7 ms·

Silicon Valley's Regulatory Exceptionalism Comes to an End

68 points by raleighm 9y ago

adventured 9y ago
We should be more broad about it. The tech industry regulatory exceptionalism ended with Microsoft in 2000. Or did it end with Intel? They spent the entire 1990s holding a regulatory & anti-trust settlement party. [1] Or did it end with the 12 years of anti-trust pursuit of IBM? There's actually nothing new going on here. The new titans, the same as the old titans, running up against cultural and political fears of unchecked power. [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/intel-and-antitrust--a-brief-history.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/int...
Notorious_BLT 9y ago
Including Apple's encryption in the list of reasons SV is going to be regulated is a strange decision. I certainly hope people don't look forward to regulation that leads to LESS encryption.
- giobox 9y ago
  I think its a great one to include, and absolutely belongs in this article. Of course very few well-informed readers here will agree with the stance, but there's no escaping that politically this has been an enormous issue in the US and other countries like the UK. This really rose to the fore in the heated exchange between the FBI and Apple over access to the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone. If the FBI hadn't found an alternate route to the contents of that phone, it's very possible Apple would have been forced into a high stakes legal battle with the FBI, and subsequently could have triggered a draconian legislative response. The seriousness with which Tim Cook took the issue and his highly public responses at the time is testament to how badly (for encryption advocates) that could have turned out. The FBI are still very publicly criticizing Apple's stance recently too. There are no shortage of politicians out there who see things like mandated back doors for law enforcement as a great idea, and all it will take is the next San Bernadino style stand-off to throw this thing back into the public consciousness. I strongly believe proposals to regulate encryption on consumer devices will absolutely rear their ugly head again in the future. Encryption technology had a long history of legal regulation too, wasn't really until the Clinton administration that much of this was rolled back. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
- manofmanysmiles 9y ago
  Does anyone have good way to come to an ethical understanding of whether unbreakable encryption is good or bad, and for whom? Every time this comes up, I am unable to simultaneously reconcile the the fact that backdoor are inevitably bad for almost everyone, while at the same time we, as people created a society to govern us, and the law enforcement of this society needs to do its job. To me this boils down to a fundamental, and for me unanswered question about the relationship between society i.e. social structures/government/etc and individuals, and how the society behaves like a living organism of its own, with its own motivations that are often in stark opposition to the motivations of its constituent pieces, and how to find a good path forward.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear that the company has finally accepted responsibility for making sure that the platform isn’t used to undermine political processes around the world" I recall that during the "Arab Spring" Facebook was heralded as a force for good precisely because it did undermine political processes (if those processes were considered to be authoritarian/tyrannical by the US government).
- mrtksn 9y ago
  Completely agree and this is one of my primary reasons to believe that the social media will be regulated globally with each country following some flavour of the China route. At the status quo, any politician is at risk of being killed by an angry mob just like Gaddafi if they fail to outbid their opponents. CA showed us that by profiling users it's possible to skew the perception of the public on issues in dramatic ways that are not necessarily in line with the truth at all. Unlike mass media propaganda, the validity of these messages are not discussed because everyone gets a different message. Even if you try to outbid your opponent, it may not help without reverse engineering their propaganda algorithm. Even if the Arab spring was an organic outcome, there's no reason why you can't achieve the same effect with bots, data and a creative team of copywriters and graphic artist.
Erlangolem 9y ago
Silicon Valley, and software engineering in general needs regulation, but it also needs to regulate itself. The whole Libertarian wet dream is fine when you’re in college, less so when you’re building self-driving cars or surveillance networks. The lack of enforced ethical standards has always been problematic, but now it’s getting dangerous. Once you’re involved in everything from healthcare, and automobiles, to drone strikes, you’re sll grown up and the training wheels need to die. The alternative is that this pressure continues to build and the public demands extreme regulation without understanding what they’re regulsting. Tl;dr grow up, or they’ll come for the good (encryption) along with the bad (carelessness with human lives a la Uber).
- Fins 9y ago
  You can't enforce ethical standards. I thought dumb college kids were all leftie Bernie supporters; being a libertarian takes slightly more intelligence than a belief that somebody will come and regulate everything perfectly for you.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Being a libertarian does not take much intelligence. It however seems to be correlated with a lot of arrogance and with overblown ego.
    - nugi 9y ago
