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I was struck that on the surface it looked quite adversarial. Senators were trying to ask fairly pointed questions (despite any technical ignorance). But unde

I was struck that on the surface it looked quite adversarial. Senators were trying to ask fairly pointed questions (despite any technical ignorance). But underneath the surface, the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. I'm sure they're going to collaborate to find something that works well for both of their interests. We're witnessing the death of the free internet. It was a nice experiment while it lasted.

deif 9y ago
Not sure what your definition of free internet is, but mine is one where the users are free, not the businesses.
- aje403 9y ago
  Those two things are positively correlated
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    Not necessarily. The ultimate aim of each business is to crush the competition and become a monopoly. If they succeed, and we do have some de facto monopolies now, they can do whatever they want and users/customers have little or no choice. Regulations limiting the power of companies are designed do counteract that.
    - adventured 9y ago
      It doesn't matter if Google crushes the competition in search. You do not actually have to use their search engine, that's part of the freedom of the Internet. Further, you're not entitled to their search engine, that's also a critical aspect of actually having the freedom to use the Internet as you see fit. They can't do whatever they want. So long as the Internet is free from overbearing government restrictions and the ISPs aren't segmenting it (locking users into restricted sandboxes), you can go wherever you want without using Google search, or shopping at Amazon, or using Windows, or using Chrome, or using Facebook, or shopping on eBay, or paying with PayPal. The only real limiting premise as it pertains to the Internet, are the ISPs and the backbones. So long as you can get on a free Internet, engineers can perpetually build their own new products at will, crafting new tech universes that didn't exist before. They have been doing that non-stop in every category for the last two plus decades since the Web took off. Don't like Chrome because it managed to acquire 99% of the market? Fine, spin up your own clone and put it out there. Or use Firefox or Edge a dozen other lesser used competitors. Don't like Go or C# or Java? Fine, use one of 37 other languages. Don't like Google search? Fine, use Bing or DuckDuckGo or a dozen other less well known search engines. Build a new one maybe, nobody is stopping you, maybe it's time for a new search paradigm. Don't like AWS? Fine, use Hetzner, or Digital Ocean, or a dedicated box provider, or Vultr, or Linode or Google Cloud, or Azure, or build your own new competitor. There are vastly more options today, in essentially every way, than there were in 1995 or 2005. The free Internet has worked extraordinarily well. It has never stopped producing alternatives, and alternatives have never stopped existing. The only thing that can crush it is government regulation, specifically if they fuck that up.
    - aje403 9y ago
      I don't disagree with you. That is why I said positively correlated, rather than perfectly. My comment intended to concur with the parent comment: "the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it." We most likely will not see any trust-busting as you're describing here. We'll more likely just see more side-effect legislation like the net neutrality repeal or FOSTA/SESTA that will just consolidate power for a few parties and the government at the expense of small businesses.
- ftlio 9y ago
  Since when are businesses not users of the internet?
  - apexalpha 9y ago
    We obviously mean freedom for individual users lacking the resources of big organisations to defend themselves and protect their own rights. Come on this isn't a game of semantics.
    - Joeboy 9y ago
      The experiment referred to was one where the web was a level playing field that didn't differentiate between different classes of users. The fact you see this is as a silly semantic point underscores the original point about that experiment being over. Edit: I can only speculate as to why people don't like this, but in case it makes a difference it's intended only as historical background for people who missed the start of the experiment.
  - StreamBright 9y ago
    I think business are providers not users.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
On an unrelated note: I always wonder how people nowadays identify the Internet with WWW. There are so many ways to use the Internet in a way not even remotely related to the current power struggles between greedy businesses and duped users, with incompetent governments meddling in from time to time.
- d33 9y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
    The Internet is the infrastructure plus a set of protocols, with HTTP being just one of them. The protocols the most heavily used tend to be regulated (at least in the EU...), the rest - not so much. So each time I hear someone talking about "the death of the Internet" when they mean regulation related to the WWW, I feel at least we as "hackers" should remember this important distinction because sooner or later, once the web becomes even more regulated, we might want to turn to these remaining protocols in order to communicate more freely, and without the blessing of people who create web browsers (that became so complex you practically can't compete here unless you have tons of money).
    - loup-vaillant 9y ago
      There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network. I can see this becoming so bad that the only way to communicate freely would be to tunnel our stuff through TLS on port 443. (That is, doing what looks like HTTPS.)
      - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
        That's true. Fortunately, if everything else fails, we should always be able to connect on 443 via stunnel for example, no matter what protocol we use. That's the price to pay for the net getting more complex and more abused.
pas 9y ago
> less freedom on the Internet The regulations should be non-technology specific. Simply it should provide rules about customer/user data. Even if I use pigeons. (But not RFC 1149.)
- extra88 9y ago
  Some regulatory requirements are manageable by a large, established company but not a startup. For instance, requiring human review of user content is going to be tough in a high growth phase.
  - ivanhoe 9y ago
    But that's exactly how it works in many other lines of businesses, e.g. in construction. Many small companies can't provide compliance with the required codes, so they're forced to work their way up the ladder slowly or create joint ventures. Sure, that way you probably can't become a billionaire in a few years, but also bridges fall down less often because of it, so in the end it's not necessarily a bad thing for the society.
    - smaddox 9y ago
      What makes you think large companies are more capable of developing reliable, secure software?
      - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        Huh? Isn't the point of this whole comment chain that large companies are able to comply with regulations that protect user safety that small companies might not be able to? In that case it's self evident why a large company is better able to protect user safety.
        mattnewton 9y ago
        That’s assuming the regulations work instead of just throw obstacles in the way of new companies.
dingaling 9y ago
The more you're free to amble around the Web 'liking' things the more data Facebook can accumulate and the more lucrative you become. Why would they want to restrict that? As for stifling competitors, Facebook actually benefit from a free-for-all Internet because they can watch trends and identify what needs to be done to capture each successive generation of users, slowly folding them into the big Facebook family. I don't like the company but I don't think they want to lock the Internet down . I reckon they know that will just lead to something really disruptive and destructive that they won't see coming, like some app that spreads by sideloading.
simias 9y ago
>Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. Beyond that and even if they make it slightly harder to build a social network in the future it doesn't mean that a reasonable amount of regulation is not worthwhile. If you want to start a bridge-building company you'll have to abide by a massive amount of rules, yet I'm not really sure I want to let the "completely free market" decide what a safe bridge looks like.
