John Scalzi Quotes

It's much easier to force intermediary communications and Internet companies such as Google to police themselves and their users than the alternatives: sending cops after everybody who attempts a risque or politically sensitive search, getting parents and teachers to do their jobs, or chasing down the origin of every offending link.

It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.

I love it when these Internet dudes say to me, 'Hey man, we just want to be 'content neutral.'

Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.

We can't edit people's content. We have to give them a platform to express themselves, and if they say something that the government doesn't like, we can't go delete it. We can't give the guy's IP address to the government.

A liberated Internet will continue to be a reality in your life (and in the lives of your children) if rules like Net Neutrality are in place.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.

Net neutrality was essential for our economy; it was essential to preserve freedom and openness, both for economic reasons and free speech reasons, and the government had a role in ensuring that Internet freedom was protected.

The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.

Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free.

Congress should consult experts and consider alternatives and make 100% sure that any step it takes to police the Internet doesn't change the Internet as we know it.

The public forum is the place for religious discussion, not religious practices.

Private property ought to be subservient to public uses, when necessity requires it; nevertheless, whenever any particular man's property is taken for the use of the public, the owner ought to receive an equivalent in money

The Internet is unpoliceable essentially.

network neutrality

The Internet in China is fully open and the Chinese Government manages the Internet according to the law. As for what you can and cannot watch, watch what you can watch, and don’t watch what you cannot watch.

From day one, the Internet was a public square, and the providers merely connected everyone, rather than regulating who spoke with whom. That allowed the Internet to evolve into a form of basic infrastructure, used by over a billion people today.

Even a government as ostensibly open and committed to freedom of speech as our own — are [censors] more likely to operate in their own interests than in their citizens’. In the age of cyberspace, that is a scary prospect.

For Americans, with the advent of the U.S. invention of the Internet, free speech is not just open dissemination of ideas and information. It includes limitless instant access to those ideas and the ability to choose and search from among virtually unlimited sources. It is also the backbone of free enterprise and a vibrant global economy.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.

I was forced to say, 'I will not censor the Internet.' But I was never convinced.

Americans' information independence is under attack, whether it's the repeal of net neutrality or the repeal of broadband privacy protections.

There's just a proliferation of blogs and the chattering classes and people talking. More avenues for people to make their feelings known, which is good.

What we will do is we'll say, 'Okay, you have your page, and if you're not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.' But that doesn't mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed.