9 ms·

Regulation could protect Facebook, not punish it

181 points by shahocean 9y ago

plunyach 9y ago
http://studymanger.com http://studymanger.com
bsbechtel 9y ago
A good way to think about regulation and Facebook might be, would you rather continue using Facebook, knowing the government is supposedly regulating them, but you can never know for sure, or would you rather move on to a new and more interesting platform where privacy and security defaults are integrated into the platform from day one? Regulation that Facebook can point to and say, "See, we are following to rules!" will make it harder to convince your friends to leave Facebook.
- majewsky 9y ago
  That's implying that your friends would consider leaving Facebook at all because of privacy issues. If, instead, your choice is between "friends on unregulated FB" and "friends on regulated FB", I'd prefer the latter option.
  - bsbechtel 9y ago
    Then how do you confirm Facebook is complying, and how do you confirm that the regulation they need to follow is sufficient, and if it's not, how do you really create any change to make it sufficient?
twblalock 9y ago
It's well known at this point that regulations tend to protect incumbents in many industries by making it more expensive for startups to compete. Industry support for regulations can seem counter-intuitive -- why would a company want to increase its cost of doing business? But it makes sense when you consider that the costs are an anti-competitive weapon. One example is when Philip Morris supported FDA regulations of cigarettes: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2002/07/smoke_screen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2002/07/smok... So, we should be very careful about how we regulate companies' use of customer data, lest we make it even more difficult for Facebook's competitors.
- bitumen 9y ago
  I really don’t care if building codes, automotive safety regulations, and standards of medical care make it hard on new businesses. My priorities are not dying in a car crash, my home not falling on my head, and avoiding incompetent doctors. Regulation on tobacco may have helped incumbents stay incumbent, but it also led to record judgements against the, and the rapid decline of their industry in the developed world. That it’s harder for a tobacco startup to get off the ground is a bonus.
  - brrrrr 9y ago
    Except Facebook isn’t cigarettes, dude. No matter how much you want it to be cigarettes, it just isn’t. Facebook is a boredom cure at best, and at times it can be a version of the cold, hard, cringey truth. You might complain that Facebook harms mental health, but the reality is that sometimes the truth is the most depressing thing to learn. If Facebook does harm by preventing enough escapism, there’s no regulatory cure to fix that. You’ll just have to wait for the tide to shift. But hey, look at that, today’s your lucky day...
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      Facebook, and large scale social media in general, does harm by substituting for genuine real-world social interaction, by warping our perception of other people's lives (highlight-reel effect on steroids), by pushing us to become egotistical "self-marketers", and by hijacking our attention via insidious manipulation of the lizard brain.
      - brrrrr 9y ago
        Hmmm, not quite. See, that’s the part about the boredom cure I mentioned. People really are that bored. People’s lives are frequently very lackluster and uneventful. This is plainly obvious, because whenever someone delightfully ordinary (yet comfortable with that) comes along, it seems like such a breath of fresh air amongst all the puffed out try-hards that grab so much attention. The cringey reality check is the depressing part that creates the anxiety of never wanting to leave the house. People have a hard time differentiating between bullshit and not bullshit. It’s not entirely correct to blame Facebook in particular for the inadequacy felt, when comparing one’s self to someone else’s carefully currated (yet seemingly natural) photo album. That part of the debate is just the bulemia-caused-by-waif-as-fashion-model-redux. You can’t fix that by removing Facebook from the equation, because people will never stop beautifying their profile pics and cherry picking exclusive-yet-swollen friend lists. So we’ll cure it by all jumping ship to Mastodon, where the photo albums will be crappier and less enviable, and we’ll all be less cringey? That’s the plan? This isn’t about elections at all, is it?
walterbell 9y ago
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-fosta-will-get-hollywood-filters-theyve-long-wanted https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-fosta-will-get-hol... "The not-so-secret goal of SESTA and FOSTA is made even more clear in a letter from Oracle. “Any start-up has access to low cost and virtually unlimited computing power and to advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and filtering software,” wrote Oracle Senior VP Kenneth Glueck. In his view, Internet companies shouldn’t “blindly run platforms with no control of the content.” That comment helps explain why we’re seeing support for FOSTA and SESTA from odd corners of the economy: some companies will prosper if online speech is subject to tight control. An Internet that’s policed by “copyright bots” is what major film and record studios have advocated for more than a decade now. Algorithms and artificial intelligence have made major advances in recent years, and some content companies have used those advances as part of a push for mandatory, proactive filters. That’s what they mean by phrases like “notice-and-stay-down,” and that’s what messages like the Oracle letter are really all about."
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  People who think like this should be VP of anything, I’m not surprised he’s at Oracle.
beefield 9y ago
I can think of three relevant regulations for (large) internet companies 1. Strong anti-monopoly regulation. There is no reason for Facebook owning Whatsapp & Instagram. 2. Once your revenue exceeds x million USD on ad supported services that are free for end users, you must offer the service also for money with reasonable margin on top of the actual production costs, with strong guarantees that the data of end user who has opted for paid service is kept private and not monetized anyhow. 3. Once your revenue on ad supported services that are free to end users exceed y million USD, you must make easily available every single usage of the end user's data. Also, user must have right to prohibit any specific type of use of user's data.
- slipperymate 9y ago
  On points 2 and 3, why limit this to companies with revenue exceeding x or y million USD?
  - beefield 9y ago
    To not create unnecessary barriers of entry.
  - oehpr 9y ago
    I assume it is specifically to avoid killing startups in the crib.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      If your business model requires that it should be killed in the crib
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Trundle 9y ago
