On Monday, January 11, 2021, 10:57:30 PM PST, Zenaan Harkness
wrote:
On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 06:24:31PM +, coderman wrote:
> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
>> On Monday, January 11, 2021 7:26 AM, jim bell wrote:
>
> > >Jim Bell's comment:
> >
> > >Again:. This is a blatant Anti-trust violation.
> >
> >> See Sherman and Clayton Antitrust acts.
>
>> Jim, when every provider out there rejects your platform for facilitating
>> treason and mob violence, it's not anti-trust - it's common sense and
>> national consensus!
>Aka "censorship is the new national concensus".
>A stunning position for a purported anarchist to take...
It's not clear to which comment you are responding.
I should point out that my reference to the Sherman and Clayton Anti-trust acts
should not be taken as if it were my 'approval' of those laws, or their
enforcement, and certainly not as if I approved the Federal Government of the
United States. I mean that those laws do exist, and with the current
controversy we can reasonably ask ourselves how 'we' (the country's people, and
including various levels of government) have gotten to where we currently are.
Myself, I am absolutely outraged that, the country and virtually the world
moving the "Town Square" of the 1700's to the Internet in about 1995, and
seemingly having it functioning smoothly until the last few years, suddenly
mammoth corporations (that got that way, and that big, in part due to toeing
the government line, and getting government protections such as Section 320).
While I do agree that a tiny bit of Federal Government research planted a tiny
'seed' in designing the Internet Protocol, I believe that credit for making the
Internet available to most citizens was...the few companies that actually
designed and made those 9600 bps modems, followed by the 14.4Kbps modems, and
even later the 28.8kbps modems. Put simply, if those modems hadn't existed, we
wouldn't have been able to take advantage of our POTS (Plain Old Telephone
Service) lines, sampled at 8,000 samples per second, using the companding
compression system, "mu-law".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C-law_algorithm (I don't know how to
make my computer display the Greek letter "mu", which looks somewhat like a
script 'u'.)
Since 'we', the early users of the Internet, were using government-regulated
Yes, I have a "libertarian hat" and I usually wear it. Nevertheless, since I
did spend more than 15,000 hours in a Federal prison law library learning many
different kinds of Federal laws (Contract Law, Tort Law, Libel Law, Criminal
Law, Civil Rights Law, and yes, even INCLUDING Federal Anti-Trust law,
surprisingly enough!), I feel qualified to point out problems and
inconsistencies, and indeed places where government could choose (following, at
least, its own laws and rules) to step away, in some ways, or step in, in other
ways, to correct a now-major problem that its own actions partly caused.
That doesn't mean that my observations (all of them) should be considered to
comply with "libertarian principles". The reality is that America isn't (yet)
a libertarian society, nor is the rest of the world. Yet, I feel that I am
intellectually entitled to propose ideas for making society better than it is
today, even if these limited proposals don't 'go all the way' to a libertarian
society. In other words, going in the right direction, but not as far as I'd
like.
The way I see it, government (and mostly the Federal Government) CAUSED, at
least indirectly (and somewhat directly, too) the problems we have been seeing
with the censorship in the major Socialist-Media (What I call 'Social Media").
I say that at this moment, the biggest threat to our freedom, at least the
most immediate and imminent threat right now, comes from companies named
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Apple.
Consider: When Facebook decided to offer a service, did it string up it own
data links, all over the country? No, it piggy-backed onto an already-existing
system, which once was called "Arpanet" but was eventually split into
"Internet" and "Milnet". It did that, of course, to avoid duplication of
effort. From a POV of 'conventional' American law, maybe it would/could be
determined by the existing (non-libertarian) government that the service 'has
to follow' rules.
Today's local Internet service already has a problem: Not too many localities
have any realistic competition in Internet service. Many areas have
telephone-line legacy services, and cable-TV legacy services. But you rarely
find localities with more than three Internet providers.
We've had a situation where for years, Facebook and Twitter, etc, appeared to
not 'play sides'. They lobbied for Section 320, which gave them serious
advantages, but knowingly with the requirement that they not censor. (except,
arguably, certain minor kinds of censorship not relevant to this
