Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I'll be honest here: I don't know. I've been thinking for some time now whether Facebook and Google should be "socialized", and I just can't see that working. In fact, I only mentioned utilities in hope someone who has an idea how it could work would share it. And the main question I wanted to ask is if we really need new regulations for whatever-we-want-to-do with Google & Facebook, or can we just reuse the old ones, and skip the part when we give governments more power?

FWIW, in my perfect imaginary world, Google Search would work as it had worked few years ago (back when it had less ads), while social networks like Facebook would be forced to interoperate through some shared protocols. But then again, my vision of the perfect Internet involves significantly reducing control the publishing parties have - that is, those parties should publish content and services, not dictate the way I should consume said content and services. I should be perfectly free to render any site any way I like, including not rendering it at all, but navigating through my own (or third party) software.

But regulations strike both ways. Your consumption patterns might not mirror the mandated consumption patterns set forth by the government. For instance, this is what folks against socialized medicine advocate - your freedoms as an individual are reduced.

I think this strikes at the heart of my contempt for heavy handed approach to regulation.

I kinda want to take that back and say we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all. This narrative that everything needs to be regulated and the Internet is a something makes me more worried that we’ll be required to do things as much as we’ll be protected in doing other things.

E.g. a relationship between the government and Facebook in any fashion pushes us closer to allowing Facebook as some form of shared trust - perhaps making it an eligible Voting ID. We get to a point where it becomes more hassle than it’s worth, benefiting the Gov and FB, but not really benefiting the end user.

Maybe that’s the real Net-Neutrality: keeping a hands-off relationship between how I consume information and the regulation of such.

Yes, I feel like the regulatory movement is underway, and the narrative is beginning to brew. And, I think we’re having someone else’s conversation.

Something as simple as mandating that all of a user's activity (and with all I mean including e.g. click tracking on FB or external sites) and accessible information (i.e. posts the user can view) can be exported in real time in a machine readable format would basically do the trick.

It'd allow you to basically build your own Facebook app, migrate meaningfully to another service and build other services that meaningfully integrate with Facebook... and effectively turn FB/Twitter into public utilies and enable real competition to Google to appear by allowing users to share key data such as which result they clicked on in response to which query.

Well, I'm not into forcing things on others, so I can't agree with your perfect world. However, I'm more interested in what "socialized" actually means: it seems like just another phrase like "treated as public utility" that doesn't mean much to me on its own. Is this about the government taking control of the company?

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