        So current free to user companies just get to hold their market forever? Are you that happy with them?
arzt 9y ago
In investment parlance the government would build them a moat. Companies with capital to maintain compliance will have a head start on any startup looking to unseat them. Should this come, it will be a lot harder to start a startup.
andrew-lucker 9y ago
privacy regulations = Facebook loses. compliance regulations = Facebook wins.
IBM 9y ago
Privacy regulations have value independent of its effects on competition. Making a Rube Goldberg argument about how it might end up benefiting Facebook ignores that fact. The solution to market dominance is antitrust enforcement.
- ianai 9y ago
  I wanted to make this comment but you made it for me. Only breaking at least one tech giant up will ever change the status quo. In FBs case that could be very simple - in theory. They’re only allowed to operate over specific geographic regions, say states in the US and feature (IM separate from profile separate from gaming) In practice, though, they're probably too big and global to be broken up.
cinquemb 9y ago
I think that future (social) data-mining startups will need to address these things in order to be regulatory agnostic (on top of the general product/market fit): - solving the decentralized infrastructure: as nodes get taken offline, they can replace themselves, and service is still usable - solving payments for services to third parties that aren't directly the users: cannot rely on traditional payments infrastructure, since that is easily co-opted by regulatory bodies and be used agaisnt the developers/owners of such services since those have traditionally tied ones identity to such payment information.
osteele 9y ago
danah boyd wrote in a 2010 essay (“Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated”, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/faceboo...): “In my post yesterday, I emphasized that what’s at stake with Facebook today is not about privacy or publicity but informed consent and choice. Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet. “I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.” and “Thus far, in the world of privacy, when a company oversteps its hand, people flip out, governments threaten regulation, and companies back off. This is not what’s happening with Facebook. Why? Because they know people won’t leave and Facebook doesn’t think that regulators matter. In our public discourse, we keep talking about the former and ignoring the latter. We can talk about alternatives to Facebook until we’re blue in the face and we can point to the handful of people who are leaving as “proof” that Facebook will decline, but that’s because we’re fooling ourselves. If Facebook is a utility – and I strongly believe it is – the handful of people who are building cabins in the woods to get away from the evil utility companies are irrelevant in light of all of the people who will suck up and deal with the utility to live in the city. This is going to come down to regulation, whether we like it or not. “The problem is that we in the tech industry don’t like regulation. Not because we’re evil but because we know that regulation tends to make a mess of things. We like the threat of regulation and we hope that it will keep things at bay without actually requiring stupidity. So somehow, the social norm has been to push as far as possible and then pull back quickly when regulatory threats emerge. Of course, there have been exceptions. And I work for one of them. Two decades ago, Microsoft was as arrogant as they come and they didn’t balk at the threat of regulation. As a result, the company spent years mired in regulatory hell. And being painted as evil. The company still lives with that weight and the guilt wrt they company’s historical hubris is palpable throughout the industry. “I cannot imagine that Facebook wants to be regulated, but I fear that it thinks that it won’t be. There’s cockiness in the air. Personally, I don’t care whether or not Facebook alone gets regulated, but regulation’s impact tends to extend much further than one company. And I worry about what kinds of regulation we’ll see. Don’t get me wrong: I think that regulators will come in with the best of intentions; they often (but not always) do. I just think that what they decide will have unintended consequences that are far more harmful than helpful and this makes me angry at Facebook for playing chicken with them. I’m not a libertarian but I’ve come to respect libertarian fears of government regulation because regulation often does backfire in some of the most frustrating ways. (A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to be included in the COPPA hearings outlining why the intention behind COPPA was great and the result dreadful.) The difference is that I’m not so against regulation as to not welcome it when people are being screwed. And sadly, I think that we’re getting there. I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.”
protomyth 9y ago
If regulators really wanted to stop the abuse by Facebook and every ad company, they would outlaw the collection of any tracking data of users on any website except the ones you own (website operators have security needs). Embedded content in other websites (via any means including iframes) not owned by your company could not record tracking data or insert data into the user's browser (e.g. cookies, custom urls, Web SQL Databases). Any sharing of user data with other companies is illegal. Cannot abuse what you don't have. I expect any legislation to make competition with Facebook very difficult.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Techies take the job because they wake up each day believing that they’re having a massive positive influence by connecting the world. I don't think this is really the case anymore - at least from the FB engineers I know. Great engineers are at FB because they get to deploy really interesting projects on the largest platforms in the world with best in class technologies, or get to work on cutting edge AI research (FAIR) or interfaces (Oculus). The whole "connect the world" thing seems to be an afterthought at best for most.
- rock_hard 9y ago
  I don't find that to be true for the people I know who work at FB though...they all deeply believe in connecting the world. Deploying code to a billion people is only thrilling the first time anyways
mkempe 9y ago
What other reasons would there be for Zuckerberg to invite regulation of the social networks his company dominates?
908087 9y ago
The whole "we shouldn't regulate Facebook because it will help Facebook" thing really seems like an underhanded attempt at tricking privacy advocates and others to fight against their own best interests. In reality, it depends entirely on the details of the regulations.
otakucode 9y ago
That is the typical situation. Regulation protects the entrenched large organizations who are mostly 'grandfathered' in and set the standard for what is permissible. And it then shelters the giants from competition coming from smaller organizations. This is how companies ossify themselves into the larger structure of government.

