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I don't agree with the idea that the internet needs more regulation. Yes, it does have it's problems. But I think many solutions are in the making, we just have

I don't agree with the idea that the internet needs more regulation. Yes, it does have it's problems. But I think many solutions are in the making, we just have to be patient. My idea of what made the web great is its freedom and lack of regulation. I'm willing to endure some drawbacks in order to maintain a high level of freedom.

thekyle 8y ago
I agree. The only thing regulation is going to do is entrench existing internet companies and raise the barrier to entry for new startups to compete.
- potta_coffee 8y ago
  Regulation always benefits the rent-seekers. They have the best means of influencing that regulation in the first place.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    I have clean air and water where I live, largely due to regulation. If "rent seekers" are benefiting from such regulations, they're certainly far from the only ones who benefit.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - keerthiko 8y ago
    This is the actual problem, not regulation itself. Regulation should be designed to scale with the size and age of the participating operator (of business or service). Regulations should be about controlling the outsize influence of any individual player/entity in any direction, in addition to restriction malicious activity. If these were equally important in regulation design, they would be far less harmful for new small players and better manage incumbents.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      Regulation of voluntary market interaction doesn't work because one-size-fits-all solutions don't work. You cannot anticipate all permutations of a class of interactions and preemptively prescribe optimal processes for each one. Doing so will massively inhibit innovation. Free market disruption will do much better to check larger players than easily captured regulatory agencies which are much more likely to become protectors of incumbents in industry and unions than check abusive power. If the government wants to limit abusive corporate power without setting the dangerous precedent of violating private property and contracting rights, it can fund open source development, like the EU recently did with its funding of Proton mail.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    That isn't a general truth. Regulation usually favours larger players because regulation favours businesses who can demonstrate compliance with regulation, and that is usually expensive. It is also much easier to achieve compliance if it is an incremental change to an existing business rather than something to be absorbed from scratch - so regulations also favour established businesses.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    This attitude ignores an awful lot of progress. Or you are just defining regulation to only include the things that favor your argument. For instance, the 40 hour workweek is a regulation in the US. Are hourly employees the rent seekers there? Or the unions and activists that prompted the change?
    - nrb 8y ago
      You’re both right, in that regulation serves the group that most successfully steers it. The notion that more often than not, incumbent corporations are the ones writing the regulations, is not exactly controversial. Given the recent treatment of net neutrality, I don’t hold out much faith in the open web getting a fair shake right now.
      - ddingus 8y ago
        Insightful. One could extrapolate this Internet struggle being closely related to how meaningful ordinary people are represented in government. In many democracies, and in the US today, big money owns government to the point of anything at all aimed at defending the interests of ordinary people seems radical? And expensive? We may find there is a cost per person, few dollars per, or small percentage of time needed to participate in the system or be stripped down, devalued, tracked and every other thing possible to make money.
    - CryptoPunk 8y ago
      Mandatory minimum employment standards aren't progress. Work hours were declining on their own, just as the trend toward a 4 day work week is happening on its own due to fundamental changes in the economic structure. But point granted that not all regulations are a result of rent-seeking. Some are a consequence of misguided common wisdom (e.g. labor regulations, tariffs, restrictions on foreign investment).
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Yeah, right. But you're forgetting few other categories of regulation. Like, protection of health and life - that's something companies don't tend to do on their own; in fact, it usually goes strongly against their interest[0]. Or, protection of environment. Or, protecting people from countless of individually and socially destructive activities that the market will happily engage in if left to its own devices, as evidenced by hundreds of years of history over which those issues were recognized and then regulated. -- [0] - A common theme in recent discussions serves as a great proof: Chinese counterfeits on Amazon. By far, Chinese export goods are a product of an environment free from regulations applying in the Western world - so how come people are so afraid they'll get a Chinese-made toy or baby formula?
