Hacker News Reader

"Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create."

Imagine if the telephone industry had to monitor phone usage to block criminal use. Imagine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities.

"Section 230 doesn’t cause lawlessness. Rather, it creates a space in which many things — including lawless behavior — come to light. And it’s in that light that multitudes of organizations and people have taken proactive steps to usher victims to safety and apprehend their abusers."

-- Alexandra F. Levy, Adjunct Professor of Human Trafficking & Human Markets, Notre Dame Law School

>magine if the postal service was charged with filtering any potentially illegal activities.

The Postal Inspection Service _is_ tasked with filtering stuff that is prohibited from the mail, such as child porn, illegal drugs, and nuclear weapons. While the USPS isn't responsible for illegal stuff that happens through the mail, they do have a whole law-enforcement branch to deal with it.

God, this mindset is disgusting. What if I don't want to make the kinds of toxic growth-addict business that venture capital leads to? As for banks, why don't you take a hard look at what banking monoculture has given society?

Then don't? VCs aren't the only source of capital. I also have no idea how you could say the US has a "banking monoculture". There are almost 5000 banks in the US.

Nearly all of those smaller banks are merely resellers, adding nothing besides a point of presence to the value of what they sell.

>society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost. I'm not sure that's the case, there's definitely many who would disagree, and even some banks. Complying with these regulations is very expensive and there's not a ton of evidence for how effective they are. Obviously they help sometimes, but the signal to noise ratio is likely very poor and they're not very cost-effective for the amount of overhead involved.

In addition to banks, money services businesses must comply with these regulations - people have gone to jail just for selling bitcoin for cash because they didn't do KYC/AML. Of course, no one related to banks goes to jail no matter how bad their compliance is.

Relating this to the original article a bit more, it's likely that these things will be abused very badly, with small players going to prison and big players only paying minor fines at worst.

>>Which is just kind of amazing if you think about it. Imagine if the energy industry didn't have to deal with EPA regulations or manufacturing companies didn't have to deal with OSHA regulations. The political winds are starting to shift and the tech industry is increasingly going to be held responsible for the negative externalities they create.

wow, what a terrible analogy.

First off you have seemed to conflate 3rd party liability and 1st party liability.

If a Company pollutes say a river that is the Company doing it directly. Thus they are liable for it

If someone posts some threating comment, or some copyrighted work to a website the hosting company did not do anything wrong, they provided a service that was then used illegally, holding them liable for that would be holding a 3rd party liable. Something that should be rejected by society

A better anology would be "Image if Ford was responsible for every drunk driver that used a Ford Car irresponsibly and killed someone with it"

Do you blame Home Depot for renting a truck to a Terrorist? Dont answer that I bet you do.

>All banks have to comply with Know Your Customer regulations, which is easier for bigger banks than smaller ones. And yet society has deemed that combating money laundering and tax evasion is worth the cost.

Some of use in society do not agree it is worth the cost

>>It'll be fine.

Yes because the banking industry is a shining example of ethics, customer service. Next to lawyers I can not think of a more hated group in society than Bankers. There is a reason for this and the fact that competition is limited due to the law you cited and many others is a reason for this.

I'm glad you brought up the banking industry because it's a perfect example of how such high fixed costs favor large incumbents, stifle competition, and prevent new entrants. In the US since 2010, 10 (ten) new banks have started up. Meanwhile the stock prices of large established banks have soared.

Imagine a world with ten new internet startups in 7 years; this is a step in that direction. This is not a fantasy but something that the government actually did to another industry.

All to make the powerful(AKA monopolistic oligarchy of corporations) even more satiated with control.

This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies. It could have been more expansive, but it's limited to just sex trafficking.

Governments have antitrust laws to handle monopolies. If you're concerned with concentration (as I am), you should support more aggressive antitrust enforcement (and political candidates that do).

>This law is very clearly designed to tackle a negative externality from tech companies

What externatlity is that? If they want to fight sex trafficking, really fight sex trafficking, they need to start by making prostitution and other forms of sex work legal.

Prohibition is what drives the activity under ground and creates the market for Sex Trafficking in the first place. It forces people that want to consume those services to a market that is outside the law, as such bad things happen, this is same for Drug Prohibition.

All you have to look to his the passage of the 18th amendment, all of the problems and violence prohibition of alcohol brought, and then the passage of the 21 amendment to end it. Today I do not see Budweiser shooting up Coors over territory, do you?