181 points by shahocean 9y ago

http://studymanger.com http://studymanger.com

A good way to think about regulation and Facebook might be, would you rather continue using Facebook, knowing the government is supposedly regulating them, but you can never know for sure, or would you rather move on to a new and more interesting platform where privacy and security defaults are integrated into the platform from day one? Regulation that Facebook can point to and say, "See, we are following to rules!" will make it harder to convince your friends to leave Facebook.

majewsky 9y ago
That's implying that your friends would consider leaving Facebook at all because of privacy issues. If, instead, your choice is between "friends on unregulated FB" and "friends on regulated FB", I'd prefer the latter option.
- bsbechtel 9y ago
  Then how do you confirm Facebook is complying, and how do you confirm that the regulation they need to follow is sufficient, and if it's not, how do you really create any change to make it sufficient?

twblalock 9y ago

It's well known at this point that regulations tend to protect incumbents in many industries by making it more expensive for startups to compete. Industry support for regulations can seem counter-intuitive -- why would a company want to increase its cost of doing business? But it makes sense when you consider that the costs are an anti-competitive weapon. One example is when Philip Morris supported FDA regulations of cigarettes: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2002/07/smoke_screen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2002/07/smok... So, we should be very careful about how we regulate companies' use of customer data, lest we make it even more difficult for Facebook's competitors.