- kristianc 9y ago
  > Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Even assuming you have the data, Facebook's value is in the IP and ML algorithms. Facebook sure as hell isn't giving those up. Even assuming all that, how does it take us further forward than what we have now? There's a lot of arguments to the effect of 'something needs to be done' but not much detail on what an alternative looks like.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    > What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Making scraping of your personal data a statutory right, including the building and distributing of tools for it. No need to force FB to publish anything, just prevent them from blocking anyone who uses a tool to scrape their own data through the regular UI. This should draw the boundaries of responsibility in the right place. This would allow e.g. a “messaging” bridge which automatically interfaces with the messages part of the site, and bridges it to any tool (or API) you want. At least per user per account. This would force de facto federation without putting a burden on FB.
089723645897236 9y ago
Just the next first step off the current plateau onto a slope of improvement. FB is garbage pork barrel software anyway. Something cooler is coming along right around the corner. The design space is wide open it's just about who can grab more users. FB UX has never really changed much in ten years and old people use it. Need I say more?
jacquesm 9y ago
Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.
- statictype 9y ago
  I think that was his point. Facebook's ascension corrodes the Free Internet
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet. That's the point. Imagine the result of all this is a piece of legislation that doesn't hamper Facebook in any significant way but imposes large fixed compliance costs on tech companies. Facebook is huge, they pay the costs without even noticing. People who want to dethrone Facebook, or replace it with some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead. Facebook gets what they want and the Senators get to look like they've done something, meanwhile nobody pay attention to the fact that the same Senators are about to get a load of campaign money from Facebook.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Yup. Textbook regulatory capture.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead I don't follow you, how would a decentralized (and presumably non commercial) alternative be affected by this? Besides the fact that legislation is typically a local affair Facebook would have an advantage versus another commercial player, and whoever wrote the law would most likely focus on those aspects that would have an impact on such players as well. So for a non-commercial, decentralized and/or federated alternative this would be a huge boon, rather than that it would be killed in the cradle.
    - 9y ago
mrlala 9y ago
>and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. What??? I watched most of it, and while Zuckerberg agreed that legislation in some areas are needed, he was quite clear that most times that he does not think legislation is the answer. He said that they would internally implement things. Multiple senators kept trying to get direct yes/no if he would support such regulation and he would say "I look forward to my team discussing that with you" when they wanted hard "yes" that he would champion regulation. So I don't understand your post at all...
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations. If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at it from the IC perspective FB is too big to fail: - Remember Palantir worked with CA on the Facebook data it acquired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721 - Remember how confident in May 2016 Thiel was of a Trump presidency and when he openly started endorsing Trump? Was he operating with more knowledge than available to the general public: http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/ http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/ - His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting now: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-donald-j-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do... - Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals-uses-specific-functions-and-key-clients/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal... - This is who runs PRISM: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism Oh and Palantir enables Immigration Agents to Access Information From the CIA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827 Also more uncomfortable questions: https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349 https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349
- specialist 9y ago
  Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time. We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases. Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data. When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF). Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc. That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally. Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody. I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.
davvolun 9y ago
Measures to protect users' data and privacy will not strictly kill a "free" internet -- there are lots of reasonable caveats such as number of active users, total revenue, number of employees that would allow a small business to compete.
- mkirklions 9y ago
  I always wonder who is saying things like "reasonable regulations" Do you run your own company and find the regulations dont require you to hire a multi-thousand dollar legal team at every turn? Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says wont be exploited? I worry that my kids will be unable to start businesses due to regulations, or rather their friends wont be able to start businesses. I am a top 4%er and I'll simply pay for the legal teams needed. I know my competition making 40k/yr cannot.
  - davvolun 9y ago
    I'll tell you, I've worked for a business small enough to avoid needing to hire a "multi-thousand dollar legal team" and a few of the things that I know happened while I was there leave me very suspicious of the things I didn't know about. > Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says won't be exploited? Nope, I'm a normal person, not actually a strawman. As long as there's government, it will be exploited; but, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by arguing that because people will exploit loopholes, we should eliminate (all) regulations. Instead of supporting a representative that tries to eliminate two regulations for every new one, how about supporting a half-intelligent representative? You're worried people won't be able to start businesses? Where is Facebook's big competition? Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No -- so why are you worried that they won't be able to do something in the future that they can't do now?
    - mkirklions 9y ago
      >Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No I disagree with this. I think at the current time they can.
drawkbox 9y ago
We really do need an Internet Party, the basis of the party is a fair open internet market.
PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
What counts as a free internet? Can an internet which is monitored and which the governments in power have ability to enforce penalties of what they consider misuse ever be considered free? How does one decide what material can be outlawed while still maintaining a free internet?
lorenzorhoades 9y ago
I don't really understand what the big deal is here. All this data was given to facebook. Ads are inherently propaganda, how is the use of this data any different? If I decide in my terms of service that i can use your data however i want, including mining your messages and selling it to an evil dictator, i should be able to do that. If you agree, you are free to use my plateform, if not, thats fine too, you can't. me, and a group of people whom i've paid have developed this app, how can you restrict my right to do as i please with everything that comes out of it? If i want to shut down facebook tomorrow, i can. If it's against what is in my terms of service, sue the living shit out of me, and force me to update my terms to reflect reality or delete the app.

