If a government wants to create a panopticon thought police state, they don’t even have to do it themselves. They can simply get your corporate overlords to threaten you with fines, social credit scores, or banishment for wrongthink. This is one aspect of 1984 that Orwell got wrong. It isn’t just Big Brother who’s watching. It’s all his Little Nephews, too.

Your right to free speech doesn’t apply when that speech is transmitted via privately-run communication networks. There, the normal rules don’t exist. One mistake, and you can lose money, have your voice temporarily silenced, or your account terminated. You can’t even object to this, because you didn’t bother to read and just scrolled down and clicked “I agree” to the thousands of words in the Terms of Service when you signed up, and then did it again every time they changed the terms.

There will be lots of people who cheer on a company (working on behalf of the state) that punishes its customers for violating their arbitrary rules, because censorship works fine when you’re on the side of the censors. 

But one day it will be their turn. 

 Milton Friedman opened this box. 

 The number of people who are in the “I have nothing to hide” camp is frightening. They won’t care about any privacy issues like this unfortunately. 

 Only slaves think like that. 

 My fears have always come from the eventual, forced capitulation of our infrastructure providers. ISPs, utility companies, airlines, etc. This is clearly their decided attack plan. 

 They can simply decide that certain types of math are contraband and then fine or ban you for transmitting illegal numbers. 

 They can make up anything they want. The old, “Sure would be a shame if something happened to that business of yours.” playbook. 

 Next step, ban encryption 

 That's exactly the idea I’ve been contemplating over the years. Centralization of ISPs is a nightmare and there is no solution in sight. If only we could decentralize internet access and take it from corporate overlords