bitumen 9y ago
I really don’t care if building codes, automotive safety regulations, and standards of medical care make it hard on new businesses. My priorities are not dying in a car crash, my home not falling on my head, and avoiding incompetent doctors. Regulation on tobacco may have helped incumbents stay incumbent, but it also led to record judgements against the, and the rapid decline of their industry in the developed world. That it’s harder for a tobacco startup to get off the ground is a bonus.
- brrrrr 9y ago
  Except Facebook isn’t cigarettes, dude. No matter how much you want it to be cigarettes, it just isn’t. Facebook is a boredom cure at best, and at times it can be a version of the cold, hard, cringey truth. You might complain that Facebook harms mental health, but the reality is that sometimes the truth is the most depressing thing to learn. If Facebook does harm by preventing enough escapism, there’s no regulatory cure to fix that. You’ll just have to wait for the tide to shift. But hey, look at that, today’s your lucky day...
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Facebook, and large scale social media in general, does harm by substituting for genuine real-world social interaction, by warping our perception of other people's lives (highlight-reel effect on steroids), by pushing us to become egotistical "self-marketers", and by hijacking our attention via insidious manipulation of the lizard brain.
    - brrrrr 9y ago
      Hmmm, not quite. See, that’s the part about the boredom cure I mentioned. People really are that bored. People’s lives are frequently very lackluster and uneventful. This is plainly obvious, because whenever someone delightfully ordinary (yet comfortable with that) comes along, it seems like such a breath of fresh air amongst all the puffed out try-hards that grab so much attention. The cringey reality check is the depressing part that creates the anxiety of never wanting to leave the house. People have a hard time differentiating between bullshit and not bullshit. It’s not entirely correct to blame Facebook in particular for the inadequacy felt, when comparing one’s self to someone else’s carefully currated (yet seemingly natural) photo album. That part of the debate is just the bulemia-caused-by-waif-as-fashion-model-redux. You can’t fix that by removing Facebook from the equation, because people will never stop beautifying their profile pics and cherry picking exclusive-yet-swollen friend lists. So we’ll cure it by all jumping ship to Mastodon, where the photo albums will be crappier and less enviable, and we’ll all be less cringey? That’s the plan? This isn’t about elections at all, is it?

walterbell 9y ago

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-fosta-will-get-hollywood-filters-theyve-long-wanted https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-fosta-will-get-hol... "The not-so-secret goal of SESTA and FOSTA is made even more clear in a letter from Oracle. “Any start-up has access to low cost and virtually unlimited computing power and to advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and filtering software,” wrote Oracle Senior VP Kenneth Glueck. In his view, Internet companies shouldn’t “blindly run platforms with no control of the content.” That comment helps explain why we’re seeing support for FOSTA and SESTA from odd corners of the economy: some companies will prosper if online speech is subject to tight control. An Internet that’s policed by “copyright bots” is what major film and record studios have advocated for more than a decade now. Algorithms and artificial intelligence have made major advances in recent years, and some content companies have used those advances as part of a push for mandatory, proactive filters. That’s what they mean by phrases like “notice-and-stay-down,” and that’s what messages like the Oracle letter are really all about."

tehwebguy 9y ago
People who think like this should be VP of anything, I’m not surprised he’s at Oracle.

beefield 9y ago

I can think of three relevant regulations for (large) internet companies 1. Strong anti-monopoly regulation. There is no reason for Facebook owning Whatsapp & Instagram. 2. Once your revenue exceeds x million USD on ad supported services that are free for end users, you must offer the service also for money with reasonable margin on top of the actual production costs, with strong guarantees that the data of end user who has opted for paid service is kept private and not monetized anyhow. 3. Once your revenue on ad supported services that are free to end users exceed y million USD, you must make easily available every single usage of the end user's data. Also, user must have right to prohibit any specific type of use of user's data.

slipperymate 9y ago
On points 2 and 3, why limit this to companies with revenue exceeding x or y million USD?
- beefield 9y ago
  To not create unnecessary barriers of entry.
- oehpr 9y ago
  I assume it is specifically to avoid killing startups in the crib.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    If your business model requires that it should be killed in the crib
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Trundle 9y ago
      So current free to user companies just get to hold their market forever? Are you that happy with them?

arzt 9y ago

In investment parlance the government would build them a moat. Companies with capital to maintain compliance will have a head start on any startup looking to unseat them. Should this come, it will be a lot harder to start a startup.

andrew-lucker 9y ago

privacy regulations = Facebook loses. compliance regulations = Facebook wins.

