Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

A few things happened that made this possible.

1)Silicon Valley surrendered the high ground in terms of free speech. In the past, Silicon Valley at least used to preach a near absolute commitment to free speech. Now, they don't anymore.

2) Consolidation of content. Before, the internet was very distributed. Number of nights a 1000 poeple might regularly visit could be in the thousands. Now, a significant number of people just visit Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or one of a maybe a dozen top sites. This makes enforcing regulations much easier.

3) Silicon Valley managed to pull off the near impossible feat of angering both sides of the political spectrum at the same time. The left was angered by the perception that the tech companies', especially Facebook's lackluster enforcement of policies allowed Donald Trump to be selected President. The right was angered by the apparent enforcement of political correctness at the expense of free speech. In addition, it became clear with this election that many in silicon valley despised the Right. Thus, Silicon Valley was left with few defenders.

4) Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures. Things like the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump's election would have been much more difficult without the Internet and social media in partiy. The powerful across the gloves in China, Russia, EU, and now the United States have realized that an uncontrolled Internet can be a huge danger to their ongoing status.

Put all these together and it is very likely that this is just the first wave of further regulation of Silicon Valley.

This comment is almost a parody of Hacker News comments:

"The evil statists are only bringing down the hammer because the glorious technologists DARED to threaten their power!"

The reality is that what's driving this is the end of the honeymoon phase with tech. There used to be a general sense of trust in the big tech companies. People could take Google's "Don't Be Evil" stance seriously. This very comment has this view as its unspoken premise, that the tech companies are good and glorious and it's outside forces that are harmful and want to suppress them. As a result, they were treated with a special hands-off approach in most areas.

It was the tech companies themselves that eroded that trust over the last decade + through their behavior and interaction with people. As a result, there's no longer that store of goodwill and a willingness to extend them special treatment, so now they get treated like every other company.

Because, of course, whatever they tried to sell the world, they WERE just like any other company the whole time. They just had a shinier surface.

You say parody, I say honest representation voted to the top of the page, on article that was knocked off the front page by flagging or mods. Part of the problem is that quite a few people here are representative of the broader industry which is full of young people who think the last decade and half are just how the world works. These are the people who look at all progress as though it must conform to Moore’s Law, and think the unregulated free-for-all of their industry so far is just how it is.

Reality is slow to catch up to new things, but it is utterly inevitable.

> Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures.

These regs will likely turn technology into yet another entrenched power structure. You won't be able to bootstrap a video hosting service as easily anymore if you need to provide a lot of moderation services, hire a legal team to keep you above board on all the requirements, etc.

There might not be another facebook or google if you need facebook or google money to even get started.

I see this argument every time tech industry regulation is discussed, and I feel it misses the fact that legal and regulation requirements are generally not that bad... they just don't scale well.

The average website owner need not worry about SESTA, for example, because they can easily take individual action on an individual violation of the law as they discover it. But a giant corporation who knows that they likely have violations numbering in the five digits needs a compliance department to handle all of it.

Startups will not be heavily restricted by regulation, because by the time their regulatory requirements are challenging, they'll just need to factor the additional costs into their scale-up plans. And on the contrary, the increased requirements for large players will add cost and challenge to the established players that will likely make room for new startups to take advantage of and work in under the margin.

The concern is that complexity is a subsidy to the large and well connected. Regulatory capture is a particular example of that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

...so if Google gets severely impacted by regulations, they have the money, connections, and power to get the rules (or at least their enforcement) altered. Small players just go out of business and we forget about them.

See all the community banks and hospitals that have been getting punished in the last ten years. Big banks and big hospitals are figuring out all the new changes just fine. But the disparate outcomes are clear enough that I am surprised by arguments that regulations are good for little players and bad for small ones.

> The average website owner need not worry about SESTA,

The average, maybe. But consider a hobbyist-operated website used by millions. Proactive compliance is just not possible for everyone.

To be honest, #3 is a very broad generalization. It wasn't Silicon Valley that gave it up, it was Reddit, Google, Twitter, and FB. The problem is, public perception of "tech" is largely driven by those three companies as they are all handling the largest collections of social media.

The truth is, the powerful have come to realize "free speech" being protected was only a safe position for them when people were unable to organize en mass without serious sacrifices. Now that they have, they feel a need to make it stop.

It is the same reason they killed Unions and tried to kill Protesting. Both are threats to those in power. Online organizational ability is another threat and they are testing the waters on punishing people there as well. They can't stop it, just reduce it.

The key one, I think, is number 4. Nothing moves Congresscritters faster than something posing a risk to their reelection campaign. But everything here is accurate.

1/2/3 all seem like the same thing. Consolidation because that's where the money was. Money comes with strings.

4 also. Money <==> power.

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