rexy Fri
Here's my understanding of some of the likely scenarios. Someone please correct me if something is wrong or describe another scenario if you think one is missing:
Scenario 1: John A. lives in the US and wants to host DrumpLies.net, a website critical of the US president. He uploads the site to the Shift ipfs cluster, pays to have the site pinned on 100 hosting nodes and points his domain to the cluster with the help of Jenga. His site is up and stays up.
Scenario 2: John B. lives in Morocco and wants to host a website, Mkingleaks.org, with leaked documents that show that the Moroccan King has embezzled millions of dollars. He uploads the site to the Shift ipfs cluster, pays to have the site pinned on 100 hosting nodes and points his domain to the cluster with the help of Jenga. Morocco blocks the domain and tries to seize it but ICANN denies their request. John B. can keep the content on Phantom since it hasn’t been removed from the cluster and people in Morocco can access the content using the ipfs hash. He doesn’t need to get a new domain to have the site accessible in Morocco. The rest of the world can still access the site through the domain.
Scenerio 3: John C. lives in Germany. He wants to host the site kiddiepornjihad.xyz that is a site for recruiting militants and sharing kiddie porn. He uploads the site to the Shift ipfs cluster, pays to have the site pinned on 100 hosting nodes and points his domain to the cluster with the help of Jenga. His site gets immediately flagged by Interpol. The domain registration for kiddiepornjihad.xyz is rescinded by the organization that owns the gTLD .xyz. The content is still accessible on the ipfs cluster but node operators begin to unpin the content. It’s possible that a handful of the node operators in Somaliland (insert lawless country) choose not to unpin the site and are able to keep the site up.
Ralf S Fri 1:18pm
Exactly Rexy, examples help to explain better. We would be happy to offer a platform for John A and John B. This is what decentralization is all about. And there are a lot more examples to think about or countries to fill in there.
But if we continue to serve John C's content from our domain gateway.shiftnrg.org, then it would lead to problems for the devs and the project.
Renn Fri 4:15pm
But where is the line between John B and John C. Who decides
And can you please clarify, the shift project, i.e. the dev team have the ability to refuse content coming through their gateway?
Ralf S Fri 5:50pm(edited)
I'll try to explain that DNS is the problem here. And why we need it.
We don't decide, the network does. See it as 100, maybe 1000 or even many more nodes with their own operators. Shift itself is one of those. For example our website can be served by any node connected. But if we would accept all content through OUR domain/gateway, and ignore court orders, then we take a risk. That's what the section of the paper is about.
Long story short decentralized content is really really hard to stop. Because content goes down with the last node online. So that's not the problem here, especially with world wide spreading. DNS is, but we need our gateway to serve sites without the threshold for the visitors/users having to install software.
Again we prefer to have this discussion, where others simply ignore it. See it the other way: without any possibility to blacklist, what options would the node operator have? So here is the idea: IF the possibility of a court order arises at some point. An operator might choose to blacklist eventually. Then the replication kicks in, other nodes take over and continue to serve.