It’s definitely a difficult issue. We never should have allowed the Internet to become as centralized as it is now. 😕

I find it difficult to consider a politician in power who wants to exercise control over Internet speech in this way a good guy.

The solution to problems like this would be the fediverse, his campaign could run its own instance…

There are no good guys in this story, are there?

This. So much.

I am old enough to remember many people on the Internet questioning the entire concept of copyright and reacting to it with free licensing, defense of torrent sites, founding Pirate Parties.

Now I read that the primary reason to reject AI is that it is a “thief”??? In the era I described above, someone wrote a song with the lyrics: copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that’s what copying’s for…

See also https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/23/copyright-infringement-still-isnt-theft-even-when-a-microsoft-employee-says-it-is/

I seriously learned how to use computers on Windows XP, so any computer I set up for myself, I set up to be as similar to Windows XP as possible.

Good ruling, but weird reasoning.

I would have thought the reasoning should be that in a legal system based on the rule of law, people need to be notified and able to inform themselves of which laws exist and apply to them. The source in the text of the US Constitution for this idea could be in the part about depriving people of liberty without due process of law.

If a company has no way of knowing or exercising control over whether users are accessing its services from Utah, how can Utah apply any of its state laws to that company?

I think it’s possible to run anything that can be run over a network over Tor. Tor can be set up as a proxy for any piece of software.

Some point in our seventh overall year of school, as I recall, i.e. during the school year in which we turned 13 years old.

I don’t remember being told that, only that we weren’t allowed to use calculators yet, period.

Coincidentally we started to be allowed to use calculators around the first iPhone’s release date. I don’t think those things had anything to do with each other though. 😛

You might enjoy the song “To Know the Unknown” by Innosense.

Mastodon is a source for links to post to Lemmy. :P

Or for that matter another pandemic that mainly affects the elderly.

That world should still be the societal end goal.

“nura” does not mean “current” or “up-to-date”, it means “mere”, just FYI; you may be confusing it with “nuna”

No, there are many convenient things you can do with having cars connect to the Internet. I don’t agree that that’s the answer to this problem.

The answer is that Stallman was right, software should be free as in freedom (i.e. among other things, modifiable by the user), and that includes software that powers cars. If we lived in that world, cars would only connect to the Internet for purposes chosen by the user.

I’m not yet even close to 40, yet I still believe I am one of the “people who built the World Wide Web”, in the sense that I’ve been posting to it for more than 20 years (there are still old forum posts online that I wrote at the age of 10), i.e. before it was something the general public did a lot.

I’m on the one hand proud of how much it has grown and how much more popular it has become; and on the other hand, worried that this has caused governments around the world to pay a lot more attention to it and limit our freedom on it through age verification laws and similar…

Correct, that was decided in a court case in the US. I’m not sure that was a good decision, but you are right that is the legal precedent.

But that case was about pornography; there is no allegation that TikTok is pornography, only that is addictive. Who is going to be next? Is my or your Lemmy instance admin going to be sued because people like using Lemmy too much and one of its users or a government claims that it’s addictive? You can see why that thought process is dangerous for the entire free and open Internet.

Freedom of speech covers all government action, including by the judicial branch by holding people or organizations liable for speech.

Free speech includes the right to receive others’ speech.

In most countries that recognize a right to freedom of speech/expression/opinion, it applies to children too - at least for the most part. Certainly so in the US, which this thread is about. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international convention that makes this explicit.

I mean it literally is. Free speech is the right to distribute information of any kind to anyone.