Why don’t we just let node providers blacklist canister’s themselves and let the system plug the holes by moving content to open and willing nodes? If the content is ‘bad’ enough everyone will blacklist it. If a provider becomes notorious for hosing terrorism or explorative content the NNS can remove the provider.
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At this point, the argument against that would be because you have the Foundation acting as the gatekeeper for node onboarding.
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Social media and content platforms do much of the outsourced regulating of governments now – there are multiple lawsuits against them on this very basis.
You’re thinking of government as the only networked state capable of legislating – Terms and Conditions function as the equivalent of laws in many capacities these days.
What if SciHub is hosted on IC, and an editor demands it shut down. Are we going to remove it? In the future, are we going to remove SciHub from the IC? (Don’t know SciHub, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub ). Depending on what we decide to enforce as “policies to warranty copyright claims” , SciHub is something that could never live in the IC. So, imagine, web2.0 would be the heaven for open Science (not the IC). (@ajismyid , what about Sci-hub ? For me, it is a great example of "revolutionary content that The IC should host and defend . It is about Science made available to every one, with no cost-barrier. It has been revolutionary in web2.0, and we should let it be revolutionary in web3.0 . If we bend to bib-corps , Scihub would never exist in The IC. Is that what we want? )
I am not saying it will be like that…
It is a complex subject. It is a great opportunity to rethink censorship. If we only look into those bullets, it is kind of easy to agree to all of them. But… think about “content that incites violence” for example. Imagine if a group is calling up for protest and publishing content in IC; in such a polarized political context we all live in, how could we decide if the call-to-protest content incites violence? There will be many situations in which this “content that incites violence” will be hard to reason about, with certainty.
(I am just trying to think about the many situations that will be hard to decide on… it is really amazing how complex it is to think about a self and fair regulated web3.0 meant to (in some sense) protect against massive censorship forces that could be unleashed by corporate+state collusion )
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@alexa.smith By the way, just a heads up – The ideas you’re floating directly contradict what Dominic (for those not familiar, the Foundation’s own CEO) is explicitly out there telling people in interviews about the reasons for a Dapp like UniSwap to build its front-end on the Internet Computer.
When governments declare 95% of the tokens on Uni to be illegal security offerings, I guess it’ll just fall within a violation of the “Acceptable Use Terms” of the IC to throw them off the network same as if they were on AWS in the first place, huh?
Or if a canister somehow finds themselves in violation of “spreading misinformation” a la Twitter censoring numerous scientific publications and Nobel Laureates these days.
Seriously, if that’s the route this whole thing is going to go, it’s much easier to just create that Ministry of Truth neuron and just get the control mechanisms out there in the open.
DFINITY was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the top venture capitalists in the world, and not one of them wanted a detailed plan for how these issues and various conflicts were going to be handled?
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I agree. I think there needs to be a policy on each of these items, but I have deliberately not advanced a policy position. The spectrum could be anything from do nothing, to removal, and to address who is the authority on saying a valid grievance has been put forward.
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Oh, and here’s another one –
Governments and central banks in many places have already launched a very negative PR campaign against Bitcoin as an “enabler of money laundering” and a “tool for terrorists” – so what happens to the Foundation’s wonderful little Bitcoin Integration when all of the sudden these Dapps and Canisters facilitating permissionless transfers find themselves on the “wrong side” of some new laws?
I mean, this whole proposal just all kinds of destructive on several fronts.
In Australia, for example, there are laws being put forth to de-anonymize social media and directly let law enforcement agents log in to user’s accounts without their permission and do all kinds of crazy things.
So now the entire Internet Identity System is in jeopardy if a sufficient number of these laws get passed?
The whole point of this damn project is to put a team of the world’s best cryptographers/network architects/developers in a place where they can create something which looks the compromised systems of the world in the face and says:
"You know what? We’ve had enough corruption, enough abuse, enough lying, enough nepotism, and enough incompetence when it comes to leadership in the world.
"So…We’re going to build what the digital world (and by extension a large portion of applications to the physical world) needs to run itself as a truly resilient system now, because you had the chance to and you chose the wrong path.
"And if you don’t like that? Fuck you. Deal with it.
“The old frame of these conversations, where somehow the scientists and the Doers and the Builders in the world are expected to kowtow to parasitic administrators/bureaucrats/fraudsters, rather than the way other way around, is over.”
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Has the question of copyright infringement become conflated with Free Speech?
OpenChat is a working example of an encrypted communication service on the IC that currently allows anyone on the planet with internet access to converse freely with other people without fear of censorship, or even spying. In this regard, the InternetComputer is censorship resistant.
But censorship isn’t the issue.
The issue is that someone’s revenue earning property was made publicly and freely available without their consent.
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– The issue (at least that I’m reacting to) is that the default proposed solution to the copyright issue looks a lot like it would spread to many, many, many other things and create a censorship regime with a global topology rather than the local kind that you’d want to give developers and individual ecosystems the freedom to use.
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Would ethereum or bitcoin have gained traction with an onchain governance feature enabling reversal of stolen funds?
