5 ms·

> "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we’re beyond that here." What does this m

> "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we’re beyond that here." What does this mean? This is completely self-contradictory. Clearly Facebook has demonstrated that regulation is required. How could Tim Cook possibly still say that the best regulation is no regulation? Clearly Tim should want a healthier tech ecosystem than what we have now and clearly be agrees regulation is needed. Very confusing quote.

totalZero 9y ago
"However, I think we’re beyond [self-regulation] here." - Tim Cook You are arguing with half of the quotation, and ignoring this other half. He doesn't seem to be advocating self-regulation as a practical policy.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  I am not arguing or ignoring anything. I'm expressing confusion by the lack of continuity in the full quote. Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on HN again. Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. I don't understand why HN thinks it is better for me to reply like this than in the now-banned reply box below. Oh well, here is my response to the comment below. > He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation. Ookay, but to me, that says that self-regulation was never going to work, and we should just admit it and move on. We should have had regulation on social media from the beginning. We didn't "mess up" self-regulation. Self-regulation in a hyper-capitalist environment is obviously going to fail. It has been shown time and time again, every day, that corporations will be selfish and do everything they can, legally or not, especially exploiting new dubious legal territory, to extract cash in the short term using dubiously moral and legal methods no matter what. Corporations should be regulation and it's insane that Tim Cook is just saying "ahhh ooops they messed up, guess it wouldn't work out that way, too bad" but it has always been that way. There was never a world in which Facebook was going to "self-regulate".
  - danlevine 9y ago
    He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace? It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users? The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
    - cryptoz 9y ago
      > Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site. > We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused. > We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened. > The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”. No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.
randomerr 9y ago
I believe what he is saying that government should stay out of company's day to day activities unless there is a clear an present danger. In this case its the data that Facebook recklessly sold does endanger it's consumers.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  But isn't it now very very clear that it is way too late to begin regulation, after the fact of all of this happening? Democracy is threatened. Isn't Tim implying that stronger regulation should be required from the very beginning in tech corporations? But also saying that regulation is stupid and should never exist? I just don't understand what he's trying to say. Clearly better regulation has always been required. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess.
mr_spothawk 9y ago
> Clearly Facebook has demonstrated that regulation is required. it's not so clear to me that it's "required". and in fact, I think that detail will be an enormous part of the discussion we get to listen to now. what's certainly apparent though, is that these systems aren't helping us in the way they are currently structured. it may wind up being the case that our governments use regulation to address the issue, but I am not sure it will solve the larger problem of individuals not having the education (& willpower?) to protect themselves from the sorts of disadvantageous relationships that FANG is willing to engage in with them.
m00g00 9y ago
If you're a drug addict, the ideal way to kick the habit is self-control, but after a certain time, rehab might be needed. There are downsides to rehab (cost, isolation etc.), just as there are downsides to regulation (compliance costs, unnecessary burden on small and otherwise well-acting companies because of the abuses of others). There's also the fact that "regulation" is a nebulous term that says nothing of what the actual laws are that manage to get passed/implemented. If history is a lesson, we should all be weary of rules written up by people who do not fully understand the domain they are trying to regulate, and who are often lobbied by the very firms that would be most subject to said regulation. So, no guarantees in the slightest that regulations will bring about a healthier tech ecosystem.

totalZero 9y ago

"However, I think we’re beyond [self-regulation] here." - Tim Cook You are arguing with half of the quotation, and ignoring this other half. He doesn't seem to be advocating self-regulation as a practical policy.

cryptoz 9y ago
I am not arguing or ignoring anything. I'm expressing confusion by the lack of continuity in the full quote. Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on HN again. Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. I don't understand why HN thinks it is better for me to reply like this than in the now-banned reply box below. Oh well, here is my response to the comment below. > He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation. Ookay, but to me, that says that self-regulation was never going to work, and we should just admit it and move on. We should have had regulation on social media from the beginning. We didn't "mess up" self-regulation. Self-regulation in a hyper-capitalist environment is obviously going to fail. It has been shown time and time again, every day, that corporations will be selfish and do everything they can, legally or not, especially exploiting new dubious legal territory, to extract cash in the short term using dubiously moral and legal methods no matter what. Corporations should be regulation and it's insane that Tim Cook is just saying "ahhh ooops they messed up, guess it wouldn't work out that way, too bad" but it has always been that way. There was never a world in which Facebook was going to "self-regulate".
- danlevine 9y ago
  He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace? It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users? The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
  - cryptoz 9y ago
    > Chill out there - you’re not banned from replying, but the HN site imposes a steady increasing delay on comment replies as the thread gets deeper, primarily to avoid rapid back-and-forth flamewars. No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site. > We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it. This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused. > We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened. > The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”. No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.

randomerr 9y ago

I believe what he is saying that government should stay out of company's day to day activities unless there is a clear an present danger. In this case its the data that Facebook recklessly sold does endanger it's consumers.

cryptoz 9y ago
But isn't it now very very clear that it is way too late to begin regulation, after the fact of all of this happening? Democracy is threatened. Isn't Tim implying that stronger regulation should be required from the very beginning in tech corporations? But also saying that regulation is stupid and should never exist? I just don't understand what he's trying to say. Clearly better regulation has always been required. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess.

mr_spothawk 9y ago

> Clearly Facebook has demonstrated that regulation is required. it's not so clear to me that it's "required". and in fact, I think that detail will be an enormous part of the discussion we get to listen to now. what's certainly apparent though, is that these systems aren't helping us in the way they are currently structured. it may wind up being the case that our governments use regulation to address the issue, but I am not sure it will solve the larger problem of individuals not having the education (& willpower?) to protect themselves from the sorts of disadvantageous relationships that FANG is willing to engage in with them.

m00g00 9y ago

If you're a drug addict, the ideal way to kick the habit is self-control, but after a certain time, rehab might be needed. There are downsides to rehab (cost, isolation etc.), just as there are downsides to regulation (compliance costs, unnecessary burden on small and otherwise well-acting companies because of the abuses of others). There's also the fact that "regulation" is a nebulous term that says nothing of what the actual laws are that manage to get passed/implemented. If history is a lesson, we should all be weary of rules written up by people who do not fully understand the domain they are trying to regulate, and who are often lobbied by the very firms that would be most subject to said regulation. So, no guarantees in the slightest that regulations will bring about a healthier tech ecosystem.