The best thing about the internet is that it is so easy for another product to spring up to serve a new need or compete with ensconced businesses.
Regulations increase cost of business and dissuades other companies from competing.
It's about how so many are in favor of "taxing the rich", not realizing that to Middle America with an average household income of $70K, if you make over six figures, you are "the rich".
And from the political skew of HN, I wonder how many actually trust this government with more power?
Yes, "accountable". Quotes here because voter suppression, disenfrachisment and aggressive gerrymandering are all things that really make me wonder about the substance of accountability ala plebiscite.
And no, I am not throwing out any babies or bathwater here.
Browsers can block that quite easily.
> and affecting the society you live in
And people are becoming more aware of how that happens, and developing tools to control and expose that, and at the end of the day people can choose to use it or not.
> At least the government is accountable through elections.
Not particularly, no.
I feel far, far more enfranchised in my ability to choose what voluntary associations I form. I know I'm not the only one.
How? That's not possible. Facebook knows where you are and what you're doing, etc, without you even having a computer or smartphone at all. Your friends or their friends will already upload your address, phone number, contact info, etc.
When you go out in public and you get caught in the background of someone else's photo, that you might not even know is being taken? They might post that to FB or Instagram, and then boom, FB gets another data point to analyze and find out where you go and what your habits are.
"Browsers" can't block what Facebook does to track users, not even close. That would be a trillion-dollar-invention.
> And people are becoming more aware of how that happens,
Are they? I don't think they are. I think people are grossly misinformed about how the data is collected.
> and developing tools to control and expose that
Who is? I know of no serious efforts to meaningfully reduce the data FB is able to collect.
> and at the end of the day people can choose to use it or not.
No they cannot. None of these services or companies are opt-in. You have profiles with them long before you sign up. You are being manipulated and studied and watched and you have no choice about it.
Perhaps over a certain size, companies should be somehow required to provide the public some amount of voting power on their board, absent a financial interest in the company’s results.
Choose not to do business with them. Advocate that others not do business with them. Encourage employees to leave or change things. Work with companies you can influence to avoid doing business with them. Create competition, whether as a business or as a new technology that obsoletes theirs. There are many, many things you can do that have far more likelihood of enacting meaningful change, and that have nothing to do with being a shareholder.
The likelihood of success in such methods depends heavily on the ability to get others to agree with you and take action.
This has no effect whatsoever. You can try but it won't matter. You make money for Facebook and Google even if you spend every waking hour trying not to do so. Your very existence - that you have opinions, ideas, that you go places, spend money, etc- is sufficient for these businesses to choose to do "business" with you without your knowledge. They'll take things you thought were yours and then use that to sell ads to other companies.
> Advocate that others not do business with them.
Again, this won't matter one bit. This kind of change takes decades to propagate throughout society, way slower than is necessary to avoid damage done.
> ...
> The likelihood of success in such methods depends heavily on the ability to get others to agree with you and take action.
So none of your ideas will work. The 'markets' are broken when looking at long-term financial gain through sustainable growth and consumer choice. Do not look to broken-since-inception-on-purpose "models" to dictate how you think a modern economy should function.
Your dismissal is not a counterargument. These approaches have worked in the past, multiple times, with many different companies, to enact change. They may or may not work every time. And on the flip side, in some cases not everyone will agree that they should work. Your position of what should happen to these companies is not necessarily a universal position.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to dismiss. I was trying to say that if your conclusion/mechanism to enact change depends on the success of convincing individual people do take action, it is unlikely to succeed for these reasons:
- People converse slowly, especially on awkward topics like privacy. Opinions change slowly.
- Propaganda and willingness of huge corporations to try to alter public opinion is huge, growing and already very intense. There is little historical analogue for it because so much power is concentrated so tightly now, with tools that completely change the balance of power (like AI, big data analytics, etc).
> They may or may not work every time.
Right. But we only have 1 shot at this and it needs to work. Our systems have already failed and our society is suffering because of it. Our government is not stable, our emotions are proudly directly manipulated by corporations, and we are hurting because of it.
We must regulate because we cannot afford future losses of this magnitude.
And yet you're suggesting government regulation that moves more quickly, which implies that the government shouldn't wait that conversation and consensus to happen. (Leaving aside whether the government should do it even if people do support it, it certainly seems even worse to do it if there isn't such a consensus.)
> But we only have 1 shot at this and it needs to work.
You are presuming agreement with your premise. And you are furthermore presuming that the resulting regulation will work, and will not cause worse damage. (And where does "only have one shot at this" come from, here?)
"The government should exert control over one of the most popular communications mediums" is a terrifying proposition, with the potential to support a huge amount of damage. I don't think it's a given that that damage would be less than the problem it's trying to solve.
That's right. If the government waits for a consensus, it will never arrive. No action will be taken and society will crumble.
> (Leaving aside whether the government should do it even if people do support it, it certainly seems even worse to do it if there isn't such a consensus.)
Why does it seem worse? The entire premise of not having a full democracy is that sometimes the people are not capable of determining what will help the country prosper in 20-50 years. We elect a body of smart people to help set these courses. It seems obvious and built-in to the system that the government must occasionally pass unpopular legislation.
> You are presuming agreement with your premise.
This is all past-tense though. All of this has already happened, is fact now, and so I feel 100% comfortable stating things that agree with history, as fact that agrees with my points. We have already lost our democracy and a lack of regulation is very clearly at fault, both in electoral law and in tech regulation.
