These new laws are brutal and scary. It's nice to see individuals and companies fighting this. I agree with their sentiments and their point of view.
However, playing the devil's advocate, I'm not sure I'm 100% convinced by their (or my own) arguments. What happens when you apply the argument of shutting down parts of the Internet, even for a seemingly good reason, is still censorship to more socially unacceptable things? Messages of hate, tools for murder, child pornography?
Doesn't Google already sensor the internet for such things? Are we just trying to avoid heading down a slippery slope (which I fully support)?
I guess I'm just trying to get a sense for how this differs from those other cases I mention, and how the arguments being made apply in the context that things are already censored.
Messages of hate, tools for murder, and child pornography are the downside to having a free society. What's good is that we can stamp out child abuse and murder in ways other than censoring the Internet. (After all, murder and child abuse happened long before the Internet or computers were invented. We dealt with it then, we can deal with it now.)
When giving someone a freedom, you have to balance the good that freedom can do versus the bad the freedom can cause. The freedom of speech is important because the benefits outweigh the risk. Being able to freely discuss election results is more good than someone selling murder-for-hire is bad, because the functioning of society as a whole is more important than one person's right to not be murdered. (Imagine if the Internet were censored. Would we have heard about Diebold's faulty election machines? Would we have had a recount in Florida? Probably not: nobody would have been able to talk about it for fear of losing their domain name or Internet access.)
Censorship is the opposite of a freedom, but the same rules apply: will the "bad" that censorship prevents be worth the "good" that is suppresses? It's not going too well for China, so I'm not sure why we think it would be good in the US.
If you take out your first sentence and your last phrase, which are both subjective, isn't the rest true for all forms of current censorship?
I'm having a hard time reconciling my thoughts that censorship is bad with the fact that I'm thankful that some stuff is censored. Is the only difference between the two that I want to pirate stuff but I don't want to look at child pornography?
Also, I still think that if you're going to call out all forms of censorship as something bad, that the ends never justify the means, than you better be prepared to answer why you're already censoring stuff.
By your logic, we should all live in government-run internment camps, just in case anyone wanted to produce child porn. Solitary confinement and constant State supervision would prevent that.
It would also prevent everything good that has ever come out of a free society. Art. Medicine. Literature. Technology. All gone forever.
Is preventing child abuse so important that it's worth trading in our humanity?
There are things that overwhelmingly tip the right and wrong scale, things that are morally reprehensible and harmful, copyright infringement isn't one of those things.
However, playing the devil's advocate, I'm not sure I'm 100% convinced by their (or my own) arguments. What happens when you apply the argument of shutting down parts of the Internet, even for a seemingly good reason, is still censorship to more socially unacceptable things? Messages of hate, tools for murder, child pornography?
Doesn't Google already sensor the internet for such things? Are we just trying to avoid heading down a slippery slope (which I fully support)?
I guess I'm just trying to get a sense for how this differs from those other cases I mention, and how the arguments being made apply in the context that things are already censored.