8 ms·

What about privacy regulation? Why is that not also feasible?

by hnhg 7y ago

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
There are a lot of things that make that hard. The first is how many industries are against it -- Google's not the half of it. Google would still make a mint if all they could do was show ads for car insurance when people search for car insurance and so on. But meaningful privacy regulation would effectively prohibit the likes of Equifax, and then you would get huge pushback from the finance industry and realtors. Then there's the fact that a lot of politically powerful government surveillance agencies want all your stuff to be in The Cloud instead of on your own device where they can't read it, so they'd fight it too. And the biggest problem is that you need the rules to be good rules that are at the same time effective without destroying small entities and entrenching the incumbents, which is really hard and there is a high probability they'll screw it up (especially with the aforementioned constraints), but doing it wrong can easily be worse than doing nothing. Then you don't get privacy but you destroy the upstart alternatives that might have made it possible for the people who most need it, or could have presented a challenge to the incumbents given more time.
- debatem1 7y ago
  Equifax may not be a great example here, since Congress already stomped on it explicitly because it was concerned about the privacy implications of digitizing the information they held. That fear led to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which substantially curtailed many of Equifax's most egregious business practices.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    The Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed in 1970, and credit reporting agencies continue to collect personal data on everybody they can, without their consent, and provide it to just about anyone who pays them to.
    - debatem1 7y ago
      Yep. The difference is in what they don't do anymore. Once upon a time they literally collected rumors and sold them, and took great pains to ensure that you couldn't see what information had been collected or sold about you or to whom. Those practices were curtailed by Congress; given that, it seems foolish to assert that current practices, hated as they are by the electorate, might not also be curtailed through legislative action.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > Those practices were curtailed by Congress; given that, it seems foolish to assert that current practices, hated as they are by the electorate, might not also be curtailed through legislative action. The problem is you don't just need some law to be passed, it also has to be a good law, which is the really hard part. And it's a lot easier for Equifax than tech because if Equifax would dry up and blow away it would only make the world better. Their entire business is doing the thing nobody should be doing at all. No part of what they do actually needs to be saved. The problem with Google is that they also make a search engine. We need search engines and email providers and video hosts to continue to exist even if their funding source changes. So it's no help to pass a law that just makes them impossible, or makes it so that nobody can do it unless they're a multibillion dollar corporation. That makes it worse rather than better, because competition is the greatest practical method of thwarting corporate misbehavior. Laws alone can't do it -- see also pre-breakup AT&T, post-breakup AT&T and Comcast, various failed attempts at totalitarian communism, etc. Especially if you make rules that cause the incumbents to get so big and entrenched that it becomes inevitable that they capture the regulators. The best thing laws can do is to ensure that competition is thriving. But most of them in practice do the opposite.
        debatem1 7y ago
        So, I note you've gone from "it can't be done" to "it can't be done well". And yet, Equifax is unquestionably less abusive than it once was. It still exists and still makes money. It's clear that legislative action is both possible (contrary to your point in your first post) and survivable (which you imply isn't possible in the more recent post). The odds that regulatory action could be taken which left intact much of the good that Google does while curtailing its most egregious abuses seem correspondingly good to me. Regarding competitive markets being the antidote to bad behavior, that's simply counterfactual. Examples from Uber to Boeing to Wells Fargo to Foxconn to Equifax itself prove that simply because you have strong, viable competitors does not mean that you have to treat anyone or anything well. And the truth is that many markets are naturally winner-take-all. In the absence of regulatory releveling, there is no natural market force which prevents behemoths from emerging and creating the regulatory capture you fear. The conclusion to draw from that is that regulatory action must be taken before capture is possible, and therefore potentially before actual abuse. Such is the position we are broadly in with giants like Amazon.

What about privacy regulation? Why is that not also feasible?

by hnhg 7y ago

What about privacy regulation? Why is that not also feasible?

There are a lot of things that make that hard. The first is how many industries are against it -- Google's not the half of it. Google would still make a mint if all they could do was show ads for car insurance when people search for car insurance and so on. But meaningful privacy regulation would effectively prohibit the likes of Equifax, and then you would get huge pushback from the finance industry and realtors. Then there's the fact that a lot of politically powerful government surveillance agencies want all your stuff to be in The Cloud instead of on your own device where they can't read it, so they'd fight it too. And the biggest problem is that you need the rules to be good rules that are at the same time effective without destroying small entities and entrenching the incumbents, which is really hard and there is a high probability they'll screw it up (especially with the aforementioned constraints), but doing it wrong can easily be worse than doing nothing. Then you don't get privacy but you destroy the upstart alternatives that might have made it possible for the people who most need it, or could have presented a challenge to the incumbents given more time.

debatem1 7y ago
Equifax may not be a great example here, since Congress already stomped on it explicitly because it was concerned about the privacy implications of digitizing the information they held. That fear led to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which substantially curtailed many of Equifax's most egregious business practices.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed in 1970, and credit reporting agencies continue to collect personal data on everybody they can, without their consent, and provide it to just about anyone who pays them to.
  - debatem1 7y ago
    Yep. The difference is in what they don't do anymore. Once upon a time they literally collected rumors and sold them, and took great pains to ensure that you couldn't see what information had been collected or sold about you or to whom. Those practices were curtailed by Congress; given that, it seems foolish to assert that current practices, hated as they are by the electorate, might not also be curtailed through legislative action.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > Those practices were curtailed by Congress; given that, it seems foolish to assert that current practices, hated as they are by the electorate, might not also be curtailed through legislative action. The problem is you don't just need some law to be passed, it also has to be a good law, which is the really hard part. And it's a lot easier for Equifax than tech because if Equifax would dry up and blow away it would only make the world better. Their entire business is doing the thing nobody should be doing at all. No part of what they do actually needs to be saved. The problem with Google is that they also make a search engine. We need search engines and email providers and video hosts to continue to exist even if their funding source changes. So it's no help to pass a law that just makes them impossible, or makes it so that nobody can do it unless they're a multibillion dollar corporation. That makes it worse rather than better, because competition is the greatest practical method of thwarting corporate misbehavior. Laws alone can't do it -- see also pre-breakup AT&T, post-breakup AT&T and Comcast, various failed attempts at totalitarian communism, etc. Especially if you make rules that cause the incumbents to get so big and entrenched that it becomes inevitable that they capture the regulators. The best thing laws can do is to ensure that competition is thriving. But most of them in practice do the opposite.
      - debatem1 7y ago
        So, I note you've gone from "it can't be done" to "it can't be done well". And yet, Equifax is unquestionably less abusive than it once was. It still exists and still makes money. It's clear that legislative action is both possible (contrary to your point in your first post) and survivable (which you imply isn't possible in the more recent post). The odds that regulatory action could be taken which left intact much of the good that Google does while curtailing its most egregious abuses seem correspondingly good to me. Regarding competitive markets being the antidote to bad behavior, that's simply counterfactual. Examples from Uber to Boeing to Wells Fargo to Foxconn to Equifax itself prove that simply because you have strong, viable competitors does not mean that you have to treat anyone or anything well. And the truth is that many markets are naturally winner-take-all. In the absence of regulatory releveling, there is no natural market force which prevents behemoths from emerging and creating the regulatory capture you fear. The conclusion to draw from that is that regulatory action must be taken before capture is possible, and therefore potentially before actual abuse. Such is the position we are broadly in with giants like Amazon.