I remember that when[0] Reuters took down that one story about organized crime, and further DMCA'd the Internet Archive to take down their version, archive.ORG cheerfully did the memory-hole thing—while archive.IS stayed up.
If the (Western) internet were to turn into a monoculture of Western-domiciled big corporations, that kind of censorship would be *effective*. Our systems aren't robust against bad-faith actors attacking the free flow of information. (And the root cause of the planet-spanning censorship cascade in that example was, unambigiously, bad actors. A crime syndicate based in India).
The fact the internet is global and freely connects to legal jurisdictions and cultures very different from the West's, is to the West's benefit: it creates an escape-hatch for things that fall between the cracks of our nascent totalitarian technologies.
If the (Western) internet were to turn into a monoculture of Western-domiciled big corporations, that kind of censorship would be *effective*. Our systems aren't robust against bad-faith actors attacking the free flow of information. (And the root cause of the planet-spanning censorship cascade in that example was, unambigiously, bad actors. A crime syndicate based in India).
The fact the internet is global and freely connects to legal jurisdictions and cultures very different from the West's, is to the West's benefit: it creates an escape-hatch for things that fall between the cracks of our nascent totalitarian technologies.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065981#39065996 ("A Judge in India Prevented Americans from Seeing a Blockbuster Report")