Ask HN: Do you think Silicon Valley needs regulatory reform? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think Silicon Valley needs regulatory reform?

2 pointstechdemic8 comments

Multiple reports this week of a run on banks tied to Silicon Valley (SVB, First Republic, Silvergate, etc). Do you think this is the wake-up call Silicon Valley needs for better financial stewardship and regulation? The '08 financial crisis led to Dodd-Frank and regulatory reform on Wall Street - do you think this will be Silicon Valley's '08 moment?

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No.

This is a banking problem. If anything, we might need another banking reform.

This.

"Big Tech" is a hydra with many heads, there are reasons why you'd want to do something about banking right now but there are other problems such as

  * Uber spending $25 billion+ on subsidizing half price taxi rides
  * A near-monopoly in internet advertising
  * Facebook suppressing developments in social media (Tik Tok is so salient because the US stopped innovating and the EU is 7-0,  all own goals)
  * AMZN supporting a money-losing online store from AWS profits
  * Fears about negative social impacts of social media
  * Microsoft trashing the game industry with "Game Pass"

there are many things you might want to regulate in SV and tech in general but you have to break them out into individual issues that would be regulated differently, maybe by different agencies.

What specific regulation do you want?

Do you know what actual effects it would have on a very complicated financial marketplace?

What makes you think that any regulation that managed to get rammed through wouldn't be subtly designed to put in place barriers to entry to competition that would actually just benefit existing banks and screw over normal people even more in the future?

Dodd-Frank is an interesting example, given that it was quietly gutted immediately.

What types of reforms would even be beneficial specifically for Silicon Valley?

Most startups fail. The funding tends to be risky. And really none of that has much to do with the problems at the banks.

Yes. But not from government.

Silicon Valley and their VC-funded startups just crank out tech monopolies or fodder for them to acqui-hire. We saw this before: AOL, MSN, etc. dominated and everyone dialed in, until the Web came out. Then suddenly AOL got “super nice” and started giving out 100 free hours, then 200 then 1000. Then they imploded. Why? The end-users didn’t lead the exodus but the businesses and organizations did! The ones producing the content at AOL keyword:NYTIMES much preferred to invest in Wordpress to power nytimes.com for this new thing called the Web Browser based around an open protocol HTTP.

Silicon Valley needs robust OPEN SOURCE competition. Too many people in the valley (and by extension on HN) love to centralize things in too-big-to-fail server farms, corporations, banks. It’s an old boys club, with the hubris that they can control the world. And they crank out AI behind closed doors, sit on each other’s boards etc. All the while they have come to control our public forums (Zuck and Elon and Larry and Sergey and Bezos and …) They have employees and want people to come into the office. And yet one engineer serves 1 million people. Where’s the service in that?

I much prefer Tim Berners-Lee and Linus Torvalds and Vitalik Buterin. Mayt Mullenweg. If something happens to those guys, the platforms they made don’t miss a beat. No single point of failure. No bottleneck. And best of all, ANYONE can adapt it to their own needs, and it’s free!

We don’t need government intervention. We just need to opt out of the profit-driven silicon valley old boys club and band together to build open source solutions to replace them. The best thing Netscape ever did was open source their browser before losing the battle to IE and M$FT at the time. That’s what led to choice in browsers, via Mozilla, Konqueror, WebKit, Blink etc.

I wouldn’t mind if we had exactly ONE target platform (eg Blink) as long as it was open source and managed collaboratively and democratically like Apache or Mozilla. But closed solutions from Silicon Valley are toxic to human flourishing. They have to be all things to all people while extracting rents forever to please their parasitic shareholder class, who bought shares at $200 and is willing to externalize costs to people and the environment just so they can make the shares worth $300, and so on forever. The whole system is dystopian.

Now we need to disrupt the Big Tech monopoly with open source. We need to move the people of the world from digital FEUDALISM to a FREE MARKET:

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

AOL gave out free hours well before the web started taking off. It was a constant strategy they used to build their subscriber base. It was not in response to anything external, if I remember correctly.

They gave out free hours, but did you notice how the number of free hours started ballooning later? People were bouncing to the Web. Companies like NetZero let them even access it for free, and there was now actual content there!

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