Yes that is certainly a good idea. And I too have thought about it in the past.
The conclusion I came up with is that you need to be very careful how you “police” it.
Do Not call it “policing it” since that will have its own problems
Do Not be censoring or removing items based on some criteria
This immediately removes the APP from having the common carrier status where the APP is only the messenger and not responsible for the content it is carrying. And once you make the APP responsible for the content then the “moderators” are responsible and police will come after the APP and the “moderators” for ANY illegal item that slips through the net.
The better way is to have sellers register (in some form) and then restrict the sellers. So if a seller sells some internationally illegal item then BAN the seller and as a consequence the seller’s adverts are removed. Yes they could rejoin with another ID, but they can relist their item with another ID just as easy.
This way you are not moderating the content but are simply only allowing suitable sellers to sell using the APP. The APP keeps its common carrier status and is then not a target of the police and the ones doing the removing of sellers is not then responsible for any items that are internationally illegal that somehow remain on the APP’s list of sellable items.
Its simply a case of moving the responsibility and thus the target of any police action. The police must see the responsibility for any listing is purely on the person listing the item and the APP and/or moderators are not responsible. Its one of the main reasons ISPs are not sued for the illegal content passing through their networks. The ISP does not moderate the packets for illegal activity, but they remove their customers who do transmit such things.
Writing the code does not mean one is managing the site. Does anyone remember who write the code to Popcorn Time? It was written and released as open source. The original version was quickly shut down but since it was open source it kept popping up. But I don’t know nor care who made it which is kind of the point. Even if the police do catch whoever writes the code it doesn’t stop the program. If the app has merit and is out there then they can’t do anything about it. Also if one made such a site modular then one person alone wouldn’t have to make it They could just make the base and others could just add modules to it. Remember police are essentially an arm of government and government are still based on centralization. They’re operating on the assumption that others are also centralized as well.
Now you’ve just substituted local law with international law. Also if you’re going to sell contraband why would you agree to such a system? Why not grab the code, fork it, and then set up a new app without those restrictions and moderators? Or set up a rating system like Silk Road had or Amazon has for reputation building? Like I get where you are going with having a friendly “ligit” app on SAFE for selling stuff but the fact is everyone on SAFE is anonymous and you can use two different accounts and/or two different apps at once. So saying there will be one app for ligit sales and one app for contraband is like saying you want to keep your youtube and youporn seperate. That’s cool but youtube doesn’t negate the existence of youporn. Nor does pretending like your kid having access to the internet means they can’t access youporn as much as they can youtube.
You want to create a free internet and what’s the first thing you do? “OMG think of the children! We must censor this new internet we’ve created instead of having a rational discussion!”
Exactly. But then its their responsibility isn’t it.
And my answer is “OMG do the censorship for yourself and leave us out of it”
People are free to implement their own version of the APP and take all the risks they want. This is one specific APP and IF they want to be safe in this policed world then they could do what I suggested. If not then they are free to do otherwise. The rational discussion is how can we have a free market place and yet not be treated by the law as a silk road.
You can’t. Contraband aside governments would want their cut of the profits, meaning taxes. And given the anonymity of the SAFE network this is totally unfeasible. A truly free market is an illegal concept no matter what way you do it. Freedom is antithesis to government. The only real protection people have is the anonymity and decentralized nature of the SAFE network. One cannot rely on legal tricks to protect them.
No they do like Australia, they hit the seller for the taxes. So the tax men will be trying to identify the sellers. We have enough “free” markets to day operating without being shutdown by governments since they do not trade illegal goods in their country. How many forums on cars run their own market and pay nothing to the government or are shutdown for doing so.