alt Hacker NewsAnd what would those values and priorities be? Because it doesn't seem to me that they align with what they actually do.
For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.
In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
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You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
I don't know why I'm the only person online willing to steelman this, but...
The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.
People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?
Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.