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I mean, what’s @dominicwilliams take on this whole thing? Anybody know if he’s made a definitive statement on where he stands?
Ethereum did when they rolled back the DAO.
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The issue that I am understanding from your responses is :
(a) this content moderation topic was knowable and known; much prior to the takedown notice.
(b) 100m+ was raised from top notch investors. It is not unreasonable to expect that some of those investors raised the very issue of this topic and further it is not unreasonable to assume that detailed plans were shared to combat this issue.
(c) legal teams were formed and working on appropriate responses
(d) public responses (i.e. how Uniswap front end could survive on IC) further bolster the claims in a,b & c.
(e) Therefore , at the first blush, a serious capitulation ("new question ")on a slight incursion (Nintendo takedown) to the very foundation of IC is very worrying.
That said, perhaps there was something that the foundation saw which was not anticipated? @alexa.smith ?
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Yes I thought that also. The DAO hack was divisive and spawned ETC. Since then has Ethereum ever rolled back or forked to reverse transactions? Despite having billions subsequently stolen in various hacks, it only happened once in response to ~15% of total eth tokens being hacked in the DAO. Why has it never happen again despite thefts of billions of dollars? Was the lesson for ethereum following that event learned that forking/governance be used in only the most exceedingly rare circumstances through network forks, or that it should be used for more frequently as a feature to prevent theft?
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I think that’s a great summary of at least the issues that I’m raising – “capitulation” is a really good word for what it seems like.
The entire project was literally billed as “a permissionless blockchain…built to withstand nuclear war” – between everything raised here, something really just isn’t adding up to me.
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I agree with you. Extreme case. Used only once. Hard to imagine it happening again with ETH.
It appears from the recent medium article the badlands model + People parties and secure enclaves or shuffling node membership of subnets is being positioned as the solution for those seeking maximum censorship resistance. scale of thousands of in home node providers, and not introducing NNS ICP voting for governance removals opens up wider possibilities for censorship resistance.
For the data center nodes (non badland node providers) would provide developers with a high performance applications which are willing to sacrifice some censorship for max performance.
The purpose of Badlands will be to allow smart contracts to be hosted upon a network with the maximum conceivable level of decentralization, which anonymous amateurs will provide, with a low barrier to entry, and the maximum conceivable resistance to censorship. This network will have a different ethos, and will be more of a “Wild West” for smart contracts with lower throughput and storage requirements
The unique advantages of Badlands are as follows:
- It will benefit from the maximum conceivable level of decentralization and censorship resistance, something that is held in great esteem by the blockchain community.
- It will have its own Network Nervous System (the permissionless governance system hosted by the Internet Computer that manages and updates the network), and this will exert the will of its community in accordance with its mission and ethos, guaranteeing a more traditional “code is law” environment.
- Even though Badlands will not be nearly as fast or efficient as the Internet Computer, it will utilize the same protocol and code, and therefore still be able to scale its capacity, serve interactive web content, interoperate with other blockchains, and run fast by traditional standards.
- It will be fully interoperable with the Internet Computer main network.
- It would be very difficult to destroy without turning off the internet (assuming nodes disguise their traffic).
- It will introduce amateurs and enthusiasts to being node providers, who may then graduate to becoming professional or semi-professional node providers in the primary Internet Computer network, which is a more expensive and involved endeavor.
The sweet spot for Badlands will be hosting smart contracts that don’t require the efficiency and speed and uptime provided by the Internet Computer — as would, say, a blockchain social network, chat application, or realtime financial exchange. It will provide a Wild West for smart contracts that can directly interoperate with smart contracts on the Internet Computer. It will provide a place for those that aim to host smart contracts on a network with the maximum possible level of decentralization, while allowing amateurs to inexpensively operate nodes from home.
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Here’s a more practical take, let’s forget about any philosophical viewpoints for a second and run through a real situation:
1 - Nefarious actors start repeatedly generating liabilities for node providers 24/7/365.
2 - These liabilities start extending further than copyright notifications when governments start issuing takedown notices for various canisters as well. (Already happening via social media as per leaked documents. Just not widely publicized yet.)
Tell me how any aspect of The Internet Computer survives resembling what it looks like right now in any meaningful capacity.
The explicit claim of Dominic (many times) and The Foundation has been that the network is built to stand up to this.
The response to this incident (I don’t mean your personal response, just the general proposal response) suggests that when push comes to shove, there are many, many, many points of attack which are being glossed over.
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The sheer naivety of thinking you can just come up with some bullet points of nation state rules (which state BTW!?) you’ll choose to implement with the tacit admission you won’t implement others. As if this if going to be allowed fly! If there’s control governments will subject it to their democracies (or whatever other system they have). The only way out of this is to not have any control.
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How about this to satisfy everyone:
Some subnets have canister removal ability, some dont. Node providers choose what subnets to host and app developers choose what subnets to deploy on. Let the market decide.
In the US, EU, etc, node providers will likely only host the moderated subnets because they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into data center hardware and don’t want the risk of legal action. Apps that need the lowest latency will sacrifice some censorship risk.
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