Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.
This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.
Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.
Matt Fitzgibbons says it’s like the ancient Roman roads. I’m not sure the analogy works very well, but I do think that it would be wasteful to deorbit it. When he says it’s “only” three or four billion a year, I don’t think he appreciates how much more we’ll be able to do for much less in the near future, But I also think in the next decade we’ll have the ability to move it higher, and preserve it as a museum.
Related: Watch Kimberly Strassell dismantle the WaPo “fact checker” on Bruce Ohr.
As an aside, Twitter threads have become a way of routing around the limitations of first the 140, then 280-character limit of the medium, to turn them effectively into blog posts, at which one can jump in at any time.
Since it’s been so much in the news lately, I thought it would be useful to link to Coyote’s case for it from a year ago. I disagree with his recommendations about withdrawing from the OST, but he explains why a separate service is necessary.
Is it the future of the Democrats?
I hope so, because if so, it means, finally, the death of this old horrific, racist, and now totalitarian political party.