      Kinda like being vegan, liberal, or conservative. Everyone is just being tribalistic and petty.
      - portofcall 9y ago
        Not at all, but that’s definitely a cheap and easy shortcut to giving ourselves license to sink to the lowest common denominator. Don’t sell everyone short based on the actions and attitudes of the loudest.
      - watwut 9y ago
gfodor 9y ago
Now that these centralized companies are in positions of power, regulation is actually a favorable position for them in a lot of cases since they will have the leverage to influence the regulations in their favor. This could lead to regulations that cement them as condoned monopolies or institute regulatory burdens that effectively cut off the ability for new entrants to even emerge in the first place. Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. If anything the introduction of regulation will accelerate this -- it's certainly easy to imagine a decentralized Facebook and Twitter that is immune to any form of government control beyond shutting down access to the Internet itself. Hopefully the idea of regulating online discussion and sharing on social media will soon be as absurd a proposition as trying to regulate the web as a whole.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  > Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. Having the tools has never been the problem, getting people to use them is. You don't know the meaning of the words "total, utter disinterest" until you've tried to convince a non-technical person to use a federated alternative to Facebook.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    By "the tools" I mean in part "a way for there to be strong economic incentives and funding mechanisms" which I think is a relatively new phenomenon. Good design costs money because most people won't do it for free (as they would do other things as evidenced by OSS out there today.) The fact someone can run an ICO to fund the development of a well designed decentralized Facebook that once launched is effectively self-sustaining is encouraging.
    - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
      Or even a Patreon to maintain a Mastodon instance
- 9y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
A few things happened that made this possible. 1)Silicon Valley surrendered the high ground in terms of free speech. In the past, Silicon Valley at least used to preach a near absolute commitment to free speech. Now, they don't anymore. 2) Consolidation of content. Before, the internet was very distributed. Number of nights a 1000 poeple might regularly visit could be in the thousands. Now, a significant number of people just visit Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or one of a maybe a dozen top sites. This makes enforcing regulations much easier. 3) Silicon Valley managed to pull off the near impossible feat of angering both sides of the political spectrum at the same time. The left was angered by the perception that the tech companies', especially Facebook's lackluster enforcement of policies allowed Donald Trump to be selected President. The right was angered by the apparent enforcement of political correctness at the expense of free speech. In addition, it became clear with this election that many in silicon valley despised the Right. Thus, Silicon Valley was left with few defenders. 4) Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures. Things like the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump's election would have been much more difficult without the Internet and social media in partiy. The powerful across the gloves in China, Russia, EU, and now the United States have realized that an uncontrolled Internet can be a huge danger to their ongoing status. Put all these together and it is very likely that this is just the first wave of further regulation of Silicon Valley.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The key one, I think, is number 4. Nothing moves Congresscritters faster than something posing a risk to their reelection campaign. But everything here is accurate.
- majormajor 9y ago
  1/2/3 all seem like the same thing. Consolidation because that's where the money was. Money comes with strings.
  - gowld 9y ago
    4 also. Money <==> power.
- deleted 9y ago
forapurpose 9y ago
IMHO: What happened since John Perry Barlow's statement is that the Internet shifted from a technological and social experiment[0] to an extremely high value asset that attracts powerful actors. In the former state, ethics and good faith suffice. John Postel could hand out IP addresses, and people followed his lead to 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept'. Forums like Usenet were a small group of geeks - read the Etiquette FAQ, and just don't be an ahole. 'Assume good faith' is a guideline somewhere (I forget where). But when there is a high value asset to be had, the economics of money and power take over. There are bad people who will ignore all ethics and public good and take every advantage they can, driving their competition to do the same in order to survive. When Facebook was a bunch of college friends sharing stories and pictures, those people didn't care. When it's a way to exert unprecedented influence on the public, that gets intense attention from government propaganda operations and their corporate counterparts. It was predictable that it would happen. In the latter environment, 'don't be an ahole' doesn't work any more; I don't think Putin read the Usenet Etiquette FAQ (and his people read the HN guidelines only to find a way to use them to their advantage). Regulations become necessary to protect the weak and all of society from bad actors. [0] There's probably a better way to conceptualize it, but I can't think of it right this moment.

