[HN Gopher] Three Stanford professors on the sensible regulation...
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Three Stanford professors on the sensible regulation of Big Tech
Author : ubac
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-09-09 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thebrowser.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thebrowser.com)
| qntty wrote:
| I'd be embarrassed to write a letter to the editor of a local
| newspaper with an analysis this simplistic. Why did it take three
| guys with PhDs to tell us that Regulation Can Be Good
| Actually(tm)?
| gego wrote:
| In Europe digital humanisms seems to be the umbrella term...
| https://dighum.ec.tuwien.ac.at/perspectives-on-digital-human...
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Until you fix Kstreet corruption of the legislative body any
| regulation pushes will almost invariably end up benefiting the
| big corps despite however noble the idea behhind the particlar
| legislion starts out.
| [deleted]
| mLuby wrote:
| I'll add that regulation can be an _entrenching_ mechanism, as
| the overhead of compliance has less relative cost to large
| existing businesses than to small, new ones.
|
| For example: if social media companies were required to ID their
| users _in person_ within 30 days of sign-up ( "think of the
| children" IDK), the infrastructure to comply with that regulation
| would make it extremely difficult for a new startups to pull off,
| while big incumbents with compliance departments already staffed
| up can make it work.
|
| Even worthwhile safety regulations have this effect. You can't
| just start a hazardous chemical transportation company in a
| weekend like you can a software company. I'd say that's working
| as intended, but it does still give larger players a competitive
| edge _just for being larger /older._
|
| For my 2C/, limiting acquisitions and mergers is the way to go
| here. The laws already exist, they just need to be more strictly
| enforced. If a company's core business grows, the company can and
| should grow. But we don't want a ravenous corporate blob that
| absorbs everything tangential to its business, whether that's for
| growth or defensive reasons.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Can't you have the regulations only kick in once you have a
| certain number of users or revenue to limit the entrenching
| impact?
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| In that case you have more terrible scenario where you have
| certain companies who are not interested in becoming too
| large. The innovation happens outside the parent company as a
| separate entity. You end up having lego pieces that come
| together to build something bigger which becomes economically
| wasteful. You are imposing a cost on folks to think big.
| Tesla or SpaceX be vision are trying to be super large
| behemoths.
|
| Among all these calls for "regulation" what is lacking is the
| broader principle that we will use to regulate not just big
| tech but for anyone. Google is different than Exxon but I
| would like the principle that regulations them to be the
| same. When you look at Texas or Florida trying to pass
| regulations around tech, they seem pretty terrifying where as
| California's regulation appears to be a big time nothing-
| burger.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Why is a uniform regulatory application across industries
| required? That seems to have an aesthetic principle but I
| can't imagine why it matters. We already regulate every
| industry separately since the problems posed within each
| industry is unique. Tech has a disconnect of scale between
| size of the company and reach that we haven't seen. Oil has
| pollution that tech mostly doesn't. Nuclear power plants
| have to deal with nuclear waste. There's certain overlaps
| but I think saying "all the regulations that apply to big
| company X in industry Y have to apply to big company A in
| industry B" is a weird and arbitrary line to draw.
|
| Same goes for your comment about inefficiencies. That seems
| to presuppose a particular truth without actually
| presenting any evidence. Sure there can be inefficiencies
| from having multiple companies involved. Conversely you
| also can have better innovation as ideas are allowed to be
| tested without having to get buy in within one large
| massive corporation. Think for example about Xerox where
| their Parc laboratory was regularly churning out ground
| breaking research that was dying on the vine within Xerox.
| For what it's worth that's potentially the case within big
| tech (eg Vine getting killed within Twitter and then TikTok
| showing success).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > You end up having lego pieces that come together to build
| something bigger which becomes economically wasteful.
|
| Isn't this offset somewhat by increased competition forcing
| those operations to be as efficient as practical?
|
| Large, vertically integrated companies can afford to comply
| with more stringent regulation.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Yes, you can. Fiscal policy makers do that all the time -
| some say not enough times - but it's unlikely in this case
| because guess who bought their seats and will be at the table
| if and when these regulations start to be written?
