The Unprecedented Pressure on Backbone Providers

In 1993 John Gilmore famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To learn why that’s no longer true, listen to Josh Moon enumerate “the amount of things that have broken that people in the industry assumed could never break,” as activists with personal vendettas and political agendas relentlessly employ every possible strategy to silence his small but notorious gossip site Kiwi Farms. From Cloudflare to Hurricane Electric, ISPs, data centers, and payment processors, literally anything up and down the Border Gateway Protocol has been targeted to shut down the 'Farms. With ISIS, the KKK, Stormfront, neo-nazis, and child porn all continuing to enjoy online services, who expected “the gossip site that makes fun of troons" to be the straw to break the Internet's backbone? And why have the individuals and organizations who once stood against censorship lost their own?

Links:

Brave browser: https://brave.com/

Tor browser: https://www.torproject.org/download/

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

The World Should Not Need Kiwi Farms by Corinna Cohn: https://corinnacohn.substack.com/p/the-world-should-not-need-kiwi-farms

Liz Fong Jones calls Corinna a “Kiwi Farms operative”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np9erdnM4l8&t=3074s&ab_channel=LizFong-Jones

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/

Internet Archive: https://archive.org/

Copyright’s origins in censorship: https://questioncopyright.org/promise

FIRE: https://www.thefire.org/