I will pop in and give my opinion on this as this is more serious a matter than most people in the thread seem to realize.
First of all I appreciate the problem this created for the node operator. It’s bad for them and happy this developer removed the Mario kart emulator on their own so nobody faces any immediate legal trouble.
But this highlights a much much bigger problem with the internet computer.
A decentralized censorship-resistant network should be exactly that. (1) decentralized and (2) censorship resistant.
From what we see here the NNS can vote to remove a canister. So it’s not censorship resistant.
It’s also not decentralized since running a node has such insane hardware requirements and is not supposed to be run by normal users.
And here we see the result of the lack of decentralization. With nodes being so few and easy to find you just serve DMCA notices and then they are forced to go to court or shutdown. An easy choice for the node operator.
What’s more with the voting mechanism and KYC of ICP holders you can actually go after individual users who vote to ignore a DMCA takedown (or vote for anything that goes against the law of some nation state). This is terrible.
At that point you are no longer working on a decentralized censorship resistant network. You have recreated a more complex, less performant version of AWS.
I don’t know if this is possible, but I urge the developers of the network to think long and hard on the direction they want to take the internet computer. And try to make the two following long term changes:
Enable home users across the globe to run their own nodes. Make it into a truly decentralized network.
Remove the ability to censor canisters via on-chain governance. The reasons why this should not exist were outlined above.
I don’t think you quite understand how decentralisation works.
The NNS was built exactly for that, so people can vote on proposals, kick out ill intent canisters ( child pornograpy, denying holocaust etc) or are you happy for the IC to just host anything?
Censorship resistant in this case means 1 entity can’t take your app down without a debate, which exactly what is happening here. If Mario Kart was on AWS, it would’ve already been taken down without further notice.
“It’s also not decentralized since running a node has such insane hardware requirements and is not supposed to be run by normal users.” This has been discussed a thousands of times. If you’d like IC to be fully decentralised but fast as a potato then sure, badlands will provide that. But what would you choose? Host your app on a raspberry pi on some shady internet connections or on a enterprise server with redundant internet and power generators? Take your pick.
I don’t think you quite understand how decentralisation works.
Cute.
The NNS was built exactly for that, so people can vote on proposals, kick out ill intent canisters ( child pornograpy, denying holocaust etc) or are you happy for the IC to just host anything?
A censorship resistant system should be able to host anything without fear of censorship otherwise it’s not censorship resistant. Once you open that can of worms it’s done. What should be censored for one person is fair game for another. What’s legal in one country is illegal for another.
The power of a censorship-resistant decentralized system is to be above all that and to simply make it impossible to censor. As long as the ability to censor is built in the system it will be used. Both for things such as the ones you mentioned which are indeed bad, but also for other things which are not bad but the powers that be at the time deem to be illegal.
This has been discussed a thousands of times. If you’d like IC to be fully decentralised but fast as a potato then sure, badlands will provide that. But what would you choose? Host your app on a raspberry pi on some shady internet connections or on a enterprise server with redundant internet and power generators? Take your pick.
I would host my app in a truly decentralized system. I would envision such a system be comprised of thousand of raspberry pis (or well more powerfull - but stil home-grade hardware) all around the world. Not in a few servers that can be taken down by DMCA requests. I thought that the IC was trying to be such a system. This debacle shows me that’s not the case.
I would hope that we have learned by now that major communication platforms operating without any means of democratic control and lawful principles are detrimental to society.
In a previous career I operated within a completely transparent framework for the purpose of transforming a failing organisation. Challenge could come from any stakeholder at any time. It was liberating. Everyone self regulated for the betterment of the community. Government agencies allowed 3 years for improvement and local agencies 2 years… we did it in one and a half.
Let’s not make the IC a next gen Dark Web, but one within which people can openly thrive.
No you don’t understand how it works. It means things are really, really hard to change/censor because of the coordination between many stakeholders required to make changes. Coordination is required because power is so dispersed.
If someone can send a DCMA request to the foundation and a day later the content is taken down, you do not have a decentralised system. You’ve got AWS masquarading as a decentralised system just because there’s coin voting.
The NNS is not democratic. It’s the equivalent of shareholder voting. States will see this and bring it under the control just like they’ve brought Facebook to heal. At that point, there’s no point to The IC’s consensus mechanism. It’s needless overhead.
@Ciaran I was just coming here to post about the need to calculate voting power differently for these types of proposals. Then I saw your post.
I don’t like the idea of large neurons with massive VP being able to make content moderation decisions.
Could we require that any neuron voting on these types of proposal be boosted via people party participation? Then we give each neuron equal voting power?
I find it fairly mindblowing/disturbing to see the lack of understanding of the value proposition of censorship resistant systems to the extent that it makes me question what is the point of The IC.
Those of us that have been around this space long enough are well aware that blockchains can and will enable people to do bad things. The deal with the devil that we made was that the good things that emanate from systems not being controlled by powerful entities like big tech, or embroiled in geopolitical power struggles between states, are empowering to all individuals, the vast majority of whom are good. The net effect of blockchains is that they’re overwhelmingly a force for good.
