Should we regulate the internet?

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121862785#Comment_121862785

Why would data centers operate any differently? It's up to the content provider or service to route back to it's existing Ips from it's EU licensed IPs. And vpns just won't have EU licensed IPs

As for Authoritarian, we'll be as free and democratic as we were 30 years ago before all this harm was being done to children.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863092#Comment_121863092

But children can't do it easily.

As I said in the Op, I'm not so bothered what adults get up to.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863106#Comment_121863106

So youre agreeing that kids can find technology workarounds. So what's the point of controls that you know from then outset you can't control?

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863080#Comment_121863080

Chinese.

Great bunch of lads.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863153#Comment_121863153

It's a public health measure, if it keeps most kids away from the harmful stuff, it works.

Besides China takes a slightly different approach to what I had in mind. Turns out a few other countries operate my approach which would be far more difficult to bypass.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/159102/has-there-ever-been-a-country-that-implemented-whitelist-based-internet-censorsh

Admittedly the countries using it are either quite or extremely Authoritarian. But a) it shows it's technically quite possible and b) we still have our existing free press etc that served us just fine all along.

dickdasr1234

Aye, god bless the kids but what about the adults?

Online gambling is causing horrific problems and nobody seems to want to tackle the issue at source.

Politicians haven't a clue and will recoil at the idea of being associated with any curtailment of this wonderful 'freedom'.

dickdasr1234

Where does he get the funds to pay for a VPN?

highpitcheric

Ive long been expecting a 2 tier internet.

A 'legit' internet where there are consequences and which is taken more seriously. Probably under national govts control. Limited options and signed into from the start. But really useful for real life stuff. Your face and your ass will be on the line with this internet. You'll have to stand by your words and actions. You'll get letters and knocks on the door if you fk around. Something like whats in China.

And the present more anonymous global version. Which will remain bigger and freer, not controlled but of less local consequence as authority starts to crack down and claim parts. Sort of like radio, its just out there as a tech and sort of a wild part of nature. People will challenge others during disputes 'ok if you're for real go say it on the safe-net'.

I think thats what it will eventually evolve into, and in a way Im surprised its taking so long. I sort of see it morphing slowly though. some sites scan your device manufacturer codes, thats fixed in some circumstances. Your hardware is logged. Theres no dodging it with a new username. Sites of consequence will increasingly demand credentials.

Maybe we'll see a day where young timmy can still access a massive supply of media and sites on the safe-net. And get in trouble for getting caught going on the old-net. so the internet will be tamed, to an extent, but will still remain independent overall. if that happens ill be ok with it. not so much suppression as roided up competition.

Grayson

I think the conversation is going down the wrong route. It's literally impossible to regulate the entire internet. For the worst stuff, there will always be the dark web for example. People will always find their way around restrictions that are put on the technology.

However it's possible to regulate big tech. It's possible to regulate google, facebook twitter. make sure they have good content moderation. make sure they are safe with our information. make sure their products are designed to benefit mental health rather than make it worse (or at the very least be neutral).

jmcc

Most politicians are technologically ignorant. Their "advisors" are so bad that they often make technology journalists look clueful. This is why badly framed legislation like GDPR and NIS2 happens and causes, as in the case of GDPR, unintended damage that makes the Internet less safe.

It was possible to check where a domain name was registered and by who (even i he registration details were fake or recent). That's important with dodgy websites that are causing harm. That's not possible now as the data on many domain names is redacted or simply not published. The owner of a compromised website cannot be easily contacted. This makes the Internet less safe.

Again, the clue factor here and with legislators is a problem when it comes to whitelists of domain names. Most people do not realise the number of domain names that are registered and the fact that domain names are deleted. There are more domain names that have been deleted than are currently registered. Of the domain names in .COM that were newly registered in 2022, approximately 50% were not renewed in 2023. That's tens of millions of domain names that are registered for a year and then deleted. The country code TLDs like .IE and .UK tend to have a better performance.

In 2012, a new round of gTLDs were introduced by ICANN. Some of these were not commercially viable so the registries cut the registration fee from about $10 to $1. That changed the economics of spam, malware and abuse and these gTLDs became filled with such registrations. One of these gTLDs peaked at around 2 million registrations. Five years later, around 2,000 of those domain names were still registered. These low priced gTLDs provided cheap and disposable domain names for abusers. The first year renewal rate for some of these gTLDs is below 5% and the number of registered domain names in these disposable gTLDs is often over a million.In a year, upwards of 90% of domain names in these heavy discounter gTLDs will be deleted. The list of registered domain names for these gTLDs from March 2023 is almost completely different to the one from March 2024.

