Ask HN: Is it technically possible to evade big-tech censorship?

It's not just tech companies which are cancelling. By Parler's own admission from their CEO, banks and payment providers, logistics, and law firms are cancelling on Parler. And friends and acquaintances too, I imagine.

I've been looking at this situation in practical terms. There are all sorts of ways to communicate online even when big tech does not want you to. The problem is that these solutions do not scale. Big Tech alternatives are also notoriously obscure and/or hard to use for the average person.

Additionally, running any service in the modern day involves dozens of third party companies. Even if you solve the technology problem there is nothing stopping the bank from closing your account. What about your accounting firm, choice of payroll software, or even the landlord? All of these links in the chain are easily intimidated into cutting you off. What happens if someone sues you? We've already seen legal firms refuse to represent Parler.

I really don't see a way out of this situation, to be honest.

The President of the United States has the same venue for disseminating information as his predecessors: White House press conferences.

As for the five people you mentioned, the CEOs of the "big tech" firms, are not one entity- you've got to go well beyond the pale (as has happened in the past week) to get them all to agree that it is their company's best interest to deplatform you.

Honestly I doubt there is. So if you co-located in a large ISP, you will still sign a contract which most of the time they put it very generic morality clause for types of content so they can pull your service at a moments notice. So even assume you had enough money to get the infrastructure you need to plug into the net, and you usually do this via co-locating and buying net access. Only way I can think of right now is you'd literally have to go the the length of setting up your own first tier ISP (like Google, Facebook etc do), which is doable but not cost effective. Cause outside of that you are either running on someones cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) or you are running under a contract of an ISP that has similar terms. Maybe I am missing another avenue, though, always possible.

I'm not sure "don't incite a violent mob" qualifies as a technical approach, but it seems likely to meet your requirements here.

The "dark web"?

Hacker News needs a black bar across the top while this assault on Free Speech continues. First they came for the Trump supporters, I said nothing...

Yes, by remaining small-tech.

It's basically like how the US keeps airstriking "the leader of Al-Quaeda" every six months. If you're high profile enough, and causing trouble to enough people, eventually it will come back to you.

Trying to overthrow the Senate is evidently the line you can't cross.

> But when he goes to another network (Parler) it's shut down with 24hrs notice by Amazon. To anyone who's the least bit of a political dissident, alarm bells should be screaming in your ears. If a handful of tech execs can (and will) do this to the US president, what chance would you stand against them, or anyone, if they want to silence you?

Your question is weirdly lacking in context. There was an attack on Congress, whose nastiest bits were openly planned on Parler. It's not like these companies just suddenly decided to cut ties because they didn't like Trump's views. They've actually been extremely tolerant of him, giving him policy exceptions left and right (e.g. if he wasn't the president, he'd probably have been banned from Twitter years ago).

> Would it be possible to host your political views on any commercial hosting vendor in this case? Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow? Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone?

> I'm interested in this as a technical (not political) question: is there any way to speak online if big tech decides they don't want you to?

Obviously, yes. Donald Trump has a website (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/), and it's still up. He can speak online there.

Here's an idea I've been playing with: you can buy your own AS and small IP block for a few thousand dollars. There are many data centers that will give you BGP access to then announce that IP range and route it to your servers. The result will be that whois tools will not actually report which data center you're in, but will report "Uncensorable Inc" or whatever you choose to call yourself. No one will know which company to tweet at to try to have you deplatformed.

I'll be trying to do this to see if it works, if I succeed I'll post a story or two here with a demo and how-to instructions.

Yes. Self-host like how 4chan and Gab are doing it.

Although its easier said than done, but when they're constantly de-platformed from the face of the internet; they're left with no other choice but to self-host.

> The implications of Trump being disappeared from the modern internet

Trump has not been disappeared from the modern internet.

He controls, for instance, a very significant online presence here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/

He also controls a broader presence through a number of subordinates, see, e.g.:

https://www.usa.gov and the whole list at https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies

And, in his (unusual for a President) parallel life, he also controls a web presence through his private business (delegated to subordinates headed by immediate family members):

https://www.trump.com/

Not sure what I am missing here but the obvious answer is an offshore host right?

This is an inherently political question where the context is critical. If you are working with North Koreans on detailed plans for disruption of infrastructure for example then you would encounter a different alarms and enforcement than a biotech researcher doing gene splicing experiments. Email lists are extremely easy to set up, make robust, and transfer as necessary, so using tech like that to simply skip around big tech might be an alternative.

As a technical question: no, if everyone you want to peer with wants to kick you off, you can't be on the "internet" in the regular sense.

Signal was funded by Radio Free Asia, which historically got past the general form of this problem by broadcasting radio stations from right outside the borders of a hostile country. St. Maximilian Kolbe did the same with amateur radio.

I think the more interesting question is some blend of technical and political: how do you get across an idea that people aren't exposed to? Radio Free Asia/Europe/etc. and Kolbe all faced this problem, as did the samizdat publishers, the organizers of the Underground Railroad, etc. You have to be creative, but it turns out that getting ideas across is not an unsolved technical problem, it just requires a bit of work. If the goal is to make people aware that an alternative to your authoritarian government exists or that an organized scheme to take you to freedom exists, you can communicate it, even without anyone else's infrastructure.

