Should we regulate the internet?

Buddy Bubs

First of all, its not just children I would be worried about. Its adults, and anyone gullible and vulnerable. Some of the stuff I have seen my parents and work colleagues believe is beyond comprehension.

Remember there was a bird of prey over Leinster a few years ago? Someone in work told me to keep my dogs (35kg labradors, I can barely pick them up myself) inside because the bird, which I think was a hawk, could swoop down and take them. Dont be so daft I said, they couldnt pick a labrador up to which I was told it had already picked up a cow from a farm and flown away with it. Baffling.

I have no IT training but years ago I installed a proxy server because our IT manager banned a load of websites in work so we could use facebook (pre smartphones)

Youtube (google) think I live in Turkey, Netflix think I live in Argentina so I get these services for almost free whatever the costs are in those countries. I learned these on boards

My whole family use my netflix account, my Gfs son uses my disney in his house despite it being disallowed.

My spotify family are not my family and dont live with me

If I can do all these things, and I am only doing it out of divilment not because I have to, how are they going to stop people that really really really want to access content and post stuff

Its impossible

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865052#Comment_121865052

It's not impossible, other countries do it, albeit for authoritarian purposes.

Your ISP can block anything but certain approved sites.

It will make the internet very limited, but that's the price.

As I suggested, maybe have the full internet available in pubs and adult internet cafes, but what goes to peoples homes and public wifi, would be a much smaller sanitized version of the internet.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865040#Comment_121865040

Tell me how you protect kids from this...

An incident came to my attention from a family member who's a teacher lately. A fifteen year old boy was sexually assaulted in the toilets of his school by a group of older students. They filmed the entire incident to share it online.

What am I supposed to do, educate my kids to not use the bathroom in school? Have security guards in schools?

I suggest you do a little reading on the subject. The harm being done to kids is massive.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865088#Comment_121865088

Surprised that the Irish Times or the Churnal hasn't offered you your own column yet. :) ISPs canot do that because the domain names of the websites and the IP addresses change. Whitelisting is not a technologically viable solution. Children can bypass such attempts at limiting access.

Regards...jmcc

LambshankRedemption

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

I've been to China. How did I get around the government controlled Great Firewall of China? A VPN.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865088#Comment_121865088

Since you hold up China as an example of what you want to achive, these are the numbers for Chinese gTLD (.COM/NET/ORG/etc) domain names and websites from last month:

gTLD domain names:

15,771,805 on Chinese nameservers.

2,635,305 websites hosted on Chinese IPs.

7,043,477 websites hosted on non-Chinese IPs.

Ireland gTLD domain names:

145,688 on Irish nameservers.

61,620 hosted on Irish IPs.

52,451 hosted on non-Irish IPs.

914,629 websites hosted on Irish IPs.

The last number is due to Amazon AWS Irish IP addresses. Microsoft's Irish data centres typically use US IP addresses. That's the problem with your whitelist approach. A website hosted on a particular country's IP addresses may not even be targeting that market. This is because trans-national hosting of websites is a very complex issue because the country with which an IP is associated can be changed. VPNs do this all the time and VPN companies rent servers and IPs in data centres.

I don't think that CnaM has the technological capability to monitor or determine the target market for websites. It is also limited to dealing with large players like Facebook, X and Google. Even the CSO hasn't the capabilities to determine what is or is not an Irish website. How would you propose to do this and what criteria would you use for a site appearing on your whitelist?

Regards...jmcc

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865088#Comment_121865088

What happens when international ISPs like Starlink tell you to feck off?

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865105#Comment_121865105

You might be a little shocked to hear this, but sexual assault was happening in toilets in this country for hundreds (if not thousands) of years before the internet came along.

In the case you mentioned, the bad thing was the sexual assault, not the internet. And if you want to go one further, by filming the incident using modern technology, they've actually made a record of their crime and can probably be brought to justice far easier.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865105#Comment_121865105

Were the gardai called about this alleged event?

