Saving the internet from Big Tech, Part 1 - Defining the problem

The big picture

As anyone who's been paying attention knows, censorship by the major progressive tech companies has been ramping up of late. Alex Jones and his ventures were recently deplatformed fairly thoroughly to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and now Gavin McInnes and his Proud Boys were banned from Twitter for... nothing, as far as I can tell.

Go read @cheah's article Silicon Valley Strikes Again for a more detailed account of the recent bans.

What people seem to have forgotten is this started almost exactly a year ago when The Daily Stormer was deplatformed over the course of about two days. That was a trial balloon, folks, and when the outcry was muted and short-lived---those dirty skinheads deserved it!---Big Tech saw that as a greenlight to go ahead with more of the same. Whether they intentionally waited until a few months before the 2018 US midterm elections is up in the air, but it would not surprise me if that was the case.

The reality is the progressive left is determined to stamp out all dissent on the internet. Last year it was The Daily Stormer. Now, Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes. By next year, who knows? Maybe they'll be hunting down small timers like me.

It's long past time we did something about this. But first, let's lay some blame.

Blame

There are two groups at fault in all this, and frankly, the bulk of the blame lies with the users. We gave Big Tech this power. We got fat and happy using their "free" centrally-controlled platforms and stopped managing our own data, our own servers. And now practically everybody I can think of is very vulnerable to attack because they decided to set up shop in enemy territory. Worse, they didn't bother to move to safer ground when they heard the war drums start to beat and the cannon start to fire.

I do not know why people insist on using platforms controlled by declared enemies. I wish I could tell you. When I've asked, I've been met with silence. I can't tell if most people are simply lazy, lack the knowledge of how to run their own sites, or both.

Of course Big Tech gets its share of the blame, but being angry at them is like being angry at a tiger for eating your pet goat. What the fuck did you think they were going to do? They're acting exactly in line with their principles.

Details

Most people don't know how the internet works, so I'll lay it out in simple terms. If you don't understand these basics, my next two articles will be worthless to you.

When you have a website, it lives on a server (a computer with special software), usually a server you're renting a slice of from someone else. The data physically resides on the server's data drive and runs on its hardware. That server has an IP address, which is akin to the physical address of your house. If someone wants to send data to or get data from your server, they need to know the IP.

The company in control of your server is your web host.

But, humans aren't good at remembering long(ish) numbers or assigning meaning to them. We're much better with names. That's why sites have URLs like steemit.com or twitter.com. You can run a server without a domain by pointing people to your public IP address, but it's an awkward way to do things. Thus, to run a website effectively you have to register a domain name.

The company you registered that domain with is your registrar. Often people register their domain name with their web hosting company. (This is a bad idea.)

Think of domains as the names in a phone book and IPs as the phone numbers. You enter the domain in the browser or click a link and DNS, the domain name system, looks up what IP to point your request to.

DNS servers are managed by ISPs, large companies like Google, random people... usually, you're using the DNS provided by your internet service provider.

Internet traffic, the packets of data going back and forth between your computer and whatever server it's talking to, is managed by multiple layers of internet service providers. There's no need to get into details here, but suffice to say there are three tiers of ISPs. Your residential internet is supplied by a Tier 3 provider.

So far we're up to these entities making the internet work:

Web hosts - where your data lives
Registrars - who you buy your domain name from
DNS servers - connect your domain name to your server IP
Internet service providers - manage traffic generally

This is the core of the internet. Then there are what I'll call low level and high level services.

Low level services are things like remote distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, which help stop botnets from effectively attacking websites and saturing their connections so that legitimate users can't connect. Cloudflare offers remote DDoS protection. Another example of a low level service is a content delivery network (CDN), which lets you serve (for example) video to lots of users at once during high demand periods without owning your own very expensive collection of distributed servers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure both offer CDN services.

Low level services are usually transparent to the end user, but critical for serving large amounts of data or keeping your site protected and available.

High level services are things like ecommerce sites (Amazon, Shopify), blogging platforms (Blogger, wordpress.com), Twitter, Youtube, Disqus, search engines, etc. These are very visible, because the business you're doing on them takes place on the high level service providers' platforms or their service is embedded in your site.

Censorship in high level services is annoying, but not crippling unless you've left yourself vulnerable. This is the most common, and easiest, way Big Tech SJWs can mess with you, but the reality is if you're big enough to be targeted for a mass-deplatforming, you should've been building your own platform to begin with. Other than social media, everything the centralized platforms can offer you, you can do yourself with low to moderate effort. Stop being fucking lazy/cheap.

Censorship in low level services can be a major problem, because it can render you unable to deliver your content without significant investment in infrastructure if you can't get the service at all. It's also not particularly common because the people working at these companies need to be competent, and competent people are less likely to play stupid games over imagined slights. Choose your service providers carefully, don't just jump on the cheapest one or the one whose name you recognize. Look at their track records and be ready to jump ship if you see them denying services for wrongthink. Do your research when buying system-critical services.

Censorship at the core level can also be a major problem for the average unprepared person, but it's also rare and, I believe, unlikely to become widespread. This is close to utility-level stuff, and I do not believe widespread censorship at the core level would be tolerated by anybody for long. Competitors would spring up to serve the market, the government would act, and tech nerds like me would work to get around the attempted censorship. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't use good practices when setting up your core services. I'll talk about that in detail in another post.

More to come

There are two basic things I want to talk about in my next couple posts:

First, what you can do to help insulate yourself from Big Tech's shenanigans. It's not that hard to get off high level services and build your own platforms, even if you don't control your own low/core services. With smart decision-making, you can become very resilient to attack when you're not relying on high level SJW-controlled services. Big Tech has much less power than people think, once you stop relying on their platforms.

Second, what I think we should be doing long term to pull Big Tech's teeth. No, the answer is not blockchain, and the answer is also not to just copy the cash-burning "free" centralized platforms Big Tech has provided to keep us penned and under control. We need to get users to accept responsibility for managing their own data again, and the way to do that is by making it as easy as possible while specifically avoiding centralized control of services.

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Image of Mark Zuckerberg without his human contact lenses - source unknown