This is dead on. Well said.

I want to just muse a bit though, because while I think the current axe grinding is facetiously bad, I can see things getting worse & do want to at least recognize some threats where I feel like the government might really have a role in mandating service.

Right now I'm at two cases, both of which I can see from different angles & feel differently about.

1. The idea of social media platforms that would filter (or, heavens, modify) conversations between consenting DM'ing folk scares me a bit, and this is absolutely an active situation in the authoritarian countries of the world and it doesn't sit well and right now I feel like some kind of democratic principles have a compelling stake even against private companies (& especially against the government itself, but that's whole nother enchilada).

2. Literally no one being willing to peer/transit you. When CloudFlare or AWS says no to KiwiFarms or Stormfront, I have zero sympathy. These are service providers. They ought not have their name tainted by affiliation, association with folks they don't want to host. I'm fine with that, because those are not critical services to getting or being online: they are convenient service providers, but fundamentally, being on the internet is just having some computers in a rack, and having interconnect and peerage and transit so people can talk to your servers. This is a much lower-level bar.

If we start getting to the place where setting up your own servers starts to become impossible (which so far has never been a real circumstance), I start to get alarmed. But also... transit is a service. Being in a data-center with an Internet Exchange (IX) (or having fiber to an IX switch in such a place) is a service. A much much lower level service though.

Yet there's only a matter of degrees between CloudFlare refusing service & these fundamental internet connectivities saying: no, we refuse service. Democracy's/government's ability to navigate what is an essential connectivity service- which must necessarily to a high degree be content neutral- with higher-order providers is a key struggle that I see as enormously difficult. Which is to say, I do think there is a very real case for Hurricane Electric, I do think there is a case for Layer7 to be government mandated essential service providers, who don't get to pick who they carry. And there must be some kind of not-totally-unreasonable rate charged. There has to be some Postal Service of the internet, be it public or private. Someone who is content neutral, private or the government itself as a provider of last resort; but to me, it is extremely low layer of essential services that must be broadly available.

And that itself opens up the reciprocal can of worms. There's definitely some kind of line somewhere we shut off essential services. It'd be interesting to know some case law about who the post office or other public utilities can claim exception to giving service, where they say, no, you're a proven problem, you're on your own, we no longer will help you.

There is interesting situations I want to consider. Just, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever to me about any of the current whining aggrieved political man-children of politics who bitch & moan & whine & are completely f-ing off their rocker wrong.

So far, cyberspace has done an admiral job of navigating challenges & I have no complaints, even if I think