Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
The system is failing right now. People are exercising any means to get the system to listen. When someone in the system finally listened, the response is to complain that action is happening? Is this ideal? No, but also these aren’t public utilities. We don’t have laws which make them such. We don’t have protections to ensure the utilities don’t cause harm (there’s no obligation to provide power to someone who wired their own home, not up to code because we want to protect our public utilities). Furthermore this gets complicated in terms of who’s hosting the content versus who’s routing it - we might not allow a utility company to shut off power, but we certainly allow the police to do so and we give them instructions on how and when to do it.
Why is the EFF grandstanding and making a blog post about this specific issue when there are so many other examples, including ones that they quite literally link to, where real harm is being caused? KF isn’t suing, this isn’t an announcement about how they are going to provide legal support. This is the system working exactly how it has always worked, and they decide to make this the hill that they wish to die on? There’s a thousand other hills already present why aren’t they getting blog posts?
This isn’t relinquishing control. We never had it. Maybe focus on that? Maybe focus on how things could be better? How the system should work? We don’t need to make a martyr out of these assholes.