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It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. Purposely ignoring laws, regulations, or seeing vague ones th

• drugme 8y ago
  It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.
• jstanley 8y ago
  Unfortunately, laws are unlikely to change without a bit of violation. Alcohol prohibition in the US didn't end because everyone stayed good and sober.
  • dmix 8y ago
    Indeed, Uber and AirBnB were evolutions of the marketplace. They aren’t going away (and shouldn’t go away) just because the laws were designed in a previous century for a different type of business. The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times. I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.
    • the_clarence 8y ago
      Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Uber and Airbnb have changed the world and how people commute or travel fornthe better.
      • njarboe 8y ago
        Airbnb has clearly been a win for travelers. As for the people who live in an apartment building next door to someone who illegally rents out their unit with Airbnb, their world has changed also, but not for the better.
        • the_clarence 8y ago
          Not true. You're just hearing a vocal minority of people complaining about bad experiences. Having bad neighborhods is not an airbnb specific problem.
          • njarboe 8y ago
            People on vacation are much more likely to stay up late partying, not understand or follow local customs, and you can't build up a long term relationship with people who are only around for a week. It is definitely a real problem.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong. In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed. Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.
      • 8y ago
  • mprev 8y ago
    This isn't all that much like alcohol prohibition, though. This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource. Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law. In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.
    • SilasX 8y ago
      That feels like a whitewashing of history. Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition. Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it. It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night. So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today. Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".
  • troydavis 8y ago
    > "Laws are unlikely to change without a bit of violation" The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them. Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society. (I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)
    • randallsquared 8y ago
      > The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them. That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf ) Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences. You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.
      • ethbro 8y ago
        The 99/100 case (in this argument) is mostly tragedy of the commons laws. Where every person would individually benefit from breaking them, but the community as a whole would be worse off. E.g. environmental regulations
        • zaroth 8y ago
          Disagreeing with the law just because it would personally financially benefit you to break it is pretty weak sauce. I think a much stronger argument could be made that many laws — and particularly regulations — fail even at their stated purpose. There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving. While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary. I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682946
  • the_clarence 8y ago
    Uber wouldn't be a thing today if they had followed every laws. Actually very few startup would exist. Very few restaurants as well.
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      You have to wonder how big Facebook would be today if a GDPR-esque law already existed and was common in most countries at the time of its launch.
      • syntheticcdo 8y ago
        On the flip side, if Facebook had never existed and never committed the privacy violations it has, would the GDPR exist?
    • ionised 8y ago
      I think Uber not being a thing might have been for the best.
      • the_clarence 8y ago
        That's the stupidest thing I've heard today.
    • rchaud 8y ago
      Uber also wouldn't be a thing today if they didn't have billions in VC money buying them lawyers and lobbyists, and developing Greyball to help drivers avoid giving rides to people identified as regulators. Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.
      • the_clarence 8y ago
        I'm not sure if your comment is a response to mine.
    • stephenr 8y ago
  • xeromal 8y ago
    Not saying I agree with you, but most places frowned on lane splitting with motorcycles in the US, but people splitting caused California to eventually codify the legality of it. Sometimes it does take a little pressure.
  • Mvandenbergh 8y ago
    Prohibition ended because people were sick of it and it was repealed not because people violated the law and the government decided not to enforce it after all.
    • bluGill 8y ago
      It was repealed because the people who disagreed with a significant political force. Those who don't drink and wanted it didn't really change their mind at all.
  • ineedasername 8y ago
    Alcohol prohibition is an odd choice here, considering that its implementation is an example of a law that did change without anyone violating an existing law. And then it wasn't done away with just because people were violating it. People violated it because it was deeply unpopular. It was repealed as much because of the chaos it caused and the fact that legalizing alcohol would re-institute a much needed source of tax revenue.
  • lvs 8y ago
    So your argument is seriously that regulating satellite launches is akin to alcohol prohibition? Do you think that's a reasonable comparison?
• duxup 8y ago
  My concern is the asshole factor. Some of this stuff is just being a jerk to other humans.
• bluGill 8y ago
  The problem is not all laws are moral. Regulatory capture is a thing. Many different people (often paid by a corporation) have come up with scheme that greatly harm their competition for no gain, yet made them sound good.