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Force residential ISPs to permit servers running over IPV6. Then we can have federated protocols that bypass the rent seekers.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "Regulation always benefits the rent-seekers. They have the best means of influencing that regulation in the first place. " The first sentence is blatantly wrong (the word "always"). In what way did environmental regulation benefit the rent seekers or in what way does the GDPR help them? I really hate when people say all regulation is bad if the real problem is that politicians are captured by industry. I grew up up during a time when the river next to my town was green one day, red one day and yellow the next. The only fish in that river were dead. Now 30 years later you can go swimming in the river and there are plenty of fish. Only regulation made this possible.
    - mLuby 8y ago
      Regulations benefit larger companies that can afford compliance departments, legal protection, and lobbyists. Imagine EvilCorp on the one hand, with 50+ employees dedicated to ensuring they stay just barely on the side of the law (while exploiting all the loopholes they can), and TinyShop on the other, which has 10 employees _total_ and has to spend a much larger percentage of available time, energy, and money ensuring they don't get shut down by a regulator. Regulations are important (that your town is healthy again is the main point), but they are also a barrier to entry that favor large, established companies over small startups.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        If you can afford more lawyers you are always at an advantage. Even the “regulations” against theft or harming other people have a bigger impact on people with less money but we still have them. So saying “all regulations are bad” is just not very smart. Without regulations we would be living in a polluted world with child labor and unsafe workplaces. Every piece of food you buy may kill you. The wheels on your car may be falling off at high speed. I agree that there is room for improvement but regulations are a big part of what makes a modern civilized society.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
How many years do we have to be patient whilst being stripped of every personal data point that can be inferred and tracked and bombarded by malicious ad networks? Lack of regulation - of advertising, of honesty, of data, of consumer protections made the internet the cesspit of data abuse it currently is. It stopped being great years ago to my mind.
- asark 8y ago
  Outlawing all the shitty data collection, or GDPR'ing it to the point so at least it's much harder and more under control, would go a long way toward fixing things, including off the web (medical providers, credit card companies, credit reporting agencies, and so on).
peterwwillis 8y ago
I do agree with the idea that the internet needs more regulation. Yes, it does have it's problems. But I think many solutions are in the making, we just have to move forward. My idea of what made society great is powerful companies being held accountable for their effect on people's lives. I'm willing to endure some drawbacks in order to maintain a better society.
falcrist 8y ago
This depends on what you mean by regulation. If you're talking about net neutrality, then it's wrong to assume regulation will benefit rentseakers. That's a matter of protecting freedom of speech from corporate infringement. If you're talking about regulating social media interactions... that's more complicated. I don't see a good way to stop people from spreading fake news, propaganda, etc without abolishing free speech legislation like the first amendment of the US Constitution. There may be a way to curtail privacy invasions via legislation, but that's highly unlikely to happen since the government itself is collecting data gathered by Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  I would much rather a decentralized global meshnet replace traditional telecommunication networks than Net Neutrality be used to manage those networks. I could easily imagine regulations like Net Neutrality inhibiting the development of a global meshnet infrastucture.
  - falcrist 8y ago
    I too would like to live in a magical fairy land where all of my dreams came true. Since I don't believe in magic, I'm forced to think in terms of real world implications. A centralized structure with a dedicated backbone will always be more efficient than any kind of mesh net. Additionally, such a structure requires a critical mass of people to operate. Since people don't want to be the infrastructure when they could be a client and have much more bandwidth, that alone sinks the whole deal. If you're not convinced, consider the fact that the incumbent providers will fight such a structure at the legislative level as well as trying to undercut its userbase. Also, net neutrality rules, as established in the US in 2015 were pretty straightforward. They wouldn't inhibit a meshnet, meshnet clients likely do not fall under the definition of ISP, and in fact such rules would probably be necessary to it's effective operation. Remember, they were based on three simple rules: "ISPs cannot block legal content, applications, or services", "ISPs cannot slow down or degrade internet service based on the content, application, or service accessed by users", and "ISPs cannot accept payment to give content, applications, or services more favorable access to users." So back in reality-land, there won't be any meshnet to compete with the current internet for the foreseeable future. If you value freedom of speech and free movement of information online, I strongly suggest you support the rules outlined above. EDIT: It's also worth noting that such a meshnet would solve none of the issues raised by Sir Tim.