Whitelists, as a solution, might appeal to the technologically ignorant but they don't work. They cannot work outside corporate networks because domain names are deleted and then reregistered. Thus a whitelist domain name that may have had a working website could be reregistered to serve malware or worse. Even without the malware and abuse aspect, there is a large secondary market in domain names and approximately 9.2% of the 157 million or so .COM domain names that are active are currently on sale. Many of these domain names once had websites and were deleted and reregistered. Whitelists have to be maintained and kept current.

Blocking by IP address might appeal to the technologically unaware. Withe the IP address system that is most commonly used (IPv4), there are 4,294,967,296 IP addresses. Not all of them are in use. These are broken down by ranges of IPs. Countries (via Regional Internet Registries) and organisations are assigned ranges of IPs. It is possible to check the ownership of these ranges of IPs. However, a secondary market in trading IP address ranges has emerged.

Much of the IP ranges allocated to some countries in Africa have been "acquired" and that the majority of these IPs are used by companies in Hong Kong or elsewhere. This is why court orders to have ISPs block IP addresses are futile.Changing the IP address for a website is as simple as editing one line of text and restarting some software. The replacement for IPv4 addressing, IPv6, has 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses.

The simple question for the champions of censorship is this: how do you intend to solve these problems?

Regards...jmcc

Yoshitsune

I do not think it is not a good idea for a government body to try regulate the internet. I think allowing the government to regulate and granting greater control will allow restrictive control on information and spying on citizens. China has there 'The Great Firewall of China', so it is possible to regulate the internet provided with sufficient infrastructure but allows mass censorship anything that the CCP disagrees with as being a surveillance state allowing a stranglehold on lives of average citizens. In recent news, the French parliament allowed their police to spy on their citizens in light of the protests in Paris.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/france-set-to-allow-police-to-spy-through-phones_6044269_7.html#

Outside of politics, what can parents do to protect their children online? I think cybersecurity and computer literacy skills implemented in schools is the ideal situation. Internet culture is rapidly changing and younger generations are more away of current trends compared to their parents from the age of dial up. I think children should be taught how to monitor their actions, recognize misinformation, and take time away from the screen. Of course the parents should play their part, don not give young children a smartphone and encourage other hobbies that develop them as a person rather then resorting to a screen for amusement.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864096#Comment_121864096

I still think you're looking at this from the 'blocking' perspective, instead of a whitelisting approach, which does work, albeit for generally authoritarian purposes in some countries.

You're looking at this in terms of taking control of the million domains out there. What we need to do is allow say 100,000 domains be available in the EU. With the help of automation and user reporting it would be quite a trivial task for an EU body to regularly check that these domains are behaving as they should and haven't been compromised.

I'd wager this would cover the vast majority of legitimate internet use for the general public. Certain commercial entities could still be licensed to access to wider net.

Of course there would be a downside, it would be harder for small enterprises to start online (though this is not insurmountable) and more niche content would be lost (again I think not insurmountable)

I'm not proposing 'controlling the internet', I'm proposing only make a small part of it publicly available.

I think this will happen sooner or later, and I'd wager most people with kids would tell you the sooner the better.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864399#Comment_121864399

So if someone wants to create a website (I have some websites dedicated to niche hobbies) they just aren't allowed to have them on the internet then?

There are 1.3 billion websites on the internet. If we only allow 100,000 websites in the EU, that's 0.0000076% of the internet visible.

So you want to basically make 9.99999934% of the internet unavailable.

I don't think you've thought through the extent of what you're proposing.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863187#Comment_121863187

You're proposing draconian measures which in reality can easily be bypassed at little or no cost to anyone who bothers finding out how.

What exactly is the problem that you're wanting to fix? Is it child welfare online? If so, define the specific risk to them from being online (and why parents shouldn't be interveneing here).

Is it adult online activity you wish to regulate? Again define what specific activity you want to stop adults doing?

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864399#Comment_121864399

Whitelisting appeals to those who do not understand the problem. There are over 300,000 .IE domain names. There is over 10 million .UK domain names, 16 million or so .DE domain names. Even France has over 4 million domain names. You simply don't understand the scale of the problem. As for an EU body to regulate it, these evolutionarily challenged individuals couldn't get anything right let alone anything to do with domain names. They gave the conract to run the .EU ccTLD, the country code TLD, to a mickey mouse registry that had never run a large top level domain. It proceded to make a complete mess of it. Rather than the .EU becoming an alternative to the .COM in the European Union, it was massively plundered by speculators who later dropped most of the domain names when the couldn't resell them. The ccTLD has become a truckstop TLD where people go to a .eu website before being redirected to another website in a country code TLD like .IE or .UK. Approximately 18% of the 3.6 million or so .EU domain names have a developed website. Most real ccTLDs have a development rate of between 30% and 45%.

You simply don't understand the number of domain names and number of websites involved. (Perhaps more than anyone else on Boards.ie, I do understand these issues because this is my work (domain name statistics and web usage measurement).)

If you cannot quantify the problem, you cannot solve it.

