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Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has serious issues),

Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has serious issues), and defense (our military seems to be used more for offense, not defense). In general, I find public institutions to be worse than their private alternatives. I prefer UPS/FedEx to the Postal Service and I send my child to a charter school rather than the local public school. Public institutions have shown that they don't need to be good, just good enough. The key is making sure the incentives are right. Google and Facebook are bad because they profit from violating people's privacy, and they've developed a business model based around trading personal information for services. I don't know what the answer is necessarily, but nationalising it just turns them into surveillance networks, which is arguably worse than advertising networks. I think we need to decide what the end goal is and define the incentives needed to get us there, and ideally we'd avoid too much use of government to get there. For Google/Facebook, I doubt advertising will go away, so we need to find a way to make privacy-preserving ads a thing while still allowing advertisers to show relevant ads to customers. Perhaps the Brave model is better than Google's model, or perhaps Google's model is acceptable with transparency and oversight. But having government deeply involved in personally identifiable activity is a bit too Orwellian for me.

claudiawerner 7y ago
> Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has serious issues), and defense (our military seems to be used more for offense, not defense). I accept your argument, but most people against net regulation generally have good opinions on food regulation agencies and the social safety net, so while you seem consistent, I have a feeling a lot of people aren't in this matter. I suspect the case is even greater for European countries, which do food regulation and social safety better than the US in many ways. Either way, it would follow that a government which does those things right could, in principle, regulate the net. I think the case is stronger when one considers that everyone except anarchists accepts the rule of law, and the democratic decision process to arrive to the law. I think it's very reasonable to say that there are government institutions that are run well, and those institutions have greater consequences than the regulation of the net. The real target of my criticism was the fact that people tend to engage in special pleading when it comes to regulating the net, or regulating speech, without much reason for it. Brison has argued that there is no meaningful metaphysical difference between what we class as "speech" and "action".
- nyxtom 7y ago
  Regulating a market is entirely different than regulating a right that preordains the existence of a nation state at all. We have the right to speech coded in law because it is meant to keep the state at bay - it isn’t given to us by the state, it exists apriori.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >We have the right to speech coded in law because it is meant to keep the state at bay - it isn’t given to us by the state, it exists apriori. That's certainly true, but it's worth asking what the justification is for the 1st amendment, i.e. what makes speech so special (after all, we have lively debate on most other amendments, such as the 2nd and in the past the 18th), and to say that freedom of speech exists a priori is just as true of speech as it is any other action, including actions we would count as murder, or theft, etc.
    - nyxtom 7y ago
      The problem with this formulation is that all other laws, all other rights, only exist as a result of the first a-priori assumption: that you are allowed to engage in discussion of any idea. Without that, people self censor and can’t feel free to think. That isn’t to say that there are no regulations on content. Plenty of media has standards and regulations about how it produces content, rating systems for media, and a system of classifying content that is acceptable for different degrees. For instance, I could see better regulation around a rating system for YouTube content to prevent children from stumbling upon poor content. This is still different than banning speech.
  - nyxtom 7y ago
    Speech is special because it is the only thing that a person can do in order to think and formulate a structure about the world outside of direct interaction. If you prevent people from being able to think stupidly then you prevent them from increasing that potential structure to a more articulated form. You can’t force people to think at a certain level, they have to discover this. Besides, who says what formulated structure of reality you come up with is the right one anyways? Seems a bit presumptuous. Action has consequence, this is certain. Thought has consequence only artificially. People have to be allowed to do this. If you don’t allow this, then they can’t think at all

claudiawerner 7y ago

> Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has serious issues), and defense (our military seems to be used more for offense, not defense). I accept your argument, but most people against net regulation generally have good opinions on food regulation agencies and the social safety net, so while you seem consistent, I have a feeling a lot of people aren't in this matter. I suspect the case is even greater for European countries, which do food regulation and social safety better than the US in many ways. Either way, it would follow that a government which does those things right could, in principle, regulate the net. I think the case is stronger when one considers that everyone except anarchists accepts the rule of law, and the democratic decision process to arrive to the law. I think it's very reasonable to say that there are government institutions that are run well, and those institutions have greater consequences than the regulation of the net. The real target of my criticism was the fact that people tend to engage in special pleading when it comes to regulating the net, or regulating speech, without much reason for it. Brison has argued that there is no meaningful metaphysical difference between what we class as "speech" and "action".

nyxtom 7y ago
Regulating a market is entirely different than regulating a right that preordains the existence of a nation state at all. We have the right to speech coded in law because it is meant to keep the state at bay - it isn’t given to us by the state, it exists apriori.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >We have the right to speech coded in law because it is meant to keep the state at bay - it isn’t given to us by the state, it exists apriori. That's certainly true, but it's worth asking what the justification is for the 1st amendment, i.e. what makes speech so special (after all, we have lively debate on most other amendments, such as the 2nd and in the past the 18th), and to say that freedom of speech exists a priori is just as true of speech as it is any other action, including actions we would count as murder, or theft, etc.
  - nyxtom 7y ago
    The problem with this formulation is that all other laws, all other rights, only exist as a result of the first a-priori assumption: that you are allowed to engage in discussion of any idea. Without that, people self censor and can’t feel free to think. That isn’t to say that there are no regulations on content. Plenty of media has standards and regulations about how it produces content, rating systems for media, and a system of classifying content that is acceptable for different degrees. For instance, I could see better regulation around a rating system for YouTube content to prevent children from stumbling upon poor content. This is still different than banning speech.
- nyxtom 7y ago
  Speech is special because it is the only thing that a person can do in order to think and formulate a structure about the world outside of direct interaction. If you prevent people from being able to think stupidly then you prevent them from increasing that potential structure to a more articulated form. You can’t force people to think at a certain level, they have to discover this. Besides, who says what formulated structure of reality you come up with is the right one anyways? Seems a bit presumptuous. Action has consequence, this is certain. Thought has consequence only artificially. People have to be allowed to do this. If you don’t allow this, then they can’t think at all