FCC

because no one else is

I’ve been doing this a long time.

Starting in 1999 I helped setup and run the tech for indymedia. We were the first widely available website to allow users without accounts to publish text, images, video, and audio online to an audience. As far as I know, we were the first people to do a live stream in the streets of a major protest, the WTO protest in Seattle in 1999.

Because we run servers that held political content, and didn’t require accounts to post it. We got lots of leaked documents and coverage of things the police didn’t like. We got lots of police warrants and had regular calls with a network of lawyers around the world, including the EFF, who defended us. We had local sites, with different servers, in a network, but we kept each server in a different country than the jurisdiction it served, because it provided legal protection. We moved the DNS ‘owner’ around all over the place, as we got in legal trouble in one country after another. Eventually we settled in Brazil, not because they’re got great protections, but because their legal system is INCREDIBLY slow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indymedia

Then I helped start Odeo, were we took podcasting from an obscure idea that anybody could product radio programs and made it accessible to a broader audience. I helped create TxtMob, a text message social network to coordinate protests and news about social movements and group communication. It was one source of inspiration (among many) for Twitter... which as we all know has had its fair share of struggles about content moderation and abuse. 

More recently, working on decentralized social protocols I've been trying to figure out how to make it work in a way that works as a commons, based on my anarchist values of autonomy, consent, and self-governance. I think we can do that with nostr. 

In figuring out how we can exist, create autonomy, we need to realize that the state exists. If you run a relay on tor, lots can do it, then you can hide who is hosting the content, but most nostr clients don't support tor unfortunately. If the server is on the open internet, then it is possible to identify the person running it, and they can be held accountable based the laws of various governments. What's more, because to distribute software at scale, on iOS and android, you must go through their walled garden app stores. The rules they impose have an even bigger impact than the ones imposed by governments.

If we don't comply with app store rules, they delete the app. This means that for nostr apps that do run on mobile devices, we need to be able to be compliant with the App Store rules. For folks on desktop and web, it's not as controlled. But most people use the internet through their phones, it's important. The App Store rules require us to have content moderation policies and systems. In particular apple is super prudish and won't let you show anything sexually explicit to minors. Sure you can view it on the web on their devices, they don't care. Sure the app creator doesn't control the relays, we're like a web browser... apple and google don't care. 

But even outside the App Store, there are laws like GDPR that doesn't care if the person hosting the content is doing it for friends or as a business. They don't care if it's a peer to peer network or centralized service. I checked this with a German lawyer & judge who specializes in internet / copyright / intellectual property law. We're required to either block users from Europe connecting to our content, or registering a representative. Stupid rule? Yes! We can get along for a long time under the radar, but if we want to become massive, a protocol most people use, then people will try to enforce those rules. Either because they're upset about some content, they want to be forgotten, or want to know who's posting things. Or because they see nostr as a threat and want to shut it down.

So, we need to make it easy for relay operators, client developers, and users to understand the risk and do harm reduction in terms of legal liability.