deif 9y ago

Not sure what your definition of free internet is, but mine is one where the users are free, not the businesses.

aje403 9y ago
Those two things are positively correlated
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  Not necessarily. The ultimate aim of each business is to crush the competition and become a monopoly. If they succeed, and we do have some de facto monopolies now, they can do whatever they want and users/customers have little or no choice. Regulations limiting the power of companies are designed do counteract that.
  - adventured 9y ago
    It doesn't matter if Google crushes the competition in search. You do not actually have to use their search engine, that's part of the freedom of the Internet. Further, you're not entitled to their search engine, that's also a critical aspect of actually having the freedom to use the Internet as you see fit. They can't do whatever they want. So long as the Internet is free from overbearing government restrictions and the ISPs aren't segmenting it (locking users into restricted sandboxes), you can go wherever you want without using Google search, or shopping at Amazon, or using Windows, or using Chrome, or using Facebook, or shopping on eBay, or paying with PayPal. The only real limiting premise as it pertains to the Internet, are the ISPs and the backbones. So long as you can get on a free Internet, engineers can perpetually build their own new products at will, crafting new tech universes that didn't exist before. They have been doing that non-stop in every category for the last two plus decades since the Web took off. Don't like Chrome because it managed to acquire 99% of the market? Fine, spin up your own clone and put it out there. Or use Firefox or Edge a dozen other lesser used competitors. Don't like Go or C# or Java? Fine, use one of 37 other languages. Don't like Google search? Fine, use Bing or DuckDuckGo or a dozen other less well known search engines. Build a new one maybe, nobody is stopping you, maybe it's time for a new search paradigm. Don't like AWS? Fine, use Hetzner, or Digital Ocean, or a dedicated box provider, or Vultr, or Linode or Google Cloud, or Azure, or build your own new competitor. There are vastly more options today, in essentially every way, than there were in 1995 or 2005. The free Internet has worked extraordinarily well. It has never stopped producing alternatives, and alternatives have never stopped existing. The only thing that can crush it is government regulation, specifically if they fuck that up.
  - aje403 9y ago
    I don't disagree with you. That is why I said positively correlated, rather than perfectly. My comment intended to concur with the parent comment: "the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it." We most likely will not see any trust-busting as you're describing here. We'll more likely just see more side-effect legislation like the net neutrality repeal or FOSTA/SESTA that will just consolidate power for a few parties and the government at the expense of small businesses.
ftlio 9y ago
Since when are businesses not users of the internet?
- apexalpha 9y ago
  We obviously mean freedom for individual users lacking the resources of big organisations to defend themselves and protect their own rights. Come on this isn't a game of semantics.
  - Joeboy 9y ago
    The experiment referred to was one where the web was a level playing field that didn't differentiate between different classes of users. The fact you see this is as a silly semantic point underscores the original point about that experiment being over. Edit: I can only speculate as to why people don't like this, but in case it makes a difference it's intended only as historical background for people who missed the start of the experiment.
- StreamBright 9y ago
  I think business are providers not users.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