thekyle 8y ago

I agree. The only thing regulation is going to do is entrench existing internet companies and raise the barrier to entry for new startups to compete.

potta_coffee 8y ago
Regulation always benefits the rent-seekers. They have the best means of influencing that regulation in the first place.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  I have clean air and water where I live, largely due to regulation. If "rent seekers" are benefiting from such regulations, they're certainly far from the only ones who benefit.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- keerthiko 8y ago
  This is the actual problem, not regulation itself. Regulation should be designed to scale with the size and age of the participating operator (of business or service). Regulations should be about controlling the outsize influence of any individual player/entity in any direction, in addition to restriction malicious activity. If these were equally important in regulation design, they would be far less harmful for new small players and better manage incumbents.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    Regulation of voluntary market interaction doesn't work because one-size-fits-all solutions don't work. You cannot anticipate all permutations of a class of interactions and preemptively prescribe optimal processes for each one. Doing so will massively inhibit innovation. Free market disruption will do much better to check larger players than easily captured regulatory agencies which are much more likely to become protectors of incumbents in industry and unions than check abusive power. If the government wants to limit abusive corporate power without setting the dangerous precedent of violating private property and contracting rights, it can fund open source development, like the EU recently did with its funding of Proton mail.
- roenxi 8y ago
  That isn't a general truth. Regulation usually favours larger players because regulation favours businesses who can demonstrate compliance with regulation, and that is usually expensive. It is also much easier to achieve compliance if it is an incremental change to an existing business rather than something to be absorbed from scratch - so regulations also favour established businesses.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  This attitude ignores an awful lot of progress. Or you are just defining regulation to only include the things that favor your argument. For instance, the 40 hour workweek is a regulation in the US. Are hourly employees the rent seekers there? Or the unions and activists that prompted the change?
  - nrb 8y ago
    You’re both right, in that regulation serves the group that most successfully steers it. The notion that more often than not, incumbent corporations are the ones writing the regulations, is not exactly controversial. Given the recent treatment of net neutrality, I don’t hold out much faith in the open web getting a fair shake right now.
    - ddingus 8y ago
      Insightful. One could extrapolate this Internet struggle being closely related to how meaningful ordinary people are represented in government. In many democracies, and in the US today, big money owns government to the point of anything at all aimed at defending the interests of ordinary people seems radical? And expensive? We may find there is a cost per person, few dollars per, or small percentage of time needed to participate in the system or be stripped down, devalued, tracked and every other thing possible to make money.
  - CryptoPunk 8y ago
    Mandatory minimum employment standards aren't progress. Work hours were declining on their own, just as the trend toward a 4 day work week is happening on its own due to fundamental changes in the economic structure. But point granted that not all regulations are a result of rent-seeking. Some are a consequence of misguided common wisdom (e.g. labor regulations, tariffs, restrictions on foreign investment).
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Yeah, right. But you're forgetting few other categories of regulation. Like, protection of health and life - that's something companies don't tend to do on their own; in fact, it usually goes strongly against their interest[0]. Or, protection of environment. Or, protecting people from countless of individually and socially destructive activities that the market will happily engage in if left to its own devices, as evidenced by hundreds of years of history over which those issues were recognized and then regulated. -- [0] - A common theme in recent discussions serves as a great proof: Chinese counterfeits on Amazon. By far, Chinese export goods are a product of an environment free from regulations applying in the Western world - so how come people are so afraid they'll get a Chinese-made toy or baby formula?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Force residential ISPs to permit servers running over IPV6. Then we can have federated protocols that bypass the rent seekers.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "Regulation always benefits the rent-seekers. They have the best means of influencing that regulation in the first place. " The first sentence is blatantly wrong (the word "always"). In what way did environmental regulation benefit the rent seekers or in what way does the GDPR help them? I really hate when people say all regulation is bad if the real problem is that politicians are captured by industry. I grew up up during a time when the river next to my town was green one day, red one day and yellow the next. The only fish in that river were dead. Now 30 years later you can go swimming in the river and there are plenty of fish. Only regulation made this possible.
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Regulations benefit larger companies that can afford compliance departments, legal protection, and lobbyists. Imagine EvilCorp on the one hand, with 50+ employees dedicated to ensuring they stay just barely on the side of the law (while exploiting all the loopholes they can), and TinyShop on the other, which has 10 employees _total_ and has to spend a much larger percentage of available time, energy, and money ensuring they don't get shut down by a regulator. Regulations are important (that your town is healthy again is the main point), but they are also a barrier to entry that favor large, established companies over small startups.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      If you can afford more lawyers you are always at an advantage. Even the “regulations” against theft or harming other people have a bigger impact on people with less money but we still have them. So saying “all regulations are bad” is just not very smart. Without regulations we would be living in a polluted world with child labor and unsafe workplaces. Every piece of food you buy may kill you. The wheels on your car may be falling off at high speed. I agree that there is room for improvement but regulations are a big part of what makes a modern civilized society.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

