Events this week really highlight why I'm so aggressive about defending tech companies, and so skeptical of increasing tech regulation and weaking their position in conflicts with governments.
At home, we have a renewed attack on end-to-end encryption. The governments of the US, the UK, and Australia are pressuring Facebook to weaken or remove the end-to-end encryption in Whatsapp and any other messaging services, so that the government can read private communications. (Only with a warrant, of course, because we all know the government would never spy on private communications without a warrant.)
At the same time, England and others are putting pressure on Firefox over its attempt to roll out encrypted DNS by default—which would make it much harder for national governments to monitor the sites people are visiting, or block some of them completely.
In Europe, we have a series of rulings that allow any country to export its defamation laws, and then make internet companies responsible for enforcing them. An Austrian court ruled that calling politican Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek a "corrupt oaf" was defamation, and ordered the Facebook post taken down; the CJEU ruled that this order compelled Facebook to remove this post and any post with equivalent content and to remove it worldwide. So a European nation can order Facebook to censor a given type of content worldwide.
We have this week three different stories of (Western, democratic) national governments trying to censor online communication and monitor private citizens' online activity. The only people in a position to effectively push back on this are tech companies like Facebook and Google—and they are pushing back about as hard as they can figure out how to.
I understand that people want more privacy and freedom of speech on the internet. I do too! I don't understand why people think that weakening the ability of tech companies to tell the government "no" will improve matters, rather than make them worse.
