This particular case is mostly corporate but also authoritarian. It presses and seeds the point that Russia wants their own internet and there be these type of deals having to be made to access it. [1]
China already does this type of "business", controlling their markets.
The internet is also regularly shut down by authoritarians in their respective states. We are definitely in the authoritarian phase of the internet. As the internet took over markets, politics and more, it was inevitable.
It is quite normal that organisations that have purchased the sole rights to sports broadcasting (an ordinary process in just about every country in the world) aggressively pursue alleged violators of their rights[0]. Domains being used to serve "pirate media" being blocked in various countries is also a norm[1]. There's nothing particularly special about this case aside from the media being interested because they can put Russia in a headline.
As opposed to America's internet, whose corporations and governments have routinely been taking down whatever shit they wanted to take down, for decades?
If you'd bought the rights to rebroadcast an incredibly popular series of sporting events, and no-one was subscribing because they were watching the stuff online for free, what would you do about it?
I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.
Not a fan of these types of blanket Moltov cocktail extortions that affect 99% of all people using the service normally.
Also, it strangely targets a property of a large American company that they do not like in Amazon. This is opening up for more of this only. Probably the beginning of fully blocking streaming on foreign sites as there is lots of money in it now. Basically the China market control approach that helps again with the authoritarianism.
There is copyright / pirating all over the internet in every country. Would you approve of shutting it all down because someone is leeching?
Ultimately people that watch streams / pirate means that the original product is either badly priced, inaccessible or the user can't afford it anyways. Most people that can afford these things will pay eventually. There have been studies on piracy being mostly people that would never pay at that time. Further, in the end pirates turn into people that buy more content [1]. Easily accessible products that are easier than piracy use the market to reduce it. [2] Tuning products to stop a small percentage of users will lead us to tyranny of markets and horrible product experiences for paying customers which will then either pirate [3] or tune out.
> I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.
I'm not saying that I condone what's happening right here, but if the nationalities were flipped Twitch would've had their domain taken away world-wide and have to play a game of domain whack-o-mole like libgen currently does.
Agreed, these types of authoritarian / corporate oligopoly moves on the internet are bad in any direction. China is already gone. Hopefully everyone else can get along but it isn't looking good.
In the real world this would be the equivalent of a corporate dispute or state dispute that would shut off entire cities, states or countries because one business within it is problematic. These are massive overreactions that probably hint to some baby steps to larger moves such as dividing the internet and competing internets.
I can guarantee you the engineers and product people aren't calling the shots on this one. It is oligopoly level business and authoritarian state leaders.
> In the real world this would be the equivalent of a corporate dispute or state dispute that would shut off entire cities, states or countries because one business within it is problematic.
I think you are taking this too far. Twitch is a big but still a private platform. Basically it is the same age-old struggle between platform owners and copyright holders - the former claim that they aren't responsible for any content published on their platforms while the latter claim that they are.
Or it is being underestimated. It is probably wise with power grabs, whether corporate/oligarchy or authoritarian, to overestimate rather than underestimate.
Overestimating preserves ground gained, rights and freedoms and is an offensive. Underestimating cedes that and is a defensive position. Power grabs and authoritarianism cannot just be defense, while they are on offensive offense, you have to go on offense to get them on defense.
Underestimate overt and subtle power grabs with greater goals in mind and end up like this scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail [1]
>I don't approve of extorting all of Twitch for one companies corporate copyrights including blocking Twitch across an entire country. This is a scorched earth corporate authoritarian/oligopoly approach.
The alternative is that I can host whatever illegal content I want in a big site, knowing they won't have the balls to block it.
Then many countries in the EU are authoritarian too, since they block domain names of websites that link (yes, link, not host, just link) to streams of football matches.
China already does this type of "business", controlling their markets.
The internet is also regularly shut down by authoritarians in their respective states. We are definitely in the authoritarian phase of the internet. As the internet took over markets, politics and more, it was inevitable.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-05/vladimir-...