Neither the purpose nor the effect of Trump's ban is to prevent people from knowing that his ideas exist. They are well-known and popular. It denies him the use of mass media (and even so, newspapers and TV stations haven't banned him), and it disrupts the ability of people to coordinate. Regardless of the merits of the ban, I think it's pretty clear this is a different sort of problem, and yes, if you want to use wide-reaching, high-bandwidth, reliable infrastructure that other people built, you need to make them okay with you using the infrastructure.

An analogy can be made to spam. Obviously everyone knows that you can lose money by wiring it to some random dude with a foreign bank account; the "censorship" of 419 scams does not in any way restrict what people know about, and spammers get denied the use of infrastructure if they make the people who built the infrastructure unhappy.

In terms of technical means, I'm not sure how to permit an existing, major political party to have access to infrastructure however they want without also, by implication, permitting spammers to have access to that same infrastructure however they want. The only distinction between those is human judgment.

> Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow?

If your content was lawful, and if the Trump Administration had not repealed net neutrality, it would be enough legally. It wouldn’t be enough technically if your ISP opposed you.

> Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone?

As a technical and not a legal/contractual matter, yes, you could be kicked off by whoever you connected to directly.

You’ve claimed that you are asking a technical rather than political question, but virtually all of your specific examples seem framed as legal questions as obviously any connection to a third party can, as a technical matter, be abandoned by the third party.

The technology you're asking about is called a blog, and there are myriad ways to host one.

The thing that's harder to do if big tech is gunning for you is to maintain an audience of millions, and get paid for that traffic. But you can put your manifesto up anywhere you want.

It's almost like people don't understand that private companies don't have to guarantee free political speech, especially to nazis.

It is currently very possible to host absolutely any political views on big tech platforms with no repercussions. Conservative media, libertarian media, communist media, scientology media are all proliferating like never before. What you can't do is incite violence or direct hatred at groups based on their innate character. At least, not with impunity.

Shutting down Trump is not at all an unprecedented move. Social media shuts out evil world leaders all the time.

Just like P2P bitcoin, can any big tech shut down bitcoin globally? Can someone develop some chat services based on HTTP/3, WebAssembly and P2P like bitcoin? Also Zero Knowledge Technology needs to be utilized.

When one says “big tech” I think it’s usually used to represent Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc “big SV FAANG’y tech”. This seems like controlling content the same way large media outlets always have (ie newspapers, magazines, etc), they have no obligation to amplify your message. You can still take your message to a smaller player if they’ll have you (ie a smaller newspaper) or if your message isn’t wanted by others at all you still have your own machine in a closet (ie a printing press and pamphlets).

I'd argue the only meaningful online social network is git, and maybe soundcloud/bittorrent, the rest is just somebody elses variable source of narcissistic supply.

You could use one of those p2p-blockchain messengers to talk to other people who use p2p-blockchain messengers, but then you are talking to people who use p2p-blockchain messengers.

It's really a question of how much breadth you want/need. The internet itself reduces to a politically atomized individual sitting alone at a keyboard, struggling to connect, while being neutralized from all sides by random noise to stimulate both outrage and helplessness. It really is the totalitarian dream. You'd have to leave The Internet proper as we know it now, and create the next one, just as AOL/Compuserve were walled gardens that the internet grew outside of, a new network that resembled the 90's era internet could emerge in as little as a few years.

Think about what Linux was: a new kernel for bare metal that broke out of the constraints of an OS landscape that looked a lot like today's internet giants. At the time, global communication was novel, today, privacy and regional networks are novel. Most linux users had a bsd/solaris/windows machine to connect to the legacy world, so you don't have to design the whole thing at once.

A p2p-reddit that used a blockchain that operated with a kind of old fidonet/UUCP/nntp over bittorrent as transport could be a source of new community. A bare metal blockchain client kernel for open RISC and ARM processors that uses a wireless mesh, and includes a kind of regional pub/sub pattern would do it.

The tech is there.

Move the discussion offline. The state can still get to you but at least you will mostly be out of big tech's reach.

I'm troubled as well. Here's how I see things that played out:

Twitter and Facebook banning Trump? Not surprised, they censor conservatives all the time and have been doing so since even before Trump. Also remember: it wasn't just Trump this time, many others have been banned from Twitter and Facebook, and many groups have been shut down.

Apple banning Parler? I was surprised by this. Apple is supposedly about privacy; clearly, they are not. Changes my view on their value proposition moving forward.

AWS dropping Parler? Again, this is surprising. Head scratching even. Going to make a lot of people think twice about AWS.

I'm also kinda surprised at the HN response to all this, perhaps its because many of the posters here work at one of these Orwellian companies and don't see the issue. I see complaints here about payments companies blocking criminal activity, yet very little relative objections to simply cancelling people the CEOs disagree with.