68 points by raleighm 9y ago

We should be more broad about it. The tech industry regulatory exceptionalism ended with Microsoft in 2000. Or did it end with Intel? They spent the entire 1990s holding a regulatory & anti-trust settlement party. [1] Or did it end with the 12 years of anti-trust pursuit of IBM? There's actually nothing new going on here. The new titans, the same as the old titans, running up against cultural and political fears of unchecked power. [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/intel-and-antitrust--a-brief-history.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/int...

Notorious_BLT 9y ago

Including Apple's encryption in the list of reasons SV is going to be regulated is a strange decision. I certainly hope people don't look forward to regulation that leads to LESS encryption.

giobox 9y ago
I think its a great one to include, and absolutely belongs in this article. Of course very few well-informed readers here will agree with the stance, but there's no escaping that politically this has been an enormous issue in the US and other countries like the UK. This really rose to the fore in the heated exchange between the FBI and Apple over access to the San Bernadino shooter's iPhone. If the FBI hadn't found an alternate route to the contents of that phone, it's very possible Apple would have been forced into a high stakes legal battle with the FBI, and subsequently could have triggered a draconian legislative response. The seriousness with which Tim Cook took the issue and his highly public responses at the time is testament to how badly (for encryption advocates) that could have turned out. The FBI are still very publicly criticizing Apple's stance recently too. There are no shortage of politicians out there who see things like mandated back doors for law enforcement as a great idea, and all it will take is the next San Bernadino style stand-off to throw this thing back into the public consciousness. I strongly believe proposals to regulate encryption on consumer devices will absolutely rear their ugly head again in the future. Encryption technology had a long history of legal regulation too, wasn't really until the Clinton administration that much of this was rolled back. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
manofmanysmiles 9y ago
Does anyone have good way to come to an ethical understanding of whether unbreakable encryption is good or bad, and for whom? Every time this comes up, I am unable to simultaneously reconcile the the fact that backdoor are inevitably bad for almost everyone, while at the same time we, as people created a society to govern us, and the law enforcement of this society needs to do its job. To me this boils down to a fundamental, and for me unanswered question about the relationship between society i.e. social structures/government/etc and individuals, and how the society behaves like a living organism of its own, with its own motivations that are often in stark opposition to the motivations of its constituent pieces, and how to find a good path forward.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made clear that the company has finally accepted responsibility for making sure that the platform isn’t used to undermine political processes around the world" I recall that during the "Arab Spring" Facebook was heralded as a force for good precisely because it did undermine political processes (if those processes were considered to be authoritarian/tyrannical by the US government).

mrtksn 9y ago
Completely agree and this is one of my primary reasons to believe that the social media will be regulated globally with each country following some flavour of the China route. At the status quo, any politician is at risk of being killed by an angry mob just like Gaddafi if they fail to outbid their opponents. CA showed us that by profiling users it's possible to skew the perception of the public on issues in dramatic ways that are not necessarily in line with the truth at all. Unlike mass media propaganda, the validity of these messages are not discussed because everyone gets a different message. Even if you try to outbid your opponent, it may not help without reverse engineering their propaganda algorithm. Even if the Arab spring was an organic outcome, there's no reason why you can't achieve the same effect with bots, data and a creative team of copywriters and graphic artist.

Erlangolem 9y ago

Silicon Valley, and software engineering in general needs regulation, but it also needs to regulate itself. The whole Libertarian wet dream is fine when you’re in college, less so when you’re building self-driving cars or surveillance networks. The lack of enforced ethical standards has always been problematic, but now it’s getting dangerous. Once you’re involved in everything from healthcare, and automobiles, to drone strikes, you’re sll grown up and the training wheels need to die. The alternative is that this pressure continues to build and the public demands extreme regulation without understanding what they’re regulsting. Tl;dr grow up, or they’ll come for the good (encryption) along with the bad (carelessness with human lives a la Uber).

