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Little by little, Silicon Valley is supplanting the government. At this point it should be obvious that Silicon Valley companies feel no need to follow regulati

Little by little, Silicon Valley is supplanting the government. At this point it should be obvious that Silicon Valley companies feel no need to follow regulations imposed on them by the government. Some do, but those that don't aren't punished and generally wind up with faster growing businesses because of it. The government makes a symbolic effort to prevent hate speech, but where their efforts end Silicon Valley's begin. SVs efforts are much farther reaching and much more swiftly applied. And, of course, there is no oversight, no law or set of guidelines that Google must follow to decide what is and isn't "hate speech." Google gets to decide, they have the power. Do you think you have a right to privacy in this country? You might have that right, as long as the SV companies decide to stick up for it. But it should be obvious at this point that, that right won't eve be enforced by the nominal "government."

cookiecaper 9y ago
Yes, conditions for the web as an open publication platform are rapidly deteriorating. This has major implications for everything that's changed during the PC revolution, not just political speech. EDIT: Welp, this is the last comment from me for a while. HN's anti-thoughtcrime metering, which was activated on my account when I shared the illegal opinion that Kubernetes is not always a good thing to use for your production server infrastructure (n.b., HN is invested in Docker, and closely associated with Google), has kicked in to prevent me from sharing any more dangerous sentiments like "If you make a censorship-resistant network, don't let the people who have recently been censored know about it." I look forward to the next five hours of watching every comment that isn't "Great! Delete everything I hate!" drop into the grey, and watching replies to my comments without being able to engage in the conversation. Very fishy stuff going on at HN recently. Source: user for 3315 days.
j2kun 9y ago
You act as if Google didn't just pay a multibillion dollar fine for violating a law based on censorship of certain shopping comparison websites. SV is not beyond the power of governments, governments are just slow to catch up. For good reason.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  By supplanting the government I really only meant The United States government. Google, it seems, is still willing to payout to foreign governments. Since they might actually Something that our government does often too, so it seems to sort of come with the territory of being one of the most powerful organizations in The US. I'd be astonished if our government had the spine to levy such a fine against Google or start an anti-trust investigation for stuff like this which, to me, seems like a pretty obvious abuse of their power as a platform.
  - j2kun 9y ago
    A cursory Google search shows they paid a fine to the US government that is only 1/5 the EU fine, and that was in 2011, when its stock was 1/5 what it is today. [edit formatting and remove snark]

cookiecaper 9y ago

Yes, conditions for the web as an open publication platform are rapidly deteriorating. This has major implications for everything that's changed during the PC revolution, not just political speech. EDIT: Welp, this is the last comment from me for a while. HN's anti-thoughtcrime metering, which was activated on my account when I shared the illegal opinion that Kubernetes is not always a good thing to use for your production server infrastructure (n.b., HN is invested in Docker, and closely associated with Google), has kicked in to prevent me from sharing any more dangerous sentiments like "If you make a censorship-resistant network, don't let the people who have recently been censored know about it." I look forward to the next five hours of watching every comment that isn't "Great! Delete everything I hate!" drop into the grey, and watching replies to my comments without being able to engage in the conversation. Very fishy stuff going on at HN recently. Source: user for 3315 days.

j2kun 9y ago

You act as if Google didn't just pay a multibillion dollar fine for violating a law based on censorship of certain shopping comparison websites. SV is not beyond the power of governments, governments are just slow to catch up. For good reason.

jdoliner 9y ago
By supplanting the government I really only meant The United States government. Google, it seems, is still willing to payout to foreign governments. Since they might actually Something that our government does often too, so it seems to sort of come with the territory of being one of the most powerful organizations in The US. I'd be astonished if our government had the spine to levy such a fine against Google or start an anti-trust investigation for stuff like this which, to me, seems like a pretty obvious abuse of their power as a platform.
- j2kun 9y ago
  A cursory Google search shows they paid a fine to the US government that is only 1/5 the EU fine, and that was in 2011, when its stock was 1/5 what it is today. [edit formatting and remove snark]