This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Texas v. Bad Porn Sites
[Past discussion here. I'm going to use "Kick" as shorthand for Kick Online Entertainment. I'm also avoiding the name of the website, both because the entire point is that it doesn't work, and because it's genuinely notorious.]
Reclaim The Net reports:
In the immediate sense, this isn't an End To The Open Internet. Kick isn't some purveyor of deep and uncomfortable truths, and on top of that is an extremely unsympathetic defendant, even by the standards of porn site managers. They got hit with a ruinous fine in no small part because they were in clear violation of the Texas HB1181 age verification requirement, but also because they simply didn't show up. Verisign is a US company subject to any state judge with a court order, and thus almost all .com domain names are subject to their policies, but as other cases have shown, just because one court issues an order doesn't mean another state will actually have to enforce it. Other top-level domains aren't maintained by operators in the United States or maintaining a US presence, though they're likely to play along with ICANN anyway. There's a handful of extant alternative DNS systems, and you can technically navigate to a website without a domain name at all, or by adding a host file record manually... but those things are all toys, impractical or nonviable for even a small website targeting technically adept users. That's why going after the domain name matters to start with.
Kick's website came back up under a .xxx domain name (maintained by GoDaddy, whose past deplatforming decisions make it a particularly strange decision for Kick), and was then taken offline at a hosting level before GoDaddy could get involved, downstream of an unrelated Dutch criminal investigation. Again, maximally unsympathetic defendants. ((To deflate some of the ReclaimTheNet reporting, while the court order says "It is further ordered that as many writs as the state deems necessary shall issue", it doesn't look like the state has gotten a subsequent writ to go after the .xxx domain name.))
But it's still a state court bringing an enforcement action that takes a website off the planet, to enforce a law that only a tiny fraction of that website's users would plausibly be covered by.
There is some novelty in the compliance posture: the court's order requires both financial bond and implementations following state law (and, notably, not just refusing to serve Texas IPs). But it doesn't matter much for this case. Kick is not philosophically predisposed to comply to start with, has no way to credibly demonstrate future compliance, Texas has been pretty vague about what age verification process is acceptable to start with, many of the commercial age verification providers wouldn't want to work with Kick anyway, and actually trying to act on it would require actually ponying up a bond that the state could easily take at any time. Similarly, there's some arguments about the court's statutory authorization, citing Texas Rule 599 that seems more built to satisfy judgements than statutory compliance, but it's a long shot when the court issued the judgment to start with, and it doesn't matter since Kick can't and won't contest it.
Still, a domain name takedown as a court order isn't unprecedented. The Department of Homeland Security has been getting domain name takedowns for reasons ranging from copyright violations to terror designations to deepfakes. There's been far more questionable takedowns, from a raw legal process perspective, than this. And they weren't that effectively reviewable, either: the punchline for the 1dmx takedown, as far as I've been able to search, is that no one's really had to talk about the entire thing when sued. Kentucky threatened to go after a bunch of poker domain names in the 2008-2010 range, though it accepted geo-location blocking.
But there's a bit of a difference in scope. 1dmx was a big deal involving nationwide protests and federal agents and allegedly high-level actors in at least one country's political infrastructure. Kick Online runs/ran a notorious web site that had been a longstanding target of both religious and feminist activists. As a hypothetical, if Gatalog gets blammed, it's going to have done so while making national news and attracted the personal attention of California's governor.
Where does that stop? There's a slope available, and the direction doesn't look great.
This could, theoretically, be the one principled exception for Texas. Age verification is a genuinely hard problem in the sense that people are unusually motivated to bypass it, compliance could theoretically be possible without infringing speech or privacy (even if actual implementations universally do both), and laws focused on protecting children get a bit of a handicap even where they mostly effect adults. We're still talking Ken Paxton, though.
And it doesn't actually matter, because even if Texas' next governor and attorney general had precise and dedicated legalistic compliance to the broadest principles of free speech every case but this one, there's a million other jurisdictions available.
Historically, the average person could depend on a certain apathy: even where a thousand different books of law and ten thousand different judges had the power to rake you over the coals in theory, legal limits like jurisdiction and practical limits like attention and visibility meant it took some real doing in practice. That's less clear a defense, now that every jurisdiction from a one-horse town up can plausibly and reasonably develop grudges against outfits that most citizens have never heard of, and now that states can find personal jurisdiction in an e-mail.
Worse, selecting for randos also selects for people who can't and won't defend themselves. Contesting the case would require funding a lawyer to stand in a highly disfavored setting, in a jurisdiction willing to write laws specifically targeting the company, in a civil case with correspondingly low standards of proof and no right to court-appointed representation for the indigent. Even if Kick could finance it, and that's pretty far from clear, the law in question here applies as easily to a 'business' regardless of income, and where Texas HB1181 only applies to a "legally recognized business entity", there's no legal or practical reason it'd stop there.
Seems like the law is quite complicated here but it seems that at least in the US the court cannot compel a takedown of content because of s230 protections, but a domain is a different story, and domain seizures are well supported under US law. I guess the fact is you don't need a domain to host some content, so you can pass around a bare ip or onion all you want, and tell texas to pound sand. And of course go jurisdiction shopping for a domain with more permissive laws.
Domains have already been subject to pretty bad censorship, mostly private, and that's why most wrongthink websites don't have a .com. This doesn't really change anything in that respect. And of course the fact that s230 means the government can't order your host to nuke your website, doesn't mean that your host can't decide themselves to nuke the website for whatever reason they want.
There's enough arms length here that it's unlikely that a court can order icann to threaten a regional registry to take down a domain. I bet the judges won't even try, and if they do they'll be slapped down badly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link