  • ethbro 8y ago
    On the other hand, this is also one of the reasons I'd be hesitant to put garbage collection in place for laws. Make it too easy to repeal laws, and anti-corporate interest laws that were difficult to pass find themselves quietly unwritten soon after. A difficult game theory problem.
  • jmcqk6 8y ago
    There is a difference between law and morality and for good reason. There has never been massives groups of people that completely agree on right or wrong. Instead of trying to codify right and wrong, law is about defining how we can all get along despite those differences. I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.
    • bluGill 8y ago
      What do you do about an unjust law though?
      • jmcqk6 8y ago
        Fight to change it. Laws are not set in stone for a purpose. They're supposed to evolve as they people governed by them evolve.
• waffle_ss 8y ago
  The problem is if we rely on lobbying gov't for change, then we're going to get change written by corporate lobbyists (including by your employer, Amazon / Jeff Bezos - no offense). They tend to build up barriers to entry to competition and entrench themselves. I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.
• paulcole 8y ago
  >It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).
  • criddell 8y ago
    Because often the consequences are paid for by other people. I'm specifically thinking about things like environmental regulations or regulations around accessibility.
    • paulcole 8y ago
      Then that's on the government for not making the disincentive to break the contract strong enough.
      • criddell 8y ago
        Sadly, you're probably right. Investors seem to be only too happy to back sociopaths.
  • ganzuul 8y ago
    > If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Textbook example of how a career criminal thinks.
    • paulcole 8y ago
      What about strategic defaults on a home you've bought? Breaking a contract with a vendor because you'll save more with another one to more than make up the penalties? Not cleaning your apartment when you move out because you're willing to lose some/all of your security deposit?
      • ganzuul 8y ago
• informatimago 8y ago
  Notice that with the global liberalism regime force feed on peoples, corporations have the right to sue governments when the later have laws preventing the corporations to make profit. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-legal-system-lets-corportations-sue-states-ttip-icsid https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-leg... And when it's corporations that have revenues ten or hundreds of times greater than the sued state, the later stands no chance. Reality is different than what you think. It's also probably different from what it should be. But who are you compared to Soros, Rockfeller and the bankers of the GAFAM?
• baybal2 8y ago
  > It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. A part of being an entrepreneur is that you have take risks from time to time, and under term "risk" I don't mean business risks.
• aqme28 8y ago
  And then there's Theranos.
  • fastball 8y ago
    Theranos wasn't bad because they skirted regulation, they were bad because they outright lied about the efficacy of their (non)product.
    • ceejayoz 8y ago
      Theranos was bad for both reasons. Even if you remove the fraud, they were skirting all sorts of regulations around patient safety and the operation of laboratories.
      • fastball 8y ago
        Not sure I agree. If you're skirting regulation but your product actually works, I don't personally think you've done anything morally wrong. The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it. It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.
        • ceejayoz 8y ago
          I'd encourage you to read Bad Blood. A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.
          • fastball 8y ago
            I actually did read Bad Blood, and thought it was a very interesting book! But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver. You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.
• LoSboccacc 8y ago
  > Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them ou What? No! That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.
• ergothus 8y ago
  > "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated. Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text. In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright. From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright. From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules. From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense. But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details? For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books. Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court. Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, when "open source" was a new term (vs free software), and when Stallman vs Raymond had just finished peaking. The concept of open licensing and copyleft was getting a broader awareness, and tech and RPGs have always had a tight bond, so when D&D introduce the Open Gaming License (OGL), to set explicit rules to allow derivative works, it was a big deal. The OGL did a lot of things. It spawned a revolution in the RPG market that would bring in a lot of new players, spawned a bunch of new companies - most of whom folded just as quickly, but a few modern companies made their start then and survived - crushed or crippled some relative giants in the industry, dealt a blow (due to unsold product) to the RPG stores that were already reeling from the correction in the trading card industry...and normalized new intellectual property practices. The OGL made it clear what was allowed to be done, and even allowed activities that distinctly required permission under copyright...IF you accepted limitations that are probably more than copyright would ever require. If there are gaming magazines (or 'zines, or any other commercial enterprise) that offer adventures without explicit license, I don't know of them. Similarly, character creation programs and the like all operate under explicit license now...because we're never figured out if they need to. Bringing this all back to the original point: "move fast and break things" in terms of the law has two possible ends: you either tick off the established players and they bring the law against you and resolve the legal vagueness one way or the other, OR you establish a new norm because no one has the resources to challenge you (and if they did, the fact that you created an accepted norm makes it more likely that the law will accept that as the norm: See how EULAs have crazily become enforceable without even offering refunds if you don't accept in most situations). End conclusion: Is "move fast and break the law" good? I really don't know. I feel like ending vagueness is good, but I feel like allowing initial corporate actors to define the starting point of the new rules is bad. Either way, I feel like it's a different situation when you're dealing with legal vagueness than when dealing with clear established laws in the Uber and AirBnB situations, but even in those cases the "little guys" weren't going to be able to impact the law without a clear market demand...and yet, I don't like encouraging companies to play fast and loose. Messy.