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| How do you stop fragmentation of large companies into
| subsidiaries who are all just below the limit where
| regulations kick in?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Ownership stakes - for example if company X owns >10% of
| company Y, then the regulations for company X could kick in
| for company Y. There's some conceptual precedent for
| reporting requirements of publicly held companies (if you
| own more than a certain percentage it has to be publicly
| reported).
|
| The subsidiary fragmentation itself is uninteresting from a
| regulatory perspective as long as the regulatory
| environment is carefully crafted to pierce through
| intentional corporate governance obfuscation.
| [deleted]
| DSingularity wrote:
| Too little too late. The famous profs are silent as they are
| already wealthy from the big-tech they helped create.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| Rich, cloistered elites discover the bare minimum of ethical
| considerations after being entirely walled off from the broader
| American political conversations for the better part of two
| decades. Says Reed Hastings OF A BOOK COMING OUT IN SEPTEMBER OF
| 2021: "In System Error, we finally have a book about the digital
| revolution that is serious rather than sensationalistic." This
| isn't serious.
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| the government really doesn't like a challenge to its power.
|
| as seen from past antitrust actions, I expect much of "big tech"
| to be thoroughly dismantled.
|
| alphabet will be chopped up along business lines. Each business
| will have to develop its own independent ad system.
|
| facebook will be forced to spin off their acqs and separate
| completely from them.
|
| amazon and AWS will be split, obviously.
|
| dunno about apple. at least split their entertainment businesses
| from their hardware businesses.
|
| This will be a great opportunity for startups who might otherwise
| never would have a chance.
| notabanker wrote:
| I really would like to believe your prophecy but want to offer
| a few rebuttals...
|
| > the government really doesn't like a challenge to its power.
|
| But the government as a whole hasn't really made up its mind.
| There are a few junior congresspeople who are vocal about
| monopoly problems with Big Tech. But senior Democrat
| congresspeople from Big Tech states have not uttered a word
| against Big Tech. Even senior Republicans, and republicans have
| been at the receiving end of Big Tech censorship, are loath to
| antitrust as they have started conflating checks on Big Tech
| monopoly with checks on free enterprise. In short, government
| will has not coalesced around antitrust action against Big
| Tech.
|
| I don't know if Big Tech can be stopped by the government. A
| possibility I see is that the stock market bubble pops, Fed
| money printing loses its ability to inflate tech stocks,
| leading to a decline in Big Tech power.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >But the government as a whole hasn't really made up its
| mind.
|
| It's probably better to view the 'government' as a coalition
| of self-interested groups. It's never really monolithic.
| notabanker wrote:
| Good point, that's really what it is .. a complex entity.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| These companies aren't a challenge to government power in the
| US, on the contrary they are a powerful tool for social
| control. The relationship between massive corporate cartels and
| the US government has become so incestuous that a distinction
| can hardly be made, it's just a question of faction in-fighting
| at this point. The centralization/monopolization of the tech
| industry makes it more convenient to conduct mass surveillance,
| as evidenced by PRISM. Its safe to infer at this point that all
| major tech companies in the US are already infested with
| alphabet spooks, there's no incentive to break them up as far
| as the feds (that actually matter) are concerned. Just partisan
| barking with no bite for the sake of 'optics'.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| > These companies aren't a challenge to government power in
| the US, on the contrary they are a powerful tool for social
| control.
|
| In a sense I'd say that they are now a branch of government.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Even if not really a branch, it's remember that big
| companies dominating whole market segments are important
| geopolitical assets for countries which those companies
| call "home".
| superbaconman wrote:
| I don't see how government can make even a dent in what are
| ultimately cultural issues without drastic changes to the core of
| our laws. The idea that you can't deny service to an individual
| for their political views is a big shift. The idea that
| businesses must align with government goals is a big shift. The
| idea that limitations must be imposed on an individuals exposure
| to social media for their own good is a big shift.
| josephg wrote:
| The situation as I see it is that we've essentially created a
| new, digital place that we spend half our lives living in. And
| it started with very little infrastructure. Facebook and Google
| have created a lot of the infrastructure we need "for free" -
| in exchange for doing surveillance capitalism. It's like if big
| megacorps owned the roads outside your house and tracked you
| and advertised to you as soon as you set foot outdoors. And
| they will ban you from using the road outside if an AI doesn't
| like something you do. Apple made a fiefdom with a harsh 30%
| tax of any trades inside their walls. - and once you're inside,
| it's very expensive to leave.
