it won’t take long for big companies to come knocking, trying to take over our communities. what’s the plan of action then? do we have to fear suing?
it won’t take long for big companies to come knocking, trying to take over our communities. what’s the plan of action then? do we have to fear suing?
So, what I would guess is that they would take a similar tack to other decentralized services or FOSS initiatives. You find people that are using the technology to skirt an existing law, for instance sharing pirated media, circumventing encryption, or some other thing that shouldn’t be a crime, but technically is. Then, you demonize the whole technology for that one set of infractions. Make an attempt to ban the whole the technology, but then walk it back to just a set of regulations that make it almost impossible to comply.
They could just host it offshore then and if it comes to it people who truly wanted to access it could just use a VPN. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot by causing awareness of the public about it as well. It’s really hard for a government to “ban” an app or service online unless they’d plan on setting up great firewall-esque system, and not only is that extremely expensive but its very imperfect and glitchy due to the nature of the internet as a whole. I know even then people say “oh they’ll just ban vpns then” it goes back to the same thing above. Like, they can make it kind of harder to access but they aren’t fully “banning” it no matter how hard they try to and I think the general population here would fully be capable of finding ways around such restrictions.
It is a bit more complicated than that, but ultimately you are right. I am not really afraid of a ban but rather the soft legislation that simply disincentivizes it. Throwing cold water on a project before it is even off the ground is enough to kill something without ever coming out against it entirely.