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Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

Wow, there's a lot of hyperbole going on here. I'm a little disappointed people on HN are falling for it.

It seems pretty clear from reading the article that Minnesota isn't stopping anybody from taking online courses.

But to be officially recognized in Minnesota requires that the entity providing the education is registered as an educational entity in Minnesota. I'm pretty sure most states have laws like this. Here's why: I know nothing about biology, but without laws like this, there would be nothing stopping me from offering classes on biology.

In this case it's obvious Coursera is legit, but in a lot of cases it may not be so obvious.

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> I know nothing about biology, but without laws like this, there would be nothing stopping me from offering classes on biology.

What if you did know something about biology, and furthermore you were a really good teacher, and you wanted to post YouTube videos to spread the knowledge for free (like Salman Khan). If the law said you had be registered as an educational institution, you'd first have to navigate the bureaucracy, probably pay some outrageous fees, and you'd probably end up being rejected because you're doing things in a new and innovative way which the law didn't account for. Would you go through all that and try to fight it just to give away some YouTube videos for free?

Probably not, and that would deprive the public of a new opportunity to learn. That wouldn't serve the public interest.

Your completely missing the point.

Minnesota isn't trying to stop Coursera's innovation.

They just need to certify they're teaching legitimate stuff before they can claim to be an educational institution in Minnesota.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If I wanted to teach people, it seems reasonable to prove that I know the subject I'm teaching.

And you're missing the point that if anyone tries any online educational innovation, they can potentially be stopped by every locality in the world shaking them down for money on a dubious pretense, if we let Minnesota set a precedent.

There is nothing HN likes more to overreact to laws that have a legitimate function that happens not to make sense applied to a new development.

Why then did Coursera update their terms of service to reflect this law?

Imagine if people could sell goods and services to each other without the resident government doing a quality check. What a hell that would be.

Wait a second, is this a certified political opinion that I'm replying to? Do you have your Internet politics license? I don't want to be cheated arguing with a low-quality commenter.

First, you're kinda putting words in my mouth. I'm not defending the law, I'm just pointing out that it's not as unjustified as people are making it out to be. The government provides and regulates education for children, it's not entirely unreasonable that they'd have their hand in higher education, too.

Also, it's nice to think that everybody would play nice, but without laws like this there are assholes who would teach people crap. Laws like this don't exist because somebody decided to make an arbitrary law out of nowhere. Apparently it was a big enough problem that the majority of people in Minnesota thought there should be a law...

No, it's absolutely fuckjng deplorable when a government stops the free flow of goods, services, and information to protect archaic business practices.

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