Fins 9y ago
You can't enforce ethical standards. I thought dumb college kids were all leftie Bernie supporters; being a libertarian takes slightly more intelligence than a belief that somebody will come and regulate everything perfectly for you.
- watwut 9y ago
  Being a libertarian does not take much intelligence. It however seems to be correlated with a lot of arrogance and with overblown ego.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Kinda like being vegan, liberal, or conservative. Everyone is just being tribalistic and petty.
    - portofcall 9y ago
      Not at all, but that’s definitely a cheap and easy shortcut to giving ourselves license to sink to the lowest common denominator. Don’t sell everyone short based on the actions and attitudes of the loudest.
    - watwut 9y ago

gfodor 9y ago

Now that these centralized companies are in positions of power, regulation is actually a favorable position for them in a lot of cases since they will have the leverage to influence the regulations in their favor. This could lead to regulations that cement them as condoned monopolies or institute regulatory burdens that effectively cut off the ability for new entrants to even emerge in the first place. Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. If anything the introduction of regulation will accelerate this -- it's certainly easy to imagine a decentralized Facebook and Twitter that is immune to any form of government control beyond shutting down access to the Internet itself. Hopefully the idea of regulating online discussion and sharing on social media will soon be as absurd a proposition as trying to regulate the web as a whole.

Analemma_ 9y ago
> Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. Having the tools has never been the problem, getting people to use them is. You don't know the meaning of the words "total, utter disinterest" until you've tried to convince a non-technical person to use a federated alternative to Facebook.
- gfodor 9y ago
  By "the tools" I mean in part "a way for there to be strong economic incentives and funding mechanisms" which I think is a relatively new phenomenon. Good design costs money because most people won't do it for free (as they would do other things as evidenced by OSS out there today.) The fact someone can run an ICO to fund the development of a well designed decentralized Facebook that once launched is effectively self-sustaining is encouraging.
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    Or even a Patreon to maintain a Mastodon instance
9y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

A few things happened that made this possible. 1)Silicon Valley surrendered the high ground in terms of free speech. In the past, Silicon Valley at least used to preach a near absolute commitment to free speech. Now, they don't anymore. 2) Consolidation of content. Before, the internet was very distributed. Number of nights a 1000 poeple might regularly visit could be in the thousands. Now, a significant number of people just visit Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or one of a maybe a dozen top sites. This makes enforcing regulations much easier. 3) Silicon Valley managed to pull off the near impossible feat of angering both sides of the political spectrum at the same time. The left was angered by the perception that the tech companies', especially Facebook's lackluster enforcement of policies allowed Donald Trump to be selected President. The right was angered by the apparent enforcement of political correctness at the expense of free speech. In addition, it became clear with this election that many in silicon valley despised the Right. Thus, Silicon Valley was left with few defenders. 4) Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures. Things like the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump's election would have been much more difficult without the Internet and social media in partiy. The powerful across the gloves in China, Russia, EU, and now the United States have realized that an uncontrolled Internet can be a huge danger to their ongoing status. Put all these together and it is very likely that this is just the first wave of further regulation of Silicon Valley.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The key one, I think, is number 4. Nothing moves Congresscritters faster than something posing a risk to their reelection campaign. But everything here is accurate.
majormajor 9y ago
1/2/3 all seem like the same thing. Consolidation because that's where the money was. Money comes with strings.
- gowld 9y ago
  4 also. Money <==> power.
deleted 9y ago

forapurpose 9y ago

IMHO: What happened since John Perry Barlow's statement is that the Internet shifted from a technological and social experiment[0] to an extremely high value asset that attracts powerful actors. In the former state, ethics and good faith suffice. John Postel could hand out IP addresses, and people followed his lead to 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept'. Forums like Usenet were a small group of geeks - read the Etiquette FAQ, and just don't be an ahole. 'Assume good faith' is a guideline somewhere (I forget where). But when there is a high value asset to be had, the economics of money and power take over. There are bad people who will ignore all ethics and public good and take every advantage they can, driving their competition to do the same in order to survive. When Facebook was a bunch of college friends sharing stories and pictures, those people didn't care. When it's a way to exert unprecedented influence on the public, that gets intense attention from government propaganda operations and their corporate counterparts. It was predictable that it would happen. In the latter environment, 'don't be an ahole' doesn't work any more; I don't think Putin read the Usenet Etiquette FAQ (and his people read the HN guidelines only to find a way to use them to their advantage). Regulations become necessary to protect the weak and all of society from bad actors. [0] There's probably a better way to conceptualize it, but I can't think of it right this moment.