Regards...jmcc

GerardKeating

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121863855#Comment_121863855

so many free ones.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864434#Comment_121864434

As a start, yes. I believe we should make that much of the internet unavailable.

That's what most people will be using for their day to day purposes. They'll be able to shop, do their banking, access news sources, and social media sites who moderate content.

I propose after that two options:

1 - Services develop to offer the smaller sites access to approved domains (allowing people to start their online businesses). They will charge to moderate the content, so it will cost, but so be it.

2 - The wider internet is still available in internet cafes and bars which aren't accessible to children.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864469#Comment_121864469

As I've said already, it is child welfare measure.

I think it's widely accepted at this point that an open internet is extremely harmful to children.

Numerous countries have tried intervene but their measure are far too weak, amounting typically to harm control, self-regulation or the type of restrictive measures already so easy to bypass.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864738#Comment_121864738

Ever think of emigrating to China? That's called Blacklisting.

As for "news sources", are you so stupid that you believe that most technology journalists have a clue about technology? Whitelisting is not a viable solution and the Internet routes around censorship. The state-approved "news sources" like the Irish Times, RTE, the Indo etc are losing readers.

Your two options will have this single logical outcome: the elimination, either politically or physically, of the censors. Attempt to take freedom away from people and they will attack those who try to do that. The Internet keeps billions of people occupied and happy.

Regards...jmcc

The Black Oil

The Irish regulator is Coimisiún na Meán, established 12 months ago.

https://www.cnam.ie/

Plutarch

Should we regulate the internet? No. The solution to every problem is not always more state power. Grow up.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864826#Comment_121864826

One of them formerly worked for the Chinese.

Regards...jmcc

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121862143#Comment_121862143

This would be a huge attack on free speech. Many people don't have freedom from their partner or their employer or their community to speak freely. Any authentication model like this would vastly reduce the ability of vulnerable people to use the internet to get and release information.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864774#Comment_121864774

I note the absence of parental responsibility in your post 🙄

Banzai600

what is it with ppl in this country looking to be chastised and thrown into a canvas bag like a snake and told what they can and cannot do. i really despair. P1ss off with your rules.

for example, how about parents take control and responsibility for their kids devices , how they use them, what content they are looking at, or video games they play for example. i know of three families , girls & boys of varying ages from 10 - 17 yrs and their parents monitor their phones, tablets , wifi goes off at 830pm in the house, and devices are off. no harm in it and the kids accept it and sleep soundly. Where's the problem in this?

And you only have to look how brainwashed irish adults here are alone , let alone kids, and any bullsh1t internet kik-kok craze comes , or trend comes about and they follow like sheep, same with Instaspam and their "influencers" , give me a break.

ppl seem to have lost their way bigtime, just because many do it, dont make it necessarily so does it because you seen it on the internet.

There are advantages to social media for sports , hobbies etc is great, but you dont live your life by them 24/7, but most do. Ppl will forgo social situations to be sucked into some stupid video thats doing the rounds or some influencer who boiled and egg that morning.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864774#Comment_121864774

I'm interested to see where you would appear on the political spectrum. Your form of Internet censorship is an extremist position. Would you be more towards the Right (FF/FG/Greens/Labour) or Left (SF/PBP)? Is there a political basis for your desire to censor the Internet?

Regards...jmcc

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864887#Comment_121864887

I'm confident in controlling what smaller kids do online while their in my house. When their at school, playground, parties etc it's out of any parents control.

For teenagers, it's much harder still, even for parents in their home to control.

After that, this is a public health approach, we have to take measures for the children whose parents can't or won't protect them.

Should we allow guns to be publicly available, and have it up to parents to keep their kids away from them?

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864958#Comment_121864958

I'm quite left-leaning and I'd think quite socially liberal in my outlooks.

For the most part I don't care what adults get up to.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864985#Comment_121864985

So more to the Left than SF (which is now a centrist party)? What you are proposing is simultaneously extreme Right and extreme Left in that both positions on the spectrum, when they gain power, depend on controlling people. It isn't a socially liberal stance at all.

Regards...jmcc

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121864970#Comment_121864970

I'm confident in controlling what smaller kids do online while their in my house. When their at school, playground, parties etc it's out of any parents control.

Fine

For teenagers, it's much harder still, even for parents in their home to control.

I managed fine with my teenagers and they lost no interactivity with their friends, etc. It is all about monitoring your kids activity. The only reason it may be harder for a teenager is because you choose not to or it is akward. Well, boo hoo, but learn how to be a responsible parent (and that doesn't require a nonsense proposal to censor the entire internet).

After that, this is a public health approach, we have to take measures for the children whose parents can't or won't protect them.

So your concern is kids with parents who don't take the role seriously? Let's just bring in a policy of removing kids from sh1t parents then?

Should we allow guns to be publicly available, and have it up to parents to keep their kids away from them?

Ah would you GTF?