I'm not getting into a public discussion about how I raised my kids. However, I had absolutely no difficulty in being a responsible parent when it transpired that a kid in the school had been murdered. Nor did I encounter pushback from the kids.

What you're throwing back at me is an absence of parental responsibility. Your proposal for internet censorship is not the solution to sh1t parenting.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865326#Comment_121865326

I think it a time ever comes where I've to log into mygovID.ie to access websites I'll be giving up the internet!

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865219#Comment_121865219

China doesn't use the measures I propose.

I believe Cuba, maybe Iran, North Korea, Myanmar and to some degree Turkey do.

Again these are using it for social control purposes. I think we should still allow access for adults to the wider internet but in internet cafes where you need id to enter.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865219#Comment_121865219

All of which would be a problem if I wanted to deal with all these websites.

I propose we don't. We take a very small subset, say 100k and make these available to ISPs which are licensed for home and public use.

Certain commercial entities can access the wider internet as required.

I think it would be extremely difficult to achieve in Ireland, but at EU quite possible.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865344#Comment_121865344

Cuba gTLDs:

349

Locally hosted websites: 58

Externally hosted websites: 46

North Korea gTDs 2

Myanmar:

gTLDs: 255.

Locally hosted websites: 79

Externally hosted websites: 99

Turkey might be a big surprise for you.

gTLDs: 1,624,780

Locally hosted websites: 1,122,022

Externally hosted websites: 110,151

North Korean style control might be a dream of extremists but it would result in dead censors. Take away Internet access and a lot of people will get very angry. Apart from not understanding the technological realities of what your are proposing, you don't seem to have thought about its consequences.

Regards...jmcc

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865414#Comment_121865414

I'm not really taking it away though. You'd only have to go to a licensed premises to get it.

And what comes to your home, or is available in a school or publicly, would be enough to meet the vast majority of your day to day internet needs: TV, banking, shopping, moderated social media, news etc.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865389#Comment_121865389

It is not. The reason is because the people in the EU bureaucracy who would try to implement it are, not to put too fine a point on it, technologically clueless. These are the same type of people responsible for the .EU fiasco and GDPR. They make the Internet less safe because they are incompetent.

These are the people who wanted every DNS to be considered critical infrastructure with contact details available in a hypothetical database for the operator of every DNS. Almost every broadband router has its own DNS and is therefore, under some interpretations of NIS2, critical infrastructure. One example I heard of the other day was that a homeowner with solar cells on the roof is considered the operator of critical infrastructure because there was a connection to the national electricty grid.

At an EU Q&A on NIS2, I asked if they had quantified the number of DNSes that are covered by NIS2. They hadn't. They hadn't a clue. You may trust such people but I don't. There was a proposed amendment (a very good one) to clarify the situation on DNSes and infrastructure but it was rejected. This is the problem with legislation that applies to technologically complex problems. There are rarely any simple solutions and simple solutions only appeal to people who don't understand the problems.

A few years ago, the National Library tried to crawl Irish websites. Simple enough, right? It isn't. First they didn't know the size of the Irish webscape and they had people who had no expertise trying to solve this problem. The company that won the contract for the crawl was the company that runs Archive.org (The Internet Archive). It detects websites by following links in pages. Now, this is a a problem because an "Irish" website may have links to a non-Irish website and the set of links becomes much larger than the set of candidate websites. Then there's the problem of compromised websites were links to drugs websites and worse are injected into the site's database. They may not appear when a human vistor loads a website but search engine crawlers will detect and follow them.

What happens if one of your "approved" websites links to a website that is not "approved"? Congratulations, you've just broken the Internet for people.

Regards...jmcc

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865389#Comment_121865389

How about social networks? Facebook is just 'one website' of your 100,000, however it's also the source of most of the online bullying you're worried about. Would you ban that from your 100,000?

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865326#Comment_121865326

Until one or two of the thousands of sites start tracking some extra information, and holding onto that information a little bit longer than they should - and the lads over at mygov.ie have the information to link your real identity to your social media usage?