|
| The whole situation is crying out for some sort of civic
| process. If we live part of our lives in cyberspace, we need a
| voice in how those spaces are governed. Something "By the
| people, for the people." We don't let corporations run towns in
| the real world and do this sort of thing. It's entirely
| consistent to want to bring democratic values online too.
| verve_rat wrote:
| This seems entirely reasonable to me. Take, for example,
| Youtube channels getting shut down for no apparent reason. It
| seems very sensible for there to be a low cost and binding
| tribunal independent of Google to appeal to.
| thephyber wrote:
| IMHO this is all wrong.
|
| We already have a framework for physical networking services
| that does this: Common Carrier. It doesn't and shouldn't
| apply to companies other than "dumb pipe" utilities. No
| company which can or does do any moderation of content should
| be governed by CC laws.
|
| You seem to think forcing all companies on the internet to
| maximize democratic values is somehow either possible or a
| good idea. I can't see how that could be implemented without
| destroying every company's ability to build a brand, to
| enforce their own contractual terms.
|
| Example: you local church/temple website that accepts with
| user-generated comments would be forced to allow and keep
| every comment submitted, no matter how offensive to the
| members or the faith the church practices. Non-believers
| would be able to deface the service in a way that trespassing
| laws prevent IRL. This compelled democratic values
| maximization concept doesn't exist in the offline world so
| you would have to build the logical/rational foundations for
| doing it from scratch. Obviously the church/temple example is
| contrived and those are far from Big Tech companies, but if
| you assert that some services are required to retain all
| offensive content and others aren't, then you need to develop
| a litmus test, which I argue is futile.
|
| And from where I stand, demanding a civic process is really
| strange considering most civic processes in the USA are
| deteriorating while Big Tech is doing the opposite.
| azinman2 wrote:
| People keep saying that, but the evidence seems to be largely
| the opposite: the most viral shares on twitter and Facebook are
| actually right leaning. Yes more right firebrands have been
| kicked off, but that's after they essentially are sharing
| things that have to do with violence.
|
| If you try to say revolution is a political viewpoint, I guess
| you could make that point, but it seems entirely reasonable
| that asking for select people to be killed is crossing a
| meaningful line. Especially in a democracy.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| > but it seems entirely reasonable that asking for select
| people to be killed is crossing a meaningful line.
|
| There is enough legal and philosophical body of work around
| that question. But either ways it is not a meaningful reason
| for "regulation". All platforms already have restrictions for
| such things and very likely government regulations will force
| platforms to allow for "kill all X" talks but not "kill all
| Y" talks making the platform very toxic.
|
| For example, American company's response to Jan 6 appears to
| be far more mature and useful to American society than that
| of American federal government and FBI.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >The idea that you can't deny service to an individual for
| their political views is a big shift.
|
| I can't remember people being denied service for their
| political views until just recently.
|
| Another odd thing is that a company would give a rip about
| their employees political views.
|
| These are strange times.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Look back 50+ years. In the Soviet Union and Soviet-
| affiliated countries, people were denied services and jobs
| for being not visibly communist enough. In the United States,
| people were denied services and jobs for being not visibly
| anti-communist enough.
|
| The idea of not discriminating based on politics or other
| overt characteristics, as a widespread cultural phenomenon,
| was relatively new and short-lived.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| _In the United States, people were denied services and jobs
| for being not visibly anti-communist enough._
|
| In the early 1970s? I'd like to see some citations of that.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I do academic work in this area, which was inspired by watching
| Reddit and HN for a decade.
|
| I do think something must be done, but the notion that it should
| be the government taking action scares me. I believe,
| platonically that is the right way for government to act, to take
| necessary actions to counter predatory behavior.
|
| What scares me is that we chanced into this. Zuck made some
| brilliant movies but he was the same guy at 22 that thought that
| younger people were smarter. Notice he wasn't young enough to say
| that at 32. The people in government do not understand tech. They
| don't understand how it works, they don't understand where it is
| going, and they don't understand its ethos. Government right now
| is dominated by ideologues and demagogues. I'm very worried that
| any government action is going to end up being something that
| only FB, Google, etc can do anything about.
|
| Why does the government need to act? Why spend so much time
| complaining about it on HN? We've been doing that for a decade.
| eplanit wrote:
| "I'm very worried that any government action is going to end up
| being something that only FB, Google, etc can do anything
| about."
|
| Worse is the likely objective/outcome: big tech and gov't.
| joining forces.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Have you studied creative destruction in your work? Could that
| apply here?
