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Repealing section 230 is not that.

The point that often gets missed is that without 230 ONLY the big platforms could afford to exist (and probably not even them in their current form).

So while the goal to limit the power of the tech giants may be good, the proposed method will likely accomplish the opposite by removing all competition present and future.

You may be aware of this, if so consider this post to be for someone who isn't.

We hope that the justice department would act in good faith, without political influence, but we're fresh out of an intensive course on how naive it is to rely on that.

Government has been intervening (in some industries) in these ways for decades. It works. It's not arbitrary.

It's not perfect of course, but it's far better than allowing large companies to get a complete stranglehold.

It seems to me that if you want to claim some version of "leave the marketplace alone and it will self correct" then you have to make a pretty strong case. It's not a self evident truth, history tells a different story.

Sometimes the marketplace takes care of itself, sure, but there have been lots of examples where it hasn't. In those cases, when government has stepped in, the outcome has generally been positive (if sometimes short lived).

And also, step back a bit and look at the state of digitally distributed disinformation. We've elected politicians that look like characters from an absurdist satire, loony conspiracy theories are going mainstream, climate change isn't real, the pandemic is a lie, a significant percentage of the US population thinks the presidental election was completely fraudulent... and so on.

Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society. I'd love to think that if you let people figure things out for themselves they'll eventually manage it. That they'll eventually stop believing wild claims based on no evidence.

But we don't have time to test that theory.

Should the big platforms have the power over the digital public square that they do? Definitely not. But they do have it. Pressuring them to deal with misinformation is something I completely support.

The alternative is tech illiterate legislation because the misinformation problem isn't going to go away on it's own.

Personally I appreciate when people point out what really happened (based on evidence) as a counterpoint to the cover narratives of the time, which so many still believe. We need cynicism where politics and public institutions are concerned.

When you add the race issues, which drove the narrative, policies and policing, there's really no comparison between the crack and opioid crises.

When PHP was first released it was dramatically better than the alternatives for it's intended purpose.

There were plenty of things to complain about, but none of them stopped you from doing useful things with it. It was never slow or inefficient compared to other scripting languages, it didn't lack functionality.

Over the decades the most popular complaints have been addressed as the language has matured.

That it's remained in active development for 25 years with no signs of that changing in the future is one of it's biggest selling points.

I don't blame people for having issues with aspects of PHP based on their personal preferences and experiences, I get that, but that doesn't make it a 'bad' language.

There's nothing wrong with purist perspectives on what programming languages should be and how they should work. That contributes to better design.

But in the real world the questions are simpler: can this tool be used to develop applications quickly? Is it reasonably efficient at runtime (in this case in the context of scripting)? Can we easily find affordable developers in the future? Is there community support?

PHP checks the boxes that people building things want checked as well as any language and better than many. Unless I'm missing something, 'bad' here is more of a philosophical stance.

Or at least it didn't present a credible argument for a crowd like HN. Despite that, from my perspective, having long followed the research in fields that relate to health, almost all of the points are the most likely explanation based on what we know (which isn't enough). Backing that up is of course a big ask, big enough that you'd have to decide between spending a few hours on a post or spending weeks compiling sources, then writing a brief history of health policy and practice.

I can understand going with option one.

All of that aside, I think this point is important:

>The default for evaluating some food that isn’t found in nature shouldn’t be that it’s “healthy until proven bad,” rather, bad until proven healthy.

We've co-evolved with our environment for 25 million years (if you count from the earliest evidence of hominoids). It's hard to argue that it doesn't make sense to approach anything that falls outside of that evolutionary relationship with healthy skepticism.

They had to evolve PageRank (into things like hubs and authorities, etc..) to maintain quality.

If you think their results are bad, try a rudimentary search query on the raw data from one of the open web index projects.

Google sucks in a lot of ways but they're still really really good at search.

Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results).

You're right that drawing users is a big challenge, but privacy gives you a way in there (again DDG). It just isn't enough if you can't provide better results.

Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.

Which is extremely expensive in engineering time because ranking isn't static but rather a constant war with gaming.

The media, and those of us who understand what Pai did to net neutrality, need to do a better job of communicating to the general public exactly what Pai is, and what he's there to do.

It would also be nice if people understood that section 230 protections allow the internet as we know it (not just the social media giants) to exist, but I'd settle for just the bit about Pai as a start.

But tread lightly when comparing this administration to any other in the history of western democracy. It's a horror show up close.

> Actually it's probably a LOT easier

Can you support that claim?

Just the scale alone is mind boggling when it comes to search.

Then throw in natural language processing, contextual signals, hubs and authorities, content categorization (which grows ever closer to looking like actual understanding), machine learning, a host of other basic and ever evolving quality signals that exist both in and inter-dependently of one another, the more complex signals that arise from the above and on and on.

Search is hard. Even the most casual of Googling (or maybe Binging would be apt in this case) will provide you with endless info about how hard it is.

If the solution was purely to force Google to sell access to their index then yes it seems possible on the surface.

But as mentioned index and ranking are inextricably tied together.

Even if they weren't, no other organization is going to be able to produce search results comparable to Google using their index. You're underestimating what goes on under the hood.

So then the answer (often in these conversations) becomes to open up the ranking algos too.

The problems with that are numerous so I'll just point out some of the bigger ones:

- Arms race: Search is a constant arms race between providers and 3rd parties trying to game the system. The minute you make the algos public, gamers win the race. Search result quality returns to the way it was in the 90's and stays that way until someone else comes up with proprietary algos that work (but is that even legal at this point in our thought experiment?)

- Motivation: If search is open and you therefore can't directly profit from your efforts to improve it (because you automatically give away anything you create to competitors) where is your motivation to keep innovating?

- It's harder than you think: Truly, there's so much more going on in modern search indexing and ranking than you likely realize. The chances that some new organization (especially a gov organization) given access to Google's black box as it exists right now would be able to maintain search result quality for any significant length of time is essentially zero.

But let's imagine that it's as easy as many people think... Wouldn't the solution then be to build a public alternative rather than effectively killing what we have now?

I think the distinction is pretty clear.

Easy enough for grandma, maybe not so much.

But they do it anyway, their call.

Of course there are examples where a company does stand to lose if they don't bid on their own name, and that sucks, but what's the solution? Give companies free top position on their name? How many variations of their name? Do they get related phrases too? What about when (as with Nike) the word can mean other things? What about when there are multiple claims on the same name? Does Nike the shoe company get a free spot over an educational page about Nike the goddess?

And so on... It's not an easy problem to solve, whereas letting companies choose what they want to bid on is simple.

It's of course worthy of much more coverage than it's getting, cheers to Mozilla for furthering the conversation.

In the same way that some thought about radio, TV and now the internet.

In any case any issues with digital media giants aren't the result of the internet, but rather late stage capitalism.

Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter.

If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.

The dystopian future is here.

It's not like he used gifs or flashing colors.

Now I kinda want gifs and flashing colors.

To anyone who's familiar with the topic it's immediately clear from the copy that the author understands it.

Considering that the target audience is other designers, why does the presentation matter?