Upcoming proposal and discussion on content moderation

2/3 should do the job. I think this would be a good step.

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When it comes to discussion of changing the definition of Simple Majority and Absolute Majority for certain types of governance proposals, I think it is necessary to clarify if we are talking about majority of votes cast or majority of total voting power. Simple Majority is defined in terms of votes cast, but Absolute Majority is defined in terms of total voting power.

It is already exceedingly difficult to achieve Absolute Majority unless DF and ICA vote and they have recently proposed a motion (NNS Proposal ID 34485 (internetcomputer.org)) to remove their default followee status for governance proposal. That proposal passed yesterday (Dec 15, 2021). Hence, it should soon be a very high bar to pass a governance proposal by Absolute Majority.

DF and ICA are free to abstain from governance votes and they will likely do that on many proposals that they believe is a conflict of interest or inappropriate for them to vote. If you look at the voting records for the last month or more, they have routinely abstained from voting on governance proposals. Any vote that is not cast is effectively a vote to Reject based on the definition of Absolute Majority. Hence, the votes to Adopt already have a higher bar than the votes to Reject simply due to the definition of Absolute Majority and the fact that everyone will not vote, even on really important proposals.

Looking at the voting history, the proposals that received the highest total votes that were not decided by liquid democracy (in other words, DF and ICA did not vote) were the people party proposal and the cannister safe upgrade proposal with 47.5M and 47.9M votes, respectively. These have been the most popular votes so far and this only amounts to 15% of total voting power that cast their votes. Hence, it is already exceedingly difficult to pass a governance proposal by Absolute Majority.

I personally do not see a need to change the definition of Adopt or Reject at all on any type of proposal. I like the fact that Simple Majority has a 3% minimum threshold of total voting power that must be met and there is a wait for quiet mechanism. I think this is sufficient to decide any proposal. To me the bigger question is whether or not certain types of proposals should be voted at all such as cannister removal. I’m still on the fence about it.

Anyway, I think it is important to clearly define what is meant when talking about changing voting definitions. It is unlikely that 100% of total voting power will vote on governance proposals in the future, so that might require recalibration of our thought process.

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Excellent point about simple majority vs absolute majority. I was thinking the potential new thresholds would be with regards to simple majority.

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The more costly it is to remove content the least effective it is.
The least costly it is to remove content the most centralized it is.

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You keep insisting on comparing the IC with glorified file sharing schemes. They are not at all similar. Even if you use pretty pictures to make your point.

Yes, the IC can store and serve static content. But it also does A LOT more. And node operators don’t have any choice regarding what runs on their nodes. Nor can that content be arbitrarily moved around as is the case with file sharing (i.e. you can’t remove a canister from one node on a subnet and have it run on the others).

Also, as a node provider with servers running in a third party’s data center, you really-really don’t have the “node keeps forwarding infringing content” option. There is no legal pursuit, your servers just get unplugged. Very anticlimactic.

To simplify your colorful chart a bit, this is how it works with IC nodes:

           Someone uploads infringing content
                            |
                            + <------------------------------------+
                            v                                      |
                 Node gets legal notice                            |
                            |                                      |
                            v                                      |
        Node cannot take down infringing content                   |
                            |                                      |
                            v                                      |
       Node cannot keep hosting infringing content                 |
                            |                                      |
                            v                                      |
            Node operator submits NNS proposal                     |
                            |                                      |
                  +-------------------+                            |
                  v                   v                            |
         Canister removed    Canister not removed                  |
                                      |                            |
                                      v                            |
                            Node is unplugged by DC                |
                                      |                            |
                                      v                            |
                   Copyright owner identifies other subnet node    |
                                      |                            |
                                      +----------------------------+

I hope that’s clear enough even if it’s not (in either sense) a pretty picture.

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I didn’t think my chart was that pretty but thanks.

Elaborate, what else does the IC does that is legally relevant?

In the case of the IC “node” would be “boundary node,” their decentralization would render em legally autonomous. Added to that, some technical solution to make storage node operators unliable would be implemented, which would be what concerns your comment.

This is being discussed here so please come over and ask about any real issues you may find with that solution, Harrison and Jordan are way smarter than me and I’m sure will be able to respond far better than I can.

As a side note, consider approaching ideas with a bit more charitability, if you want to keep engaging with me at least. Instead of saying “this can’t be done, you’re stupid and the IC is too complex for your solutions,” ask yourself how a solution could be implemented, what the relevant abstractions in the idea are, etc. And we may both benefit from it.

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I have to strongly disagree here with you. 3% is way too little for any decision with far reaching consequences like removing/blacklisting a canister or changing who controls a neuron (ongoing proposal).
On the contrary, I believe at this stage Dfinintys hand should be forced on decisions like this. They might choose to wait for quiet, and follow a clear decision from the wider community (if any). But it will take a few years before the NNS, and IC for that matter, is decentralized enough to take Dfinity out of their responsibility to think long and hard about matters like these, and actually voice their opinion. If they can’t come up with a clear opinion, maybe it’s time to eat your own meds and let everyone vote internally if a highly controversial issue arises? After all, I still trust Dfinity to have the deepest knowledge of what has to be done in the interest of the whole network, that’s why I choose to follow their neuron in the first place.

That’s why I believe there has to be 50% of eligible votes cast, and a 2/3 majority for anything that has to do with neuron or canister ownership/control.
For everything else status quo could be fine, I guess.

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I think quorum should even be much higher than 50% with some sort of algorithmic adjustment downwards over many days if no proposal passes, then adjusted to that % but always floating back up unless a motion passes to adjust lower.

For example in the case of a global war where 80% of neurons/icp holders die and keys are lost. It would adjust downward over some days or weeks and allow the survivors to change quorum rules and redistribute new keys to heirs etc

My sincere apologies. Got a bit carried away.