On an unrelated note: I always wonder how people nowadays identify the Internet with WWW. There are so many ways to use the Internet in a way not even remotely related to the current power struggles between greedy businesses and duped users, with incompetent governments meddling in from time to time.

d33 9y ago
Could you elaborate?
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  The Internet is the infrastructure plus a set of protocols, with HTTP being just one of them. The protocols the most heavily used tend to be regulated (at least in the EU...), the rest - not so much. So each time I hear someone talking about "the death of the Internet" when they mean regulation related to the WWW, I feel at least we as "hackers" should remember this important distinction because sooner or later, once the web becomes even more regulated, we might want to turn to these remaining protocols in order to communicate more freely, and without the blessing of people who create web browsers (that became so complex you practically can't compete here unless you have tons of money).
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network. I can see this becoming so bad that the only way to communicate freely would be to tunnel our stuff through TLS on port 443. (That is, doing what looks like HTTPS.)
    - dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
      That's true. Fortunately, if everything else fails, we should always be able to connect on 443 via stunnel for example, no matter what protocol we use. That's the price to pay for the net getting more complex and more abused.

pas 9y ago

> less freedom on the Internet The regulations should be non-technology specific. Simply it should provide rules about customer/user data. Even if I use pigeons. (But not RFC 1149.)

extra88 9y ago
Some regulatory requirements are manageable by a large, established company but not a startup. For instance, requiring human review of user content is going to be tough in a high growth phase.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  But that's exactly how it works in many other lines of businesses, e.g. in construction. Many small companies can't provide compliance with the required codes, so they're forced to work their way up the ladder slowly or create joint ventures. Sure, that way you probably can't become a billionaire in a few years, but also bridges fall down less often because of it, so in the end it's not necessarily a bad thing for the society.
  - smaddox 9y ago
    What makes you think large companies are more capable of developing reliable, secure software?
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Huh? Isn't the point of this whole comment chain that large companies are able to comply with regulations that protect user safety that small companies might not be able to? In that case it's self evident why a large company is better able to protect user safety.
      - mattnewton 9y ago
        That’s assuming the regulations work instead of just throw obstacles in the way of new companies.

dingaling 9y ago

The more you're free to amble around the Web 'liking' things the more data Facebook can accumulate and the more lucrative you become. Why would they want to restrict that? As for stifling competitors, Facebook actually benefit from a free-for-all Internet because they can watch trends and identify what needs to be done to capture each successive generation of users, slowly folding them into the big Facebook family. I don't like the company but I don't think they want to lock the Internet down . I reckon they know that will just lead to something really disruptive and destructive that they won't see coming, like some app that spreads by sideloading.

simias 9y ago

>Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. Beyond that and even if they make it slightly harder to build a social network in the future it doesn't mean that a reasonable amount of regulation is not worthwhile. If you want to start a bridge-building company you'll have to abide by a massive amount of rules, yet I'm not really sure I want to let the "completely free market" decide what a safe bridge looks like.

kristianc 9y ago
> Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat. What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Even assuming you have the data, Facebook's value is in the IP and ML algorithms. Facebook sure as hell isn't giving those up. Even assuming all that, how does it take us further forward than what we have now? There's a lot of arguments to the effect of 'something needs to be done' but not much detail on what an alternative looks like.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  > What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Making scraping of your personal data a statutory right, including the building and distributing of tools for it. No need to force FB to publish anything, just prevent them from blocking anyone who uses a tool to scrape their own data through the regular UI. This should draw the boundaries of responsibility in the right place. This would allow e.g. a “messaging” bridge which automatically interfaces with the messages part of the site, and bridges it to any tool (or API) you want. At least per user per account. This would force de facto federation without putting a burden on FB.

