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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

... and thus begins a new series of regulations designed to pierce the plausible deniability of "terms of service". People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook.

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There's probably nothing FB wants more than to be regulated into a monopoly

So long as we don't have to log onto to FB to file our taxes or something, how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public? Assume it ends up being a regulator that's really talented at harming the general public, like FCC...

> how much harm can the regulator really inflict on the general public?

They can make regulations on social networks that are infeasible to comply with for any company not making 10s of billions of dollars a year, effectively cementing facebook as the only legal social network. Whether you consider that a harm or not is up to you.

I think that's an insane stretch of what's really happening.

Sure. It was a reply to a (dismissive) question asking what's the worst a regulator could do... it wasn't necessarily meant to be a reflection of what's really happening.

The harm of (captured-)regulated monopolies is real, but we ought to save this argument for important targets like the Daughters Bell. I offered an admittedly far-fetched example of a possible harm from regulating FB, in the hopes that you could come up with a more plausible one. No such luck!

> People complain about GDPR and other regulations, but they are created to close loopholes that were abused by companies like Facebook

I complain about GDPR because it buttressed Facebook's position [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-europes-new-privacy-rules-f...

It seems like we're seeing how scalable the mantra of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" really is.

Not Facebook scale, apparently.

Been fine so far.

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