Like I said, anonymity is essential for free speech.

Padre_Pio

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865344#Comment_121865344

VPNs work in China and Cuba, I've been to both.

I had the same range of online content in those countries as I had in Ireland.

Buddy Bubs

You'd have lads with half an idea of IT creating breakaway internet's if you banned stuff.

It's a monster that's never going away.

Just have to prosecute people that abuse it and that's almost impossible in many cases too.

One I always remember that I couldn't find online no matter how much I checked was the names of the 2 teenage boys that killed the girl in Leixlip/Lucan, I know there was a big court order that they wouldn't be named but I always wondered why a journalist or a person in a far flung jurisdiction didn't name them to get traffic to their sites/ blogs.

I didn't think the law in Ireland could extend to the globe

Yeah Right

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865519#Comment_121865519

"I'm not really taking it away.......I'm only taking away 99.9999999% of it away".

Listen to the rubbish you're spouting, here. This is a complete and total authoritarian solution which will do sweet feck all to counter the problems that you're trying to address. Socially liberal my left nut, you're proposing a dictator's wet dream, the complete antithesis of a liberal ideology.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865105#Comment_121865105

So, tell us, under your 100k sites proposal, how do you protect kids from this happening in the future?

You block the site that hosts it? What if it's posted to multiple sites? You block them all? So, all of a sudden you're down to 99k sites and everything that can possibly host videos or gifs is now blocked, including Boards, Facebook, instagram, twitter, snapchat, youtube, whatsapp, tiktok, telegram, pinterest, reddit, linkedIn, discord, twitch, tumblr, etc.

That's probably 75%+ of Irish internet traffic gone overnight. This is like using a nuke to kill a cockroach, it honestly looks like you proposed this as a solution and, faced with the glaring impracticality of it all, you're digging in instead of admitting that it is a) unworkable, b) unsuitable, c)impossible to implement and d) a completely inappropriate reaction in the first place.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865678#Comment_121865678

If it didn't apply moderation, yes. But again people can still go and use it at a licensed premises.

If there's a business case for providing moderated social sites it will be met.

I think your argument here gets to why we need to introduce this sort of measure. A lot of these big tech business models just don't allow for child-safety. Them pretending they'll moderate or control content are lies. Likewise any softly, softly measures to encourage them to moderate and control are doomed to failure.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865582#Comment_121865582

That's why the number is limited. So we can check if an 'approved' domain isn't returning what it should and stop it until the genuine service provider works with us to fix the issue.

That's not a huge job, using automation to help, for 100,000 websites. Even a million wouldn't be so difficult.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865775#Comment_121865775

Who gives out the random email?

AndrewJRenko

So Apple can link the random email to the site in question then?

eightieschewbaccy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865935#Comment_121865935

What you're proposing is taking the responsibility off of parents and making the Internet a far less free place. So I would have been a teen in the early 2000s and I totally saw plenty that I shouldn't have. I equally frequented websites that taught the fundamentals of hacking. Honestly, my parents had very little knowledge of my online activities.

Many of the entirely legitimate websites that I used could easily be interpreted as bad or even dangerous. However in spite of largely unmoderated access to the Internet, I largely turned out fine. I'm an experienced software engineer as a result of it.

There are parts of the Internet that need to be regulated to some extent and I say that in terms of data mining, disinformation by foreign regimes and just overall privacy. Standard laws on illegal material should apply also. However proposing outright draconian rules to prevent general online access to the vast majority of the Internet? It's incredibly dangerous and anyone with half a brain will work out how to bypass it if they want.

MegamanBoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121866085#Comment_121866085

I am happy you turned out fine. At the same time I'd suggest we shouldn't decide how we deal with the internet based on one individuals experience.

There's a ton of evidence out there on the harm being done to kids. I'd think aswell that there's far more kids with access to smartphones etc now than did in the early 2000s.