France asked ISPs to prepare temporary DNS blocks for major social platforms

As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests with similar demands. This feels refreshing and prove that regimes response to wide spread protests they don’t like is not that different. But please don’t call it European spring.

Social media permits Broadcasting for Free. One to All messaging. For all other media - radio, satellite, tv, phones broadcasting requires licenses. Why? Cuz Claude Shannon told us if everyone broadcasts on the same frequency noise increases and no one hears anything forcing them into broadcasting at higher and higher power or repeating their messages more and more. Which again increases noise. So Broadcasting has always been licensed and regulated. That solved the Noise problem because people were forced to coordinate use of broadcast spectrum. Social media platforms act as if Shannon doesn't apply. So they do exactly what Shannon predicted. Everyone is broadcasting. No one can be heard clearly. People scream louder and louder. The loudest get locked into arms races. Repeat their messages more and more. At the end of it all Noise hasnt reduced and who gets attention from one day to the next is unpredicatble. And since Platforms dont want to talk about Shannon we are all stuck in some kind of red queen dynamic. People are expending lot of energy. Results are all temporary and unpredictable.

Why not just allow genuinely peaceful protests and take stern police/legal action against all other forms of protest? I don't understand the logic behind cutting access to communications platforms. Seems like an indirect or roundabout way of solving the problem.

DNS block is really the most lazy and easily bypassable type of block you can imagine. It is like blocking something with a gate which you can open by reaching a latch on the other side with your hand Only the freaking politician can attempt to block something via DNS ;)

During the 2011 London riots, there were proposals to ban Blackberry.