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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

> I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government,

If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent:

The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove.

Google, a foreign private entity has no such checks and balances in place. We don't vote in general elections for the new CEO of Google, we don't elect representatives into the board, and we cannot lean on transparancy laws to look into the kitchen at that private entity.

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On the other hand, the government is a true monopoly (for good reason) so you can't just stop being their "customer" whenever you like.

You may end up spending your entire life oppressed by your fellow citizens who may be indifferent towards your needs.

So I think there is a good reason for not having the government directly run everything. It wouldn't even mean democratic control over everything. It would mean bureaucratic control, very indirectly influenced by a democratic choice between a handful of parties once every 4 or 5 years.

Both government and voluntary agreements between individuals and companies have their place. What governments should do is make sure that our interaction with Google and other tech giants is indeed voluntary and transparent.

Turns out it's surprisingly hard to stop being a Google customer, if not impossible. I advise you to check the series by Kashmir Hill if you haven't yet: https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

From the article, it doesn't sound _too_ hard to not be a customer of any of the companies (and I was Google-free for a long while until I had to use an Android for work purposes); what is difficult is not interacting with any customers of these companies in addition to not interacting with the companies themselves. This person didn't use Signal, for instance, because it is hosted on AWS. That's like saying you'll stop visiting shops that have Verizon Business internet or similar, which to me seems very different from just trying to cut Verizon out of your life.

> It wouldn't even mean democratic control over everything. It would mean bureaucratic control, very indirectly influenced by a democratic choice between a handful of parties once every 4 or 5 years.

Even direct democratic control would be a nightmare. In practice the bureaucratic layer probably tempers the worst excesses.

That's probably true as long as a particular bureaucracy isn't too corrupt.

True, and I absolutely support regulation where necessary. I strongly support regulation that require companies to handle user data in a confidential manner, for example. But that doesn't make all regulation automatically good; I strongly oppose regulation that requires companies to share sensitive user data with anyone who asks for it, for example. And forcing a company to do business it does not want to do, seems unreasonably oppressive.

In this particular case, if Google barely makes any money on linking to news sites, and the law says they need to pay a lot of money to link to those sites, then the obvious business decision is not to link to those sites at all, which will likely hurt news sites, because they get less visitors.

There are levels of regulation that will hurt the market, rather than help it, and this sounds like it might be one of those.

I recognise the right and need of democratic governments to regulate markets, but I also recognise that this can turn the government into an authoritarian seat of power, that serves power, rather than the people. This democratic accountability needs to work, needs to be used, needs to be obeyed by the government. So that makes it good that Google shares with the Australian public what's going on.

I'm not saying this specific law is any good (I think it is not). But I am saying that when we compare who is to allow or deny us access to news and knowledge, and who should be able to track our every move, a democratic elected goverment is better suited to do so, than a private entity.

That sounds completely contrary to the concept of a free press. If the government gets to decide access to news, then independent checks on the government can become impossible. It would be the end of a free press.

This is absolutely a big problem with democracy: on the one hand, it requires a free press to inform voters about the state of the country and the government, but on the other hand, there's no way to guarantee that the press will provide the necessary information; the press needs to be funded, but if the government funds it, the government controls it. If the people pay for it in a free market, then the press will publish what the people want to pay for, rather than what is necessary for them to know about their government.

What I meant was not that a democratic government has to be the free press, but that I has to keep laws, checks, balances and regulation to ensure that free press is possible.

And that a government is a better candidate to enable and ensure free press than a private entity: we can see this in action in e.g. China where either Google keeps away from, or companies self-censor to grab some Chinese cash.

Sorry for the confusion.

I don't quite understand what you mean. Are you saying that the Chinese situation, where the government is the entity that decides on access to the news, is a good one?

I think it's vitally important that press can exist and publish completely independently from the government. Yes, that does mean there need to be laws protecting the press from censorship and subtler forms of manipulation. But this particular piece of regulation looks like it's going to hurt access to the press by forcing Google News out of the country.

Furthermore, it sounds like only large news corporations can get money from this, which makes me wonder what that means for independent journalists and small news publications.

(Admittedly fake news is a big problem, but so is a government deciding what is true and what is false.)

Sorry for more confusion.

I think the Chinese situation is bad. But that was not my point. The point was that a government is the entity to protect, enable and allow free speech; a private entity is not.

The Chinese example shows that when a government does not allow, or protect free speech, the private entity cannot solve it either. Google cannot enable free speech in China: only the Chinese government could do that.

I used this example to show that relying on private entities to protect freedom is not a very good one: you need a government that enables them; even if "enabling" means "not interfering" or "pulling back".

> "The point was that a government is the entity to protect, enable and allow free speech; a private entity is not."

This is true in the ideal case. In practice, governments don't always enable and protect free speech. Even the idea that governments should do this is fairly recent, and constantly under attack.

> "Google cannot enable free speech in China"

This is true. But Google can warn people when free speech is under attack. And some companies do have a habit of fighting for free speech.

In the end, there is no single entity that can and should bear the entire responsibility of protecting free speech; it's up to everybody.

So what? Democracy isn’t a sacrament, it doesn’t sanctify the government. Hitler was democratically elected. Democracy does not have moral valence as such.

Hitler got 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections.

But I agree that democratic government doesn't automatically justify everything. Minority and fundamental individual rights are a problem. There are a lot of tricky issues with self referentiality if you think about independence movements for instance.

Yep, Hitler being elected Chancellor was well within the legal framework of the Weimar constitution (even if it was kind of a shady backdoor deal). Him rigging the 1933 election and later grabbing all the power through the Enabling Act wasn't.

I find the elected fascist to be an interesting thought experiment. If someone was fairly elected on a platform of genocide, would you comply? If someone doesn't, does that mean democracy is second to morality? And, if they don't, do they think that person should be allowed to stand on that plaform?

Duh, obviously democracy ranks way lower than morality.

Whether someone should be allowed to campaign for genocide depends on the laws of the country. In modern Germany platforms like that are explicitly forbidden. But the laws of the Weimar Republic were more value agnostic.

Hitler wasn't elected, in fact the Weimar Republic was mostly incapable of forming a working government during the time it existed. Like many before him Hitler was assigned his position in the hope that his failure to uphold his promises would also cripple his support in the population. His biggest grab for power was underlined by armed SA troops in the Reichstag, a lot of imprisoned or outright missing politicians and Göring fudging the attendance count to meet the minimum requirements for a legitimate vote.

The Nazi faction, led by Hitler actually 'won' the election because their party got the most votes, but not enough to have an absolute majority so they were going to have to make some kind of coalition.

A similar thing could easily happen today.

> The Nazi faction, led by Hitler actually 'won' the election because their party got the most votes, but not enough to have an absolute majority

The coalition Hitler lead had around 240 of 580 seats. They didn't have an absolute majority because they weren't even near having any kind of majority. Of course a hundred of the other seats were held by communists and those went up in flames after the Reichstag fire and the subsequent ban on left leaning political organisations.

> A similar thing could easily happen today.

The last time a German government tried to outlaw an opposition party it ended up with the courts throwing the case out for involving too many law enforcement moles.

So you are saying democracy is magic?

No.

I'm pointing out some differences between a private entity and a goverment, which the parent commenter either ignored, or forgot to mention when comparing said governement with said private entity.

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