Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
I must disagree.
We need not wait for marginalized groups to be impacted to decry T1 ISP censorship. Ban whatever speech you want; the method of enforcement should be to arrest the perpetrators - not stop the sale of paper, the delivery of mail, or blocklist class A ip ranges.
On a more philosophical level, this is the question of “kindergarten policy” - do we punish those who crayon on the walls, or do we take away everybody’s crayons. To punish the ability to do wrong, or the act of doing wrong. Like most philosophical questions, there’s no good answer to this.
To do that, you have to know who the perpetrators are, which is routinely impossible.
This isn’t a hypothetical situation, we are living in a world where servers are kicked off the internet, SSL certificates are revoked, vast quantities of emails are deleted without even sending them to a spam folder, lemmy instances are defederated and deleted for posting illegal content, etc.
In a perfect world, none of that would be necessary and we could simply send the perpetrators to jail. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in one where censorship is the only option.
Requiring arrest to be the correct method of suppressing abhorrent speech is actually way worse than letting ISPs decide to deny it a platform.