Re: [Pearg] descriptive censorship work: draft-hall-censorship-tech

(A quick note that I haven't been able to keep up with this conversation as
I've been preparing to testify in the USA today on another part of my work
unrelated to this (election security). I'll be able to jump back into the
conversation tomorrow; thank you all for your patience!)

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 05:10 Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=
40open-xchange.com@dmarc.ietf.org> wrote:

>
>
> > Il 19 maggio 2019 03:37 Amelia Andersdotter <amelia@article19.org> ha
> scritto:
> >
> > To be fair, Facebook faces fines in the order of tens of millions of
> > euros if they fail to block something they should have blocked.
> > Over-blocking has indeed been a persistent concern among those groups
> > who have argued that blocking is not a good solution to any particular
> > content moderation problem.
>
> It's true that, in the end, most independent blocking decisions by private
> companies derive from the fear of legal trouble, which by definition
> derives from a law and thus from a political/governmental decision. So I
> see why you could argue that most private censorship still indirectly
> derives from governmental pressure (the other big case I see is that of
> pro-intellectual-property upload filters, which until a couple of months
> ago were not legally mandated, but were privately adopted to avoid
> potential litigation with copyright owners; but one could say that this was
> still a consequence of a legal framework biased in favour of protecting
> commercial IP rights).
>
> There are however a few cases in which it's quite hard to establish this
> connection; think for example of the Google Shopping case[1], which IMHO is
> indeed a form of private censorship. This does not derive from indirect
> legal pressure - on the contrary, it was ruled as illegal - but only comes
> as a consequence of private business interests.
>
> In the end, I am really afraid of a future in which more and more
> censoring power is in the hands of private companies, so I would like the
> draft to cover that as well.
>
> Ciao,
>
>
> [1]
> https://www.beuc.eu/blog/how-google-is-eroding-consumers-freedom-to-choose/
> --
>
> Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
> vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com
> Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
>
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-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
Chief Technologist, Center for Democracy & Technology [https://www.cdt.org]
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