089723645897236 9y ago

Just the next first step off the current plateau onto a slope of improvement. FB is garbage pork barrel software anyway. Something cooler is coming along right around the corner. The design space is wide open it's just about who can grab more users. FB UX has never really changed much in ten years and old people use it. Need I say more?

jacquesm 9y ago

Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.

statictype 9y ago
I think that was his point. Facebook's ascension corrodes the Free Internet
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet. That's the point. Imagine the result of all this is a piece of legislation that doesn't hamper Facebook in any significant way but imposes large fixed compliance costs on tech companies. Facebook is huge, they pay the costs without even noticing. People who want to dethrone Facebook, or replace it with some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead. Facebook gets what they want and the Senators get to look like they've done something, meanwhile nobody pay attention to the fact that the same Senators are about to get a load of campaign money from Facebook.
- specialist 9y ago
  Yup. Textbook regulatory capture.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead I don't follow you, how would a decentralized (and presumably non commercial) alternative be affected by this? Besides the fact that legislation is typically a local affair Facebook would have an advantage versus another commercial player, and whoever wrote the law would most likely focus on those aspects that would have an impact on such players as well. So for a non-commercial, decentralized and/or federated alternative this would be a huge boon, rather than that it would be killed in the cradle.
  - 9y ago

mrlala 9y ago

>and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. What??? I watched most of it, and while Zuckerberg agreed that legislation in some areas are needed, he was quite clear that most times that he does not think legislation is the answer. He said that they would internally implement things. Multiple senators kept trying to get direct yes/no if he would support such regulation and he would say "I look forward to my team discussing that with you" when they wanted hard "yes" that he would champion regulation. So I don't understand your post at all...

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations. If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at it from the IC perspective FB is too big to fail: - Remember Palantir worked with CA on the Facebook data it acquired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721 - Remember how confident in May 2016 Thiel was of a Trump presidency and when he openly started endorsing Trump? Was he operating with more knowledge than available to the general public: http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/ http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/ - His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting now: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-donald-j-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do... - Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals-uses-specific-functions-and-key-clients/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal... - This is who runs PRISM: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism Oh and Palantir enables Immigration Agents to Access Information From the CIA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827 Also more uncomfortable questions: https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349 https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349

specialist 9y ago
Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time. We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases. Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data. When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF). Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc. That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally. Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody. I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.

davvolun 9y ago

Measures to protect users' data and privacy will not strictly kill a "free" internet -- there are lots of reasonable caveats such as number of active users, total revenue, number of employees that would allow a small business to compete.

mkirklions 9y ago
I always wonder who is saying things like "reasonable regulations" Do you run your own company and find the regulations dont require you to hire a multi-thousand dollar legal team at every turn? Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says wont be exploited? I worry that my kids will be unable to start businesses due to regulations, or rather their friends wont be able to start businesses. I am a top 4%er and I'll simply pay for the legal teams needed. I know my competition making 40k/yr cannot.
- davvolun 9y ago
  I'll tell you, I've worked for a business small enough to avoid needing to hire a "multi-thousand dollar legal team" and a few of the things that I know happened while I was there leave me very suspicious of the things I didn't know about. > Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says won't be exploited? Nope, I'm a normal person, not actually a strawman. As long as there's government, it will be exploited; but, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by arguing that because people will exploit loopholes, we should eliminate (all) regulations. Instead of supporting a representative that tries to eliminate two regulations for every new one, how about supporting a half-intelligent representative? You're worried people won't be able to start businesses? Where is Facebook's big competition? Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No -- so why are you worried that they won't be able to do something in the future that they can't do now?
  - mkirklions 9y ago
    >Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No I disagree with this. I think at the current time they can.

drawkbox 9y ago

We really do need an Internet Party, the basis of the party is a fair open internet market.

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago

What counts as a free internet? Can an internet which is monitored and which the governments in power have ability to enforce penalties of what they consider misuse ever be considered free? How does one decide what material can be outlawed while still maintaining a free internet?

lorenzorhoades 9y ago

I don't really understand what the big deal is here. All this data was given to facebook. Ads are inherently propaganda, how is the use of this data any different? If I decide in my terms of service that i can use your data however i want, including mining your messages and selling it to an evil dictator, i should be able to do that. If you agree, you are free to use my plateform, if not, thats fine too, you can't. me, and a group of people whom i've paid have developed this app, how can you restrict my right to do as i please with everything that comes out of it? If i want to shut down facebook tomorrow, i can. If it's against what is in my terms of service, sue the living shit out of me, and force me to update my terms to reflect reality or delete the app.