Why Internet Censorship Doesn’t Work and Never Will
Speech regulations are always going to be either too loose or too strict, and users are always going to exploit them.
Who decides?
Photographer: Ishara S.Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images
Regulating speech is difficult even under the best of conditions, and the internet is far from the best of conditions. Its patchwork system of regulation by private entities satisfies no one, yet it is likely to endure for the foreseeable future.
By way of explanation, consider a case in which authority is (mostly) centralized and the environment is (mostly) controlled: my own. I am a professor, and if a student regularly made offensive remarks in class, I would meet with that person and try to persuade him or her to desist. (For the record, this has never happened to me.) If the person continued, I would at some point seek to ban the student from my class, with the support of my university.