if I’m gonna be spending efforts focused on trying to make it a public utility I want those efforts to go towards instances which are worth the time. If it was already a public utility and this was a real threat to it continuing to be a public utility, that would be a very different situation.
There’s a big difference between explicitly endorsing something and not making a blog post about it. Hell there’s even a big difference between making a better blog post about this and this nonsense they put up. As I just stated in a reply to someone else right above you, despite all the issues the link in this post addresses, my other issue with the EFF post is how tone deaf it is.
Real tangible harm was caused by KF - the burden of education is on everyone who chooses to open their mouth about this issue in the same way that we expect people to be reasonably knowledgeable about minorities before talking about them. We chastise companies and people for taking tone deaf stances on all sorts of issues all the time, because they should know better. They chose to open their mouth about a group which caused a lot of violence in the world, it’s their responsibility to be educated on how to approach the subject tactfully.
They could have fairly trivially provided links to charities which exist to offset this harm. They could have trivially talked about how the police system is currently failing to protect minorities and others disenfranchised by the existing system that has no net neutrality. They didn’t do these things. For such a large company and a non-profit with the reach that they have, they need to be better than this.
Ideas don’t have to exist in absolution. Many people oppose murder, but are also okay with murdering convicted criminals. It’s also possible to believe in laws yet allow them to be violated when a system isn’t perfect. One can believe in net neutrality and wish deeply for it, but also recognize that it does not currently exist and to be okay with (or even endorse) people using the system to disenfranchise bad actors because they believe it is the best solution currently available.
If we do allow this type of net neutrality violations
We already allow it and it is normal practice. We don’t have laws which protect net neutrality, in fact, we have laws which do the opposite in the USA and in nearly every country. Saying that every LGBT+ website will be taken down because we aren’t choosing to jump to the defense of KF which has always had zero protections is absurd.
Looking forward is important, but looking too far forward assumes that your vision of the future matches reality and that’s just plain narcissism. How much we can accurately predict what the world will look like in the future is a direct function of how far into the future we are looking. Accuracy sharply drops off after even just a few years. Predictions made via science, such as the temperature of the earth with historical and current decisions/energy production is a lot more useful than hypothesizing about how humans might live. Using these assumptions as a starting point for making decisions about how to plan/exist today rather than using predictions made via science to inform a course to not continue or change from are vastly different decisions and the author brings up a good point about the intermixing and equivocating of the two.