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practical_romantic  1yr ago (text post)   3308 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It seems the choke points on the internet, currently, are (1) companies like Cloudflare that protect sites from DoS attacks, (2) payment processors, and (3) ICANN registration. There are enough hosting companies that KF could have kept hopping around so long as they were a Cloudflare client. I haven’t seen too much controversy around ICANN. But we are seeing weird stuff around payment processors. Some of the conditions placed on porn sites are odd and arbitrary…

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cherie-deville

…as in, not full-stop anti-porn, but byzantine as to the specifics of what is allowed. And PayPal recently had to walk back a company policy where they could confiscate a set amount of money from users engaging in “disinformation”.

But we are seeing weird stuff around payment processors.

Operation Choke Point. The conspiracy fact that Democratic administrations secretly and illegally coordinate with banks to deny banking services to porn sites, gun accessory sellers and others. When they did it under Obama they made sure to not write anything down in order to frustrate investigations into their malfeasance.

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