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp
| philipov wrote:
| As I see it, the problem is essentially an antitrust issue, but
| our notion of antitrust hasn't evolved since the early 1900s to
| cover the realities of today's economy. Whether a company has
| complete market domination is a red herring used to dismiss
| other types of market failure.
|
| Cartel behavior does not involve monopolies. Vertical
| integration of supply chains does not require a monopoly to be
| a problem. Markets are defined in a way that makes it look like
| on paper the leader doesn't have a dominant position simply
| because they don't have 100% market share, but it hides that
| market share doesn't tell the whole story. Facebook should have
| never been allowed to buy their most promising competitors in
| Instagram and WhatsApp, for example.
|
| Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App stores
| is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust never
| had to deal with. Just because two products look the same
| doesn't mean they compete with each other if there are other
| reasons, such as identity politics or vendor lock-in, which
| cause people to not treat them as replacements for each other.
|
| All these things are issues which government should
| legitimately be regulating, and at one point did regulate. But
| there is no will left to do that anymore, and the poor quality
| of our politicians is partly to blame for it.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Intentionally confusing the market for phones with App
| stores is an example of a problem that 20th century antitrust
| never had to deal with.
|
| I'd say that the issues with app stores are a pretty direct
| parallel to Company Towns[0], whose issues have been known
| and addressed for more than a century.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The people in government do not understand tech. They don 't
| understand how it works, they don't understand where it is
| going, and they don't understand its ethos._
|
| That may have been true 20 years ago. The people in government
| understand current tech and its ethos very well, because it's
| the same ethos as in every other industry: profit over all.
|
| What surprises me is to see people still thinking our industry
| has any trace of the original "hacker ethos" left in it. It
| doesn't. Big Tech companies are just run-of-the-mill
| megacorporations, with all pathologies that come with megacorps
| run by suits, differing only by the flavor of the products they
| sell. Startup world is just another Wall Street, with a
| sprinkling of tech sugar on top of the dollars being gambled.
|
| Governments understand this well. Whether it's Google or GM or
| Monsanto that's pulling business shenanigans, it's all the same
| business shenanigans. Hacker ethos? That ended when programming
| started to pay well.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| What you are describing is SV. SV doesn't have to be the tech
| industry and it isn't.
| jjulius wrote:
| >... and they don't understand its ethos.
|
| What is tech's ethos?
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Because the authors, and tech industry milieu they represent,
| believes democratic government is the only method for resolving
| differences:
|
| >[Democracy] doesn't mean that there's some alternative way to
| accomplish that underlying task
|
| >[Democracy is] about a fair process for refereeing in an
| ongoing way, the contestation of citizens' own choices and
| preferences.
|
| Like they said, would you prefer the Pope to censor your tech?
| Would you wear unregulated clothing? Of course not. "[W]e need
| to break people out of a kind of binary mindset where markets
| are good and markets have all the solutions" and people's needs
| must be decided democratically.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| These profs know that democracy isn't a magic fix. The
| changes made to tech today will come from the democratic
| system, the same system that is not working great. The
| current situation sucks but a challenger still has the power,
| overreaching legislation instead puts that power into the
| public will which is arbitrary and easily misrepresented. I'm
| not opposed to a break-up or limits on some of the bigger
| companies, but it's beyond that which worries me, personally.
| prox wrote:
| It's a false view that markets will regulate themselves.