IBM 9y ago

Privacy regulations have value independent of its effects on competition. Making a Rube Goldberg argument about how it might end up benefiting Facebook ignores that fact. The solution to market dominance is antitrust enforcement.

ianai 9y ago
I wanted to make this comment but you made it for me. Only breaking at least one tech giant up will ever change the status quo. In FBs case that could be very simple - in theory. They’re only allowed to operate over specific geographic regions, say states in the US and feature (IM separate from profile separate from gaming) In practice, though, they're probably too big and global to be broken up.

cinquemb 9y ago

I think that future (social) data-mining startups will need to address these things in order to be regulatory agnostic (on top of the general product/market fit): - solving the decentralized infrastructure: as nodes get taken offline, they can replace themselves, and service is still usable - solving payments for services to third parties that aren't directly the users: cannot rely on traditional payments infrastructure, since that is easily co-opted by regulatory bodies and be used agaisnt the developers/owners of such services since those have traditionally tied ones identity to such payment information.

osteele 9y ago

danah boyd wrote in a 2010 essay (“Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated”, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/faceboo...): “In my post yesterday, I emphasized that what’s at stake with Facebook today is not about privacy or publicity but informed consent and choice. Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet. “I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.” and “Thus far, in the world of privacy, when a company oversteps its hand, people flip out, governments threaten regulation, and companies back off. This is not what’s happening with Facebook. Why? Because they know people won’t leave and Facebook doesn’t think that regulators matter. In our public discourse, we keep talking about the former and ignoring the latter. We can talk about alternatives to Facebook until we’re blue in the face and we can point to the handful of people who are leaving as “proof” that Facebook will decline, but that’s because we’re fooling ourselves. If Facebook is a utility – and I strongly believe it is – the handful of people who are building cabins in the woods to get away from the evil utility companies are irrelevant in light of all of the people who will suck up and deal with the utility to live in the city. This is going to come down to regulation, whether we like it or not. “The problem is that we in the tech industry don’t like regulation. Not because we’re evil but because we know that regulation tends to make a mess of things. We like the threat of regulation and we hope that it will keep things at bay without actually requiring stupidity. So somehow, the social norm has been to push as far as possible and then pull back quickly when regulatory threats emerge. Of course, there have been exceptions. And I work for one of them. Two decades ago, Microsoft was as arrogant as they come and they didn’t balk at the threat of regulation. As a result, the company spent years mired in regulatory hell. And being painted as evil. The company still lives with that weight and the guilt wrt they company’s historical hubris is palpable throughout the industry. “I cannot imagine that Facebook wants to be regulated, but I fear that it thinks that it won’t be. There’s cockiness in the air. Personally, I don’t care whether or not Facebook alone gets regulated, but regulation’s impact tends to extend much further than one company. And I worry about what kinds of regulation we’ll see. Don’t get me wrong: I think that regulators will come in with the best of intentions; they often (but not always) do. I just think that what they decide will have unintended consequences that are far more harmful than helpful and this makes me angry at Facebook for playing chicken with them. I’m not a libertarian but I’ve come to respect libertarian fears of government regulation because regulation often does backfire in some of the most frustrating ways. (A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to be included in the COPPA hearings outlining why the intention behind COPPA was great and the result dreadful.) The difference is that I’m not so against regulation as to not welcome it when people are being screwed. And sadly, I think that we’re getting there. I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.”

protomyth 9y ago

If regulators really wanted to stop the abuse by Facebook and every ad company, they would outlaw the collection of any tracking data of users on any website except the ones you own (website operators have security needs). Embedded content in other websites (via any means including iframes) not owned by your company could not record tracking data or insert data into the user's browser (e.g. cookies, custom urls, Web SQL Databases). Any sharing of user data with other companies is illegal. Cannot abuse what you don't have. I expect any legislation to make competition with Facebook very difficult.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Techies take the job because they wake up each day believing that they’re having a massive positive influence by connecting the world. I don't think this is really the case anymore - at least from the FB engineers I know. Great engineers are at FB because they get to deploy really interesting projects on the largest platforms in the world with best in class technologies, or get to work on cutting edge AI research (FAIR) or interfaces (Oculus). The whole "connect the world" thing seems to be an afterthought at best for most.

rock_hard 9y ago
I don't find that to be true for the people I know who work at FB though...they all deeply believe in connecting the world. Deploying code to a billion people is only thrilling the first time anyways

mkempe 9y ago

What other reasons would there be for Zuckerberg to invite regulation of the social networks his company dominates?

908087 9y ago

The whole "we shouldn't regulate Facebook because it will help Facebook" thing really seems like an underhanded attempt at tricking privacy advocates and others to fight against their own best interests. In reality, it depends entirely on the details of the regulations.

otakucode 9y ago

That is the typical situation. Regulation protects the entrenched large organizations who are mostly 'grandfathered' in and set the standard for what is permissible. And it then shelters the giants from competition coming from smaller organizations. This is how companies ossify themselves into the larger structure of government.