Kicking bad actors off of the mainstream Internet

Wanted to branch this discussion off of the whole Parler-being-dropped-by-AWS thing that largely got buried in the Insurrection 2021 thread.

For context: Alt-right social media site Parler was used by white supremacists and other right-wing extremists to plan and execute (and later, self-incriminate over) the January 6 storming of the US Capitol. This righteously pissed off most of America, and cloud hosting megagiant Amazon Web Services kicked Parler off of its services for failing to so much as lift a finger to discourage its users from fomenting terrorist plots in the open.

This is basically an Internet death sentence. As @CLWheeljack noted in the aforementioned thread, the technical realities of distributed cloud architecture for a modern consumer-scale web app like Parler make it basically impossible to migrate off of your cloud provider no matter how “platform agnostic” your engineers tell you they’ve made things. Even world-class engineers can’t really do that without more or less rebuilding the whole thing, and Parler for some reason does not seem to have attracted world-class engineering talent.

So.

Today I came across (from that same mailing list, not shockingly) an article by a super-smart lady about how Internet network peerage works on a contractual level and effectively gives the tier-1 backbone providers effective control over which bits get passed around the tubes.

Even extremely large tech companies that have their own data centers, like Facebook and Apple, are ultimately beholden to ISPs. (Google is something of an odd case because in addition to owning their own data centers, they are one of the largest global network operators. Google owns extensive fiber routes and peers with Tier 1 ISPs as an equal.) And even though AWS has, to some degree, a network of its own, it is effectively a Tier 2 ISP, making it beholden to the AUPs of its upstream. Other cloud providers are typically mostly or fully transit-dependent, and are thus entirely beholden to their upstream.

In short: Everyone who hosts content companies, and the content companies themselves, is essentially trapped, by the chain of AUP obligations, to policing content to ensure that it is not illegal, harassing, or otherwise seen as commercially problematic.

She then goes on to explain how persona non grata like Parler are relegated to primarily Russian providers to actually host their applications, which is of course fraught with any number of additional issues.

The upshot of all this is that there exists a de facto standard of behavior, as enforced by these cascading contract terms that come down from the backbone providers, the contravention of which get you more or less an Internet death sentence.

What I want to explore is this: Is this ideal? Should more formal multilateral agreements between polities take a more active role in what is and isn’t allowed to be on the (for lack of a better term) “public” Internet? Is this sort of organically grown-and-agreed-upon set of behavioral standards actually a better situation than getting the politicians involved?

From the article:

It’s an interesting result of what happens when businesses police themselves. Even without formal industry-association “rules” or regulatory obligations, a fairly ironclad order can emerge that exerts extremely effective downstream pressure (as we saw in the cases of 8Chan and the Daily Stormer back in 2019).

I don’t have a clear answer to this. Personally I tend toward practical technocratic solutions to societal problems like this, and I think I am coming down for the moment on “not broke, don’t fix” in the sense that I have little faith that political action would actually result in better outcomes. Not that I don’t love clicking through cookie warnings thanks to the loving oversight and gentle guiding hand of the wise elders at the EU.

I’ll worry about it right after I worry about ISIS getting back access to mainstream internet.

I kind of think Internet is or should be a public utility, which adds an additional complication.

Generally, you can’t turn off someone’s water or electricity in these types of situations, AFAIK. Depending on the country of course.

Though in this case I don’t really care what bad things happen to Parler. They can hire lawyers if they need to.

Oh for sure, this is very much a “what is the most robust solution here?” and not “this is a huge problem right now!”

I would argue that these things are essential services in a way that access to the Internet is not.

I like the idea of Internet as being a public service that isn’t as subject to the whims of private entities, but it should not be elevated to the level of an inalienable human right. You should definitely be subject to consequences for acts or speech that could be deemed harmful.

Dunno. My brain hurts going there.

Let’s say that access to the internet is a right. That doesn’t make doing whatever you want on it wherever you want a right.

Free speech is a right. You can’t walk into my house and start screaming without my permission.

Absolutely. My argument is that it should not be elevated to the level of water or electricity, as was the example in Yak’s post. As far as I know there’s not many things you can do that should result in the loss of access to those utilities.

A further wrinkle is that if the politicians did get further involved, the U.S…'s hands would be tied much more than any other country by the First Amendment and the extensive history of litigation that surrounds it. Rules written by non-private actors would be written by non-US polities.

Well, I don’t know about other countries, but I’d have a pretty hard time interacting with government services here without the internet. I’m not even sure I could file paper taxes anymore.
In general, though, without it I’d lose the ability to look up business (contacts, hours, address, location…), find jobs, get routes, order a bunch of stuff I can’t get nearby, entertainment options would be pretty bad, news access would be pretty limited, learning too… You could live and get by, at serious disadvantage.

As to the topic… since it actually works, despite all the reasons it shouldn’t, I’m okish with how things are. But it gets so much more worse than backbone providers, like the 13 DNS servers in which it all rests, timezone maintenance, the registrar wild west, or how to make sure time isn’t screwed with. They’re all getting better by clever solutions, but it’s icky down there.

Right, that’s the point. Similar to how your life might change if you lose your driver’s license because of drunk driving. Water and electricity are on a whole different level from being able to drive or use the Internet.

But yeah, as far as the topic, I tend to agree that it’s tough to think of a system that would work better than what we have now without overhauling how human societies operate across the globe.