| They tend not to beyond what their clientbase deems
| acceptable or not. So we have big tech which undermines
| democracy, and in the US democracy is skewed because people
| aren't properly represented because of lobbyists and
| gerrymandering (and sponsorship by corporations instead of
| their constituents)
|
| So this vicious circle is hard to break if we aren't will
| to break with old ways.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| It can be, if people are energized by their newfound
| agency, instead of towed around on cattle cars called
| Facebook and Google. Like Rob says in the interview,
| cooperation beats competition. Cooperative community
| solutions beat greedy private solutions.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| I guess my main disagreement is that private solutions
| dn't have to be greedy and community solutions are often
| driven by it. I think we want the same or similar things,
| we disagree about the process?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _private solutions dn 't have to be greedy_
|
| But they do, over time. This is what competition does.
| You may start out in a fresh market fully intent on doing
| a good and honest job, but then competitors arrive.
| First, they force you to innovate and improve your
| offering. Then, when improvements start yielding
| diminishing returns, you're forced to either become
| exploitative and dishonest, or be outcompeted.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| While we live in an idealistic democracy, in truth we live
| in a plutocracy. Tech has become one of the venues to
| become a plutocrat and wield influence that a single vote
| in a representative republic can't even imagine.
| efitz wrote:
| The problem is that we are dealing with large concentrations of
| power. These tech corporations have power in the form of money;
| additionally many technology corporations have power in the
| form of the ability to selectively amplify or silence people
| and ideas. Many of these companies have monopolies, but many of
| these companies, while jot monopolies, participate in very
| small oligopolies. How many credit card networks are there? How
| many microblogging sites?
|
| Effectively if you piss off one of these companies, they can
| exclude you from entire swathes of tech, media or the economy.
| In such situations many people will choose to self censor.
| Personally I don't believe that is healthy; it leads to
| situations like the US 2016 election when all the polls were
| well in favor of one candidate and then the other won.
|
| Another thing about corporate power in general is that it is
| not the case that the corporation uses its power
| proportionately representing either its employees or
| shareholders. The corporation uses its power in accordance with
| its officers' desires. In this way corporations are the
| ultimate anti-democratic institutions as they concentrate the
| economic power generated by many diverse people and centralize
| it to one or a few people. Hence Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.
|
| And the combination of skill, hard work and luck that led to
| their leadership of these corporations doesn't in any way
| relate to their values or judgment and the ways that they will
| use their power.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The government is the only institution with a monopoly on
| force. How else can institutional changes be enacted without
| worrying about defection?
| crazy_horse wrote:
| How many people here work in those institutions? Do they not
| have power to make change or work somewhere else?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Not really... If the market saw an opportunity to make
| money by defecting from a commonly accepted norm that isn't
| enforced by law there are people who would be willing to
| implement the defection for the right price.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| There is absolutely zero incentive for any of those people
| in power to do anything about it. They work in one of the
| best paying industries on earth, they financially stand to
| benefit from the very things that ought to be regulated.
|
| How do you think anyone reigned in the tobacco industry?
| Everyone in the industry just went, "well I hate coffers
| full of money, let's stop working here" ?
|
| That's what governmental authority exists for. The idea
| that the foxes polices themselves while they have all the
| keys to the henhouse is comical.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The idea that the foxes polices themselves while they
| have all the keys to the henhouse is comical._
|
| Exactly. "The tragedy of the commons" is a well-known
| terms that means, "given the keys to the henhouse, the
| foxes are not able to police themselves well enough to
| keep themselves from starving" - and this doesn't even
| begin to consider the interests of hens.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| Judging from the daily riots in Portland without law
| enforcement involvement I'd say that force has become a more
| egalitarian hobby.
| void_mint wrote:
| You can really tell who gets their info on Portland from
| Fox News and not Portland residents.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| That article is awful. Three professors coming up with five-world
| clickbait memes, while evading real issues.
|
| A real question is, in areas where network effects are very
| strong, how do we avoid monopolies forming?
| seph-reed wrote:
| This is a very interesting question.
|
| Almost like saying: how do we keep gravity from eventually
| creating a few giant blackholes?
|
| Granted, we can't change physical laws. But if we could, we
| would clearly need some sort of anti-gravity that kicks in just
| passed the point of a black hole.
|
| So I guess there needs to be some benefit of _not_ being a
| monopoly.
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