It’s analagous to the encryption debates. You can plan a murder or send child porn using encrypted messaging and the person that designed the encryption algorithm can’t intervene to stop you. The entities hosting the content can’t know about it and thus can’t stop you either. But most people aren’t murderers or paedophiles and they benefit from encryption every day of their lives. It secures their financial transactions and maintains their human right to privacy. If you weaken that encryption to try catch the .01% of the population that do these bad things you end up reducing the autonomy of the 99.9% because there are powerful state and criminal forces out there that have readily shown they will exploit these weaknesses to do bad things. That’s a really bad trade!
The same principal exists here. Censorship resistance empowers 100% of people. If you start trying to govern what’s acceptable content or not, you both introduce the possibility for powerful actors to game the system for their benefit, along with the possiblity of becoming eternally mired in politics because what is acceptable or not is guaranteed to be highly subjective. When both of those things inevitably happen, governments won’t just stand by and watch, they’ll come to take control just like they came to bring Facebook to heal.
At that point, we’ll just have recreated Web 2.0 and we’d have to ask ourselves what on earth is the point of chainkey tech, etc if it’s just going to be routinely over-ridden by corporate and state interests?
If IC stakeholders don’t see the light on this issue, I predict a fork of The IC that won’t have formal governance procedures - or at least won’t be dominated coin voting - to emerge and quickly out-compete the IC because like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it will minimise governance in order to maximise censorship-resistance and in doing so, maximise social scalability.
FWIW - I myself am new to the blockchain space, and I’ve noticed that many of the other IC community members are as well. It’s good to have people like you and @lastmjs share this history with us.
I am interested to see if this “deal with the devil” holds up in the long term as more mainstream adoption takes place. I’m not trying to suggest that it shouldn’t; but I do find it hard to believe that everyone will be so willing to accept a deal that they did not make themselves.
As for your last comment; isn’t that what we are doing right now? Everyone I’ve seen chatting about this in the community channels is trying to figure out how to do that. And even before the vote was cancelled the general consensus was that we needed more time to figure out our next steps.
@Ciaran you’re doing something similar as this famous attempt to disprove the evolution theory with the broken watch thought-experiment. I don’t think it works like that. There are millions of use cases where a service would benefit from being community owned and governed and does not care to be censorship-resistant in every single jurisdiction. This is where you need IC and not AWS. It’s not all black and white and not everyone is into libertarianism and anarchy.
It’s funny to bring up Facebook, since it’s a good example of why it’s sometimes necessary for (democratic) state powers to intervene, even where some entity considers itself “good”.
Radical all-or-nothing narratives are not helping. There are no simple solutions to complex questions of organising society. Everything ultimately is a trade-off and compromise that has to be checked and rebalanced constantly.
Although the decision is moot because the canister’s creator has taken the canister down, we must continue this discussion. This will happen again, and soon. There is a good chance that people will start uploading “bad” content to the IC just to see what happens. Will the community delete it? Or is it actually censorship resistant, with the one exception of intellectual property violations?
One thing we should keep in mind here is that moderation is an attack vector. People who want to see the IC fail–e.g., people who have invested in “competing” projects–could start mass posting content to the IC that impinges on the intellectual property of some multi-national corporation. Moreover, they could send takedown notices for applications that don’t actually violate anyone’s intellectual property, with the hope that node providers won’t actually know/care whether it’s true. Are we going to start going through potentially hundreds of claims a day to determine what is actually infringement and what is not?
Imagine a decentralized YouTube, whether running on the IC or some other network. It’s a lot of data and bandwidth, such that a successful global app pretty much has to run in data centers. You aren’t going to get the necessary performance characteristics from household nodes. Such a network has a bigger target on its back due to the data center presence. This is the target market the IC is aiming for, IMO: dapps that household node networks can’t do.
To reject the viability of a decentralized YouTube merely because some censorship must be applied to protect node providers is to make perfection the enemy of progress.
Yes, the governance must be overhauled but at least we can do that, as opposed to giant tech corporations.
However I agree with some other posters that improving plausible deniability and reducing content moderation responsibility is the best path forward. But I don’t think we will ever get to 100% not legally responsible. The stronger the will, ex with child porn, the more forceful the legal system will be, and the more responsible node providers will be in the eyes of fiat legal systems.
I think it’s telling (and reassuring) that Dfinity has abstained from direct intervention. That alone gives me a lot of faith in the future of this project.
IP infringement in this case is about as clearly black and white as it can be. Nintendo owns the copyright, the game has not been modified in any way, it is a clear violation. I should hope that in the future the community chooses to protect IP rights of small creators, something that is woefully neglected by the big companies—that is one area that ICP can shine.
Clearer lines for moderation will need to be drawn sooner than later, and I think in light of the recent Twitter purge, we need to be mindful of the nuance between freedom of speech and piracy.
Community ownership (eg cooparatives) existed long before blockchains. Hell a corporation qualifies as community ownership. These things exist everywhere (eg AWS) now so I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t need The IC for community ownership.
Blockchains can facilitate community ownership outside of national legal structures but only if they’re censorship resistant. If they’re not, and there is active governance, states will quickly move to control that governance because disputes will inevitably arise and end up in state courts, forcing the states to act.