Fredrick Brennan Is the Founder of 8chan. Now He Wants to Take It Offline. – Jacobin magazine

Right now, if we do not start to enforce some rules online, the internet is going to balkanize, and were going to lose something great. People are going to look back on this era of the open internet as the time before national exchanges where youre passing email, but youre not really able to engage on [other peoples] websites, and theyre not able to engage on yours. Everybody is enforcing local law its called cyber sovereignty, right?

Every contract right now is pursuing a version of that, where they enforce their local laws on websites and websites that refuse to comply. 8chan got banned in Australia, New Zealand, etc.

We are at a big risk of losing our global internet if we dont find an international way to come together and to enforce some standards on the internationally available internet. Because if the US continues to be ineffectively governed and to have a Congress that is not able to pass any laws, no other country is going to want to let their citizens access our internet. And that is going to hurt the entire internet. Every country will have a great firewall, like China and Russia; those are being built all over. Theres even one in Thailand, which is a small country. Were talking way back to these past periods where Japanese users could just hike on over to American servers.

I do agree with you that we need a way to enforce existing laws and standards, because Jim and Ron Watkins impersonated a federal agent for gain. That is a federal crime, and they werent ever punished.

We absolutely need to start enforcing our laws better and see that the internet and the world are not separate things. If we continue to have this artificial disconnection in the minds of our leaders, that somehow crimes that happen online are less important than crimes that happen in the real world, then no other country is going to want their citizens to [join our internet]. I do feel strongly about that. Since we have not even tried enforcing our own laws and standards yet, why dont we do that before we make sweeping changes beyond that?

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Fredrick Brennan Is the Founder of 8chan. Now He Wants to Take It Offline. - Jacobin magazine