In war, one of the first moves is to attack the communication infrastructure of the enemy. Being generally organized military forces with centers of operations that receive orders from the center of command which usually answers and receives orders from a civilian structure, usually headed by the "head of the state" (president or prime minister, in most cases), if the communication lines are taken out, armed forces are beheaded.
It's what was attempted and succeeded in Ukraine at the beginning of the war, but Elon Musk stepped in and gave the Ukrainians access to Starlink.
In both cases, before and after Starlink, we are talking about permissioned communications for Ukranians, including their special communications for the army.
Since Russians were able to take them out and then Musk offered Starlink to them (which at some point he threatened to take back as he often throws words in the wind to see the effect they produce).
This is an extreme case to describe permissioned communication which go directly to the internet infrastructure. Of the same category is the phone system infrastructure. The idea is if the physical infrastructure is damaged (like in a war), you either have a backup or you have no communications.
AI-generated image with Canva, since I couldn't find a proper one free. Yes, I know it spelled Stop wrong, but the other images were much worse. Looks like AI still has a lot to learn.
But there are less critical situations, which are still permissioned. My attention was brought on them after listening to Task in the latest Cryptomaniacs episode. Things like:
- phone calls (when the infrastructure is intact, but calls go through operators)
- emails (not really?)
- live streams
- many chat systems (not all)
- traditional social media and most alternatives
are examples of permissioned communication. Someone is in the middle and can say no or block a certain conversation, one party to the conversation, a group, entire geographical areas, or shut down the entire platform (or parts of it) for as long as needed. I'm curious if a powerful intermediary could remove the possibility of two or more determined individuals to communicate via email. I think you can set the entire route your email will take from source to destination, which may be one way to avoid controlling email servers.
How about comments on blogs? Can they be blocked? I suppose they can be blocked for something like blogs hosted by Wordpress, but unlikely for self-hosted blogs. And what do you block? How many blogs are out there? Do you force the plethora of small hosting companies to take down these websites? That would be a desperate measure and with very little chances of success.
How about permissionless communication? That's what we have on Hive.
One way we can do this is through comments on Hive blogs. How do you turn those down? Close down the interfaces? In how many jurisdictions? We have ways to spin up new standard or custom interfaces for our Hive blogs with a few clicks (they keep improving).
Someone might argue that comments (and posts) can be hidden through downvotes or, inside a community, by choice of moderators. Hidden doesn't mean removed though, even if it may not be as easy to be viewed by more people.
But here's a communication method that cannot be censored except by hardfork. And that is by sending a memo to someone. Sure, unlike a comment, a memo costs a minimum of 0.001 HIVE or HBD liquid to send, instead of some regenerable RCs. And the memo can be in plain text or encrypted, which makes it a powerful means of communication. Nobody stands in between this type of communication if a random node adds it to the blockchain.
Permissionless communication doesn't become important until someone is denied the regular means of communication and they have important messages to deliver. Then, they would really love to have that option.