How many years do we have to be patient whilst being stripped of every personal data point that can be inferred and tracked and bombarded by malicious ad networks? Lack of regulation - of advertising, of honesty, of data, of consumer protections made the internet the cesspit of data abuse it currently is. It stopped being great years ago to my mind.

asark 8y ago
Outlawing all the shitty data collection, or GDPR'ing it to the point so at least it's much harder and more under control, would go a long way toward fixing things, including off the web (medical providers, credit card companies, credit reporting agencies, and so on).

peterwwillis 8y ago

I do agree with the idea that the internet needs more regulation. Yes, it does have it's problems. But I think many solutions are in the making, we just have to move forward. My idea of what made society great is powerful companies being held accountable for their effect on people's lives. I'm willing to endure some drawbacks in order to maintain a better society.

falcrist 8y ago

This depends on what you mean by regulation. If you're talking about net neutrality, then it's wrong to assume regulation will benefit rentseakers. That's a matter of protecting freedom of speech from corporate infringement. If you're talking about regulating social media interactions... that's more complicated. I don't see a good way to stop people from spreading fake news, propaganda, etc without abolishing free speech legislation like the first amendment of the US Constitution. There may be a way to curtail privacy invasions via legislation, but that's highly unlikely to happen since the government itself is collecting data gathered by Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.

CryptoPunk 8y ago
I would much rather a decentralized global meshnet replace traditional telecommunication networks than Net Neutrality be used to manage those networks. I could easily imagine regulations like Net Neutrality inhibiting the development of a global meshnet infrastucture.
- falcrist 8y ago
  I too would like to live in a magical fairy land where all of my dreams came true. Since I don't believe in magic, I'm forced to think in terms of real world implications. A centralized structure with a dedicated backbone will always be more efficient than any kind of mesh net. Additionally, such a structure requires a critical mass of people to operate. Since people don't want to be the infrastructure when they could be a client and have much more bandwidth, that alone sinks the whole deal. If you're not convinced, consider the fact that the incumbent providers will fight such a structure at the legislative level as well as trying to undercut its userbase. Also, net neutrality rules, as established in the US in 2015 were pretty straightforward. They wouldn't inhibit a meshnet, meshnet clients likely do not fall under the definition of ISP, and in fact such rules would probably be necessary to it's effective operation. Remember, they were based on three simple rules: "ISPs cannot block legal content, applications, or services", "ISPs cannot slow down or degrade internet service based on the content, application, or service accessed by users", and "ISPs cannot accept payment to give content, applications, or services more favorable access to users." So back in reality-land, there won't be any meshnet to compete with the current internet for the foreseeable future. If you value freedom of speech and free movement of information online, I strongly suggest you support the rules outlined above. EDIT: It's also worth noting that such a meshnet would solve none of the issues raised by Sir Tim.