> And you are furthermore presuming that the resulting regulation will work, and will not cause worse damage
I will happily invite studies on this. But there is significant work already that shows that power corrupts, that greed has no end, that we live in a tragedy of the commons where unrestricted markets do not produce optimal outputs for the population.
> I don't think it's a given that that damage would be less than the problem it's trying to solve.
Given the absolutely immense damage that has already occurred, I disagree. I think it is a given that regulation would solve far more problems than it would 'cause'.
I didn't say "unanimous", I said "consensus".
> as fact that agrees with my points.
You are jumping from a set of events that took place to presuming what specific action should occur in response. The former are facts, the latter requires actual arguments and support.
> there is significant work already that shows that power corrupts
On that we agree. Which leads me to entirely different conclusions.
I don't especially want to pursue this further; I don't think any new arguments are likely to arise.
Don't like how Facebook runs its data collection on you whether you have an account or not? Tough. There's no, and will never be, a town hall for Facebook.
Don't like how the county runs its health services departments? Well, you can show up at county council meetings, you can get involved politically, you can vote, etc.
Fundamental difference.
But if you live in a larger state like California, you have much less say in the federal government on a per capita basis than someone who lives in Rhode Island between the Senste (2 senators per state regardless of population) and the electoral college, not to mention gerrymandering.
You have to consider what you're trusting them to do.
I trust organizations to act in my interest so long as our interests align. It is the difference between allies and friends.
No matter someone's political views, it surprises me when people are willing to trust the government with more power as long as their party is in control, while forgetting that their party will not always be in control. Before assigning a new power to government, consider whether you'd trust the opposing party to wield it.
When you fight to pass a law that will create new government institutions and regulations and grow it in size, you're advocating the granting of more power to government. You are in control of whether you choose to advocate that or whether you choose to say "this could be abused".
Government is the ultimate example of needing to consider yourself part of the threat model of your system.
You already see full well how much the government disagrees with its critics on what's considered fake news or not. Don't they realise it'd probably be pro Breitbart/pro Infowars regulation there, with the main targets being those outlets they support?
Same goes for this social media regulation stuff. You won't get a crackdown on 'Russian propaganda', since the elected government over in the US does't believe it is an issue at all.
Government agencies don't stay very independent either, and even if they do, you have no guarantee they'll do what you think is right at all. See net neutrality and Ajit Pai.
So yeah, their party won't always be in control and in a lot of cases, their party isn't in control right now anyway.
For some things I would trust the government over states. If Gay Marriage was left up to the states, there would still be a large amount of states that would gladly ban it. Yet people feared any sort of laws or regulations surrounding gay marriage being passed as a way of the government usurping power.
I would certainly consider federal regulations saying "states may not prevent X" (and in turn state regulations saying "cities may not prevent X") a good thing. That's not an increase in power, that's an intentional ceding of power.
Regulation is one of the best ways for incumbents to build a competitive moat against prospective new entrants.
1) median is a better metric to use than average for this sort of thing
2) an average of 70K with two incomes is not at all impressive. a single person making 6 figures is doing incredibly well, compared to the average household.
I was actually off the 50th percentile is actually around $60K
Why, though? This line of thinking does not work in a modern, connected society. You can not any longer choose to avoid these services, and you will still be affected. Personal consumer choice may take decades to play out in the market, as people take time - a lot of time - to identify and address risks in a rapidly changing environment like tech and social.
We all have Facebook profiles whether we want to or not - and this means that individual choice no longer means anything about whether or not the company survives. The market reacts very slowly. Are you willing for humanity to suffer from consequences we can identify and fix, but choose not to while we let the 'market' decided?
Externalities are not priced in to the price of pollution and the damages done by climate change. The 'market' does not select for an optimal solution by anyone's definition here or with social/web.
By letting the 'market' decide, you are directly allowing and accepting that billions of dollars of propaganda, meant to shape public opinion through the use of logical fallacies, scare tactics, etc, would end up being the deciding factor in how social media works. You'll end up with billionaire interests being 'market-encouraged' while the regular people will have no voice.
> The best thing about the internet is that it is so easy for another product to spring up to serve a new need or compete with ensconced businesses.
This doesn't seem true to me at all. If anything, the Internet is the most intrenched-money-takes-all platform we have. I think you are mistaken when it comes to your optimism about how the web works.
> Regulations increase cost of business
I think this is false. Regulations increase the sustainable lifetime of a business by providing a stable market to operate in for decades.
> and dissuades other companies from competing.
I think this is also false. Regulations create opportunities for sustainable business, and do not dissuade from real value creation.
Facebook, etc., can easily purchase any social network that gains significant traction, and has done so multiple times in the past.
How do you solve for that?
Please identify how "alternatives" can displace an entrenched monopoly without regulatory interference?
Is your solution just wait for FB to fail?
A smart regulation would simply to require transparency or as someone mentioned elsewhere in another comment, a requirement for federation using some standard - ie, removing those monopoly barriers.
Show me how the market self-regulated to properly treat a customer’s data.
The Public: I'm on board with that!
Congressperson then introduces a bill that imposes regulations that benefit Congressperson's generous donors, while resulting in an even bigger shitshow than before for the public.
The Public: WTF, man?!
Congressperson (if Republican): That's what happens when you let "big government" and stifling regulation go unchecked! Who's up for repealing the Clean Air Act?