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  How many startups do they have to fine into bankruptcy for the rest of the community to take notice? I think some need to be made an example of.
• lorenzorhoades 8y ago
  The problem with this statement is it worked, and gives me great hope in this company that they were smart enough to risk it. The FCC said no, you cannot launch the satellite you spent years developing for reasons that ended up being completely wrong. So, what is a company to do? Launch anyways and accept the backlash as they had no other option. Once the satellites launched, they were able to effectively track them and the company got approved for more launches but this time without the 900k fine. As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example
  • negrit 8y ago
    The problem with "don’t make sense" is that very often they do but the arrogance/mistrust is stronger. Reading the comments on /r/robinhood is very eye opening. There is a big disconnection between the regulators and the regulated.
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      I think r/robinhood is a particularly bad example, the naïveté in that subreddit is overpowering. In general financial regulations are probably more good than bad given how completely irrational people get when money is involved.
  • borkt 8y ago
    This could have gone an entirely different way. I am glad it worked out but I do not gain respect or hope in a company because they willingly ignored a very serious regulation and the consequences of a failure on their part could have caused a big problem up there. Feels very amateur and irresponsible.
    • borkt 8y ago
      As some clarification I am all for breaking laws that can really only hurt the individual doing the lawbreaking. The government shouldn't have the right to protect us from ourselves. However, that this could have affected the other items in the payload or existing satellites in orbit if something went wrong is why I am disappointed.
• meddlepal 8y ago
  Laws are just contracts and have consequences if you get caught breaking them. People and businesses break contracts all the time. I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.
  • njarboe 8y ago
    I think criminal law probably should not be looked at in this way. Murder? Best if people think of not murdering people as an absolute and not some contract that should be contemplated as breakable if risk/reward calculation is right. Most humans don't think on gradients and are much more comfortable with binary choices. And we would probably have to bring back torture to get the risk/reward appropriate on that law.
• porpoisely 8y ago
  Breaking laws is normally not a good idea. But most of the time, the only way to change bad laws and regulations is to break them first. Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks. Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.
  • Traster 8y ago
    I think you're right that there are some laws that are worth breaking, but let's not conflate choosing to break laws as a matter of principle with breaking laws as a matter of sloppiness. There was no real reason for Swarm to break these laws beyond a fundamental unwillingness to follow basic standards that are there for good reason. Their law breaking a FCC investigation has almost certainly cost them more than it would've cost to engage with the FCC. The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.
    • bobthepanda 8y ago
      What exactly would be a good alternative? Jail time is also not a good penalty. See: marijuana. The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.
      • Traster 8y ago
        I think the fact that Swarm consulted with the FCC, had their plan to launch satellites rejected and then decided to launch anyway indicates the fines weren't suitable. A simple 3 year ban on further launches would've changed that. I find the fact that Swarm did this knowingly particularly egregious. I'm also not sure the lack of violations is a good indicator that the FCC is working since I don't think there's a particularly big sample of companies doing this for other structural reasons.
• cat199 8y ago
  > Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money. seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..
• sano1 8y ago
  I am sure this is exactly how all the regulatory groups in congress that people hate so much feel when enacting things 'for our own good.' Meet the new boss (some millennial that feels superior because they know what gulpgruntwebpacknpm are), same as the old boss.
• dfxm12 8y ago
  A more apt mantra here is "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission". After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized. Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?
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