In the absence of big government, big corporate will become defacto government even more easily.
There have been way too many stories alone on HN about people losing e.g. their entire mail archives or Youtube deleting evidence videos of war crimes, to let this situation continue for any longer.
Government needs to finally recognize the importance of social media to modern society... after all, telcos are not allowed to arbitrarily cut you off (especially not for life!). Why should social media be treated differently?
Well, ISPs are replaceable (okay, they will offer different speeds). Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data).
A telco is not easily replaceable though, as the phone number is your unique handle that often cannot be changed easily (which is why you have the right to keep your number in Europe across providers)...
Comcast customers would like to have a word with you.
I'd say it's reasonable these days to expect regular people (especially the 18-34 demo) to actually rely on the speeds you get with fiber. ADSL and satellite, by comparison, are slow as molasses.
A number of those folks could probably survive with a mobile data hotspot, but that is really not ideal for a house or apartment.
I'm not opposed to government regulation (I support the GDPR, for example), but I really don't see Gmail bans as a problem needing intervention.
YouTube banning videos is more concerning, but how would you regulate that? And which government decides what rules apply, considering that YouTube is international?
It is a similar thing with the EPA and FDA, if a corporation meets their requirements, you can't sue them, even if they are polluting your town. It actually _enables_ a legal limit that they can pollute rather than strictly reducing pollution. The most effective anti-littering campaign was the Keep America Beautiful, Crying Indian campaign, not really the EPA.
A lot of this has to do with culture, if people aren't okay with big corporations and corruption, then they would do something different. But on a certain level, people don't really care or believe that corporate entities somehow help the economy. Two-hundred years ago, the culture was different and people made things go a bit differently; the culture we have now generally supports corporate and governmental power.
Do you have a citation for that? States, cities, and individuals sue all the time. Saying you met the federal standards may be part of the defense but it’s not immunity.
Instead, I think technology is the culprit. Technology pushes out the boundary where economies of scale give way to diseconomies of scale. Mom & pops can't compete with Amazon not because Amazon has a few senators in its pocket. They can't do it because Amazon's immense scale (multiple robotic warehouses, in-house shipping and logistics expertise, etc.) makes it impossible to compete on price and quality.
I think you're right that Google and Amazon (and others) leveraged something new - the catalog-sales and cat-video dynamo we call the internet - to get where they are.
And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are.
[1] You might say 'Uber' in response; I'd say the company was corrupt and failed to find sufficient exploitable government levers to succeed in those efforts, because someone else got to those levers first.
IMO that's not a convincing argument. Your response to two specific counter-examples is "one day you'll see that those examples actually prove my point instead of yours"
If you want to argue they'll lobby, manipulate and bribe less than average among peer-firms, well, that argument could be made.
But if you want to argue that there's something special about them that means they won't play all the same games, perhaps start with explaining how Amazon's begging-for-handouts HQ tour is different than the sports stadium scam.
You’re begging the question by assuming that this conduct is what keeps “peer firms” big. That’s the point in dispute.
I’d say that there is good reason to believe why that isn’t true. Walmart spent just $7 million on lobbying last year. It’s a company with $500 billion in revenue. Does it make logical sense to infer that the $7 million in lobbying is what keeps the $500 billion spigot flowing? Much smaller competitors could out-lobby Walmart, raising the market price of corruption. Why doesn’t that happen—with hundreds of billions of dollars on the line?
People take as a shibboleth that lobbying is corruption and corruption keeps big companies big. But that flies in the face of the actual data.
You're attempting to treat lobbying as a binary. Does it make logical sense that Walmart would spend $7M if it didn't feel that investment had a return?
Of course large companies are buoyed by other factors. But as congress-critters famously pointed out a while back, Silicon Valley had to learn to lobby. And they did, otherwise Bad Things could happen.
Also,
> People take as a shibboleth
I don't know what tribe you're trying to make me a member of, but, uh, no.
> But that flies in the face of the actual data
If you're talking about the gap between $7m and $.5T, that dataoid demonstrates nothing other than that multinational retailers operate much larger firms than politicians do.
My question stands: how is AZON playing a different game than they various sportball leagues?
Would Walmart spend only $7 million on lobbying if the return was so crazy high as you’re assuming it is?
> If you're talking about the gap between $7m and $.5T, that dataoid demonstrates nothing other than that multinational retailers operate much larger firms than politicians do.
Price doesn’t relate to size of firm or cost, but rather supply and demand. Under your theory, where lobbying is instrumental in keeping a $500 billion business from being out competed, demand should be high. At the same time, with a very limited number of Congress critters, supply is limited. That should push up the price as other firms bid to secure the supposed benefits Walmart now gets.
A small government is perfectly able to regulated what is needed to regulate. It is an absolutle isllusion to believe that only a big government can correctly regulated cooperations.
In fact, I would argue there is little corrulation either way, both big and small govenrment sometimes have effective laws.
The ability to regulated derives from a monopoly on violence, not control of 50% of the economy.
It's not immediately obvious to me that either is true in terms of producing viable societies, but as these are the primary axes which determine how a society is going to function, it seems they ought to both be or neither be.
But if you think in terms of multiscale, the difference between systems stops looking so qualitative and looks more quantitative:
Either you have an absolute property law system, and a limited commons forms on top of that through land trusts, etc.
Or you have an absolute communist system, and a limited free market forms on top of that, within a system of exceptions and exemptions.
Technically you could implement identical 50/50 socialized/private systems in both of those schemes.
In practice scale matters so which system runs which scale will affect the outcome.
But the long term outcome will inevitably be “the right things are socialized and the right things are privatized”... the two systems each do experiments and make concessions when they lose. They’ll end up being quite the same, although in the short term they are quite different. And we need both to exist to run all the experiments.
As the government has balooned in size, trust busting has become almost non existent. Corruption these days just gets a yawn.
Can we imagine anything other than the system we live in?
I suppose we can imagine small adjustments like higher or lower taxation, more or less regulation, increasing or decreasing subsidies for different groups.
But that's like slightly changing the temperature or salinity of the water we're swimming in. It doesn't help us imagine what walking through air would be like.
A small / weak government can't do anything to stop them.