It was not obvious that you were talking about boundary nodes. Technically speaking this could be done for boundary nodes without problems (or rather with few problems, II principals depend on the actual URL of the app, so if you access the same app via different boundary nodes you’d end up with different principals).

But it’s quite possible that a determined copyright holder, who doesn’t want to play whack-a-mole with what are basically proxies to content hosted on the IC, may end up going to the source of the problem and request that a specific IC node be taken down. Then the next, and the next. And I will point out that (a) which nodes host a given canister is public information; and (b) there is no way to hide that (if a boundary node can locate a canister, so can anyone else).

Meaning that this may be an interesting short-term solution, but unfortunately not a lot more than that.

As for node operators removing canisters from their nodes, that’s not directly possible: a node is part of a subnet and all nodes on the subnet must execute the exact same messages on the exact same canisters. This is very different from a platform that stores static content: you can simply shard the content over a huge number of anonymous nodes, with none of them storing even a piece of the original content and require many of them to contribute in order to rebuild the original content. That way the content isn’t located anywhere in particular (unless you consider 100 anonymous nodes that can be replaced at a moment’s notice to be a location). You cannot do something like that with an application (which is what a canister is): you can’t arbitrarily break it into tiny pieces spread across 100 nodes and still expect it to work in any meaningful way.

And here I am having spent yet another 15 minutes on the forum instead of doing one of the dozen things I still have to finish by tomorrow.

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As far as voting to remove abilities such as ability to remove a canister, such a proposal could be a really good symbolic vote. Practically speaking though, we could always vote to give the ability back to ourselves. Not a bad way to but force us to address the question explicitly though.

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I disagree with any censorship. This is a relatively easy case to fight against . What happens with a nation state wants to take down a dissenters site .

Let the firms with issues go to the source who posted the material .

As has been said many times in this thread, your utopian vision of “no content moderation” is impossible. The world’s governments will outlaw the entire ICP network. The network will have 0 users. We will all continue using Amazon Web Services. End of story.

Node operators need to be able to stop hosting content that is illegal in their jurisdiction. There is no alternative. You are talking as if governments cannot exert any power over network participants.

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Well they can’t against BTC or ETH.

That’s a silly comment. Of course they can. The world’s governments could make it illegal to hold BTC or ETH, and to run nodes, at a moment’s notice. They simply haven’t done so as of now. Don’t mistake a failure to legislate for the inability to legislate.

If governments enacted such a ban, the BTC and ETH networks would lose most of their users overnight, and most cryptocurrency exchanges would shut down. Most humans aren’t trying to start a revolution.

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Can storage subnets that are working the way you just described (every node only holds some piece of a file) solve this? You build your logic in an application subnet and store your data in a storage subnet. Performance wouldn’t be great if you really intend on working on the data, but for static assets it could be a solution, right?

Maybe. But they would have to run a very different protocol from what subnets run now. Currently subnets (the gossip layer; consensus protocol; deterministic state machine; and so on and so forth) are explicitly designed to ensure that all replicas have fully identical states.

What you are proposing is essentially integrating the IC with IPFS. Which may turn out to be a more straightforward way of going at it. Not saying that implementing something similar to IPFS that’s more closely integrated with the IC is impossible, just that it would be a lot of work. And likely not very high priority.

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Considering there are ways to obfuscate, wouldn’t the easiest way be just to go after the domain-registrant?
Since everything rn goes through a single domain?
Don’t know who owns ic0.app. Dfinity or ICA?

Maybe I misunderstood something here, please someone explain.

IMO I disagree with the entire notion that the community should be responsible for this. I propose that the original IC founders legal council could propose a document on the official position and process on dealing with ip theft, piracy and other illegal activity on the network that could go to vote. The language could be improved and we could try again until it passes. If this is continuously voted down by the foundations large power and concerned investors, at least the position in this issue is clear before others yolo join the 8 year gang.

Asking the community to come up with the perfect legal language along with associated processes for this is not our expertise and should not be the communities responsibility. We all come from different countries with different rules and have different backgrounds, and so our convo’s just keep going in a loop, as there is no perfect solution. The original position, legal language and process to deal with inevitable problems needs to come from the responsible founders to protect themselves and the network, just like IPFS has done (https://ipfs.io/legal). Then the community will figure out how to make the solution as open and tolerable as possible.

If this does not happen, then it seems to me like they are planning blame to us as investors down the road when something goes wrong, which is not acceptable. Each one if us deserves to know what we are investing our time/money in, if we are unknowingly indirectly supporting such activity, and if we will be down the road after we have already built our castles in the sandbox.

Happy holidays everyone :christmas_tree:

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The Foundation and its representatives are the ones who have:

  1. Built the protocol and network stack while making several explicit claims about objectives regarding censorship resistance (in ways that will likely be proven to be bald-faced lies within the next few years, regarding a few specific things Dominic has said).

  2. Taken on the position of implementing the directives agreed upon by the community.

– I ask “what the Foundation will do” because I have the viewpoint that when push comes to shove, there’s a good chance the Foundation will just go rogue and do what the Foundation wants to do if a vote comes in that the Foundation doesn’t like.

Regarding this idea of “technical + legal reasons, not because of any grand scheme” – that’s all taken care of, where things are headed governments will end up deciding how to position the ICP now and dictate whichever schemes you shall follow.

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Manu’s idea about a market for node providers to bid on which canisters to host would be moderation via the market.

I’ll say it again, though, and I understand this isn’t really an area that you’re responsible for/you might not even be aware of it – one of the more striking things regarding this whole deal is that Dominic has been running around presenting the IC in a very very very different light with regards to censorship resistance than a lot of the sentiment (and proposed actions/policies) that I’ve seen coming out of the Foundation.

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