4chan Will Refuse to Pay Daily Online Safety Fines, Lawyer Tells Bbc

Almost certainly. Relevant donor tie from the Tiburon Trestle Trail Project https://imgur.com/a/3JAW9ku (2017)

The adoption speed is critical, exactly because of what you're saying. It's easy for a wannabe authoritarian to make a decision to "just block all of ECH and QUIC traffic" if that breaks 0.8% of all traffic - but not if that breaks 80% of all traffic.

So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.

The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.

For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"

One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?

Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?

ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.

It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"

Now gather a huge group of friends who are willing to fight for this cause (and for whose this cause is so important that they can accept ending in jail or even worse).

Now, did they do that with the approval of the voters? Ostensibly, yes, but in reality, it's not that clear-cut.

This would be more like if the Thirteen Colonies had MPs and those MPs still voted in favor of the Stamp Act, or they voted to delegate the power to tariff to someone with a severe personality disorder.

Do you think the general public NEEDS to know those things right now? Because that's what actually mostly drives what people put in the time to learn. This smug elitist "everyone is dumb except me the tech wizard" sort of comment shows up every such thread and it's deeply irksome. Most people are plenty intelligent and can easily learn things as trivial as setting up a VPN. For most that would just amount to "sign up for one of many turnkey services, install this app, scan this QR code" or even more commonly "ask one of the kids or techie person in circle of friends/neighbors to take care of it". All sorts of people working in a vast array of businesses use VPNs all the frickin' time, it's no big deal.

But there are endless such things in our lives and only so much time, so most people very reasonably triage and only put effort into things they enjoy personally or things they are forced to care about due to being important. Up until now, most people haven't needed to care in their personal lives, because they're satisfied enough with the fairly open internet experience we've had. If that changes, and it matters to them, the tools exist to easily deal with it and people will easily learn it.

Remind me again, what the problem they're trying to solve is?

Fair point. As you say regarding files, it's easy to vastly overestimate the familiarity with computing concepts when you're writing anything in the orange bar website.

The public doesn't need to know how it works behind the scenes to use it. It just needs to be packaged in a way so that they don't need to know. Which it will.

You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.

People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.

I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.