And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.

I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.

Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.

The root problem of course is their de facto monopoly status, as gatekeepers of the internet (if they aren't secretly an NSA run company, the NSA is probably very jealous of what they've done), but this would be so much worse if they decided to play internet editor.

It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)

Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.

You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?

</s> (just in case)

EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...

I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.

I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.

Likely, the country that wanted to do this finds themselves isolated on their own network, not their target isolated from the internet. Even if that country as is large and powerful as the United States. Perhaps the answer might have been different, 20 years ago or even 15, but everything has changed and there's no going back.

Countries like Russia or China spend billions on controlling the flow of information on their own land. Countries like Iran go out of their way to blackhole the traffic whenever any disruptions or political violence happens in the country, and for every Nepal, where this backfired terribly, there's a dozen cases of countries doing that and getting away with it. And you're proposing we just help the authoritarians out by doing their dirty work for them.

Sure, let's do that! Give their propagandists a win, leave everyone who's in those countries now hang out to dry in an information black hole! Let the abuses perpetuated by their own governments go unseen and unheard! All to preserve the Good Web, For Good People Only.

...But, of course, US corporations enforcing the same kind of censoring is a-OK, because corporations are people and their censorship is free speech.

I'll be open to your posititon the day Boticelli's Venus doesn't get censored on FB because there's a pair of tits somewhere on the painting.

blocking that interferes with access to legitimate sites that i might use to buy or sell products and communicate with potential customers should be a violation of these agreements.