Network Neutrality and Digital Inclusion

(⚠ Enshitification warning: The linked article has a cookie wall; just click “reject” and the article appears)

Google is ending the public access to the cache of sites it indexes. AFAICT, these are the consequences:

• People getting different treatment due to their geographic location will lose the cache they used as a remedy for access inclusion.
• People getting different treatment due to having a defensive browser will lose access.
• The 12ft.io service which serves those who suffer access inequality will be rendered useless.
• Google will continue to include paywalls in search results, but now consumers of Google search results will be led to a dead-end.
• The #InternetArchive #WaybackMachine will take on the full burden of global archival.
• Consumers will lose a very useful tool for circumventing web enshitification.

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

There is hardly any discussion on this trending variety of web enshitification where a website needs to give physical locations to people. Many web devs are starting to spotlight their profound incompetence in accomplishing this very simple task. They throw up an interactive map which requires the full utilization of fancy GUI browser frills that excludes all but those who “chase the shiny”. A 1990s high schooler to do this better in plain HTML.

Doesn’t this screw over blind people? How does a screen reader handle a map?

My hardened low-bandwidth browser can’t handle this absurd degree of putting fancy above access equality. When this shit happens on a vendor’s website and I’m trying to locate them to give them business, the answer is easy: they can fuck off and lose my business. But it’s sad when a government does it and the information has medical relevance.

This is what it looks like when a Tor user attempts to fetch a file or even just obtain the size of a file from a Cloudflared resource like #LemmyWorld.

TMC is a broadcast of traffic information which usually uses an FM signal. These protectionist countries encrypt the data:

• #Australia
• #Finland
• #Germany
• #Italy
• #Norway
• #Sweden

That’s fucked up, is it not? Shouldn’t publicly funded information be open to the public? These countries provide unencrypted #TMC data:

• Estonia
• France

#openData

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6251633

LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:

• Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
• Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
• Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive

It’s antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.

So what’s the solution?

Individual action protocol:

1. Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed.
2. Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
3. Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).

This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.

Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?

Before sharing a link I would like to determine whether the website excludes people from access, and who is excluded. I can test for myself whether the Tor community is excluded but what about:

• VPNs
• i2p
• public libraries
• #cgNAT-issued IP addresses (often from impoverished regions)
• various geographical regions
• particular browsers (e.g. lynx, w3m, non-chrome-based…)

for example? I cannot check all those means of access. If a website is implementing some form of digital exclusion, I would like to ensure that I am not helping the exclusive website gain visitors.

#askFedi #netneutrality