7 ms·

That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard f

That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate. I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.

class4behavior 6y ago
They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.
- dantheman 6y ago
  I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.
  - pedrosbmartins 6y ago
    I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources
    - thephyber 6y ago
      Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.
      - Nasrudith 6y ago
        It is a matter of "less dysfunctional with regulation" as opposed to not being dysfunctional with regulation unfortunately. There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them". Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.
        bhupy 6y ago
        I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes. What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The biggest improvement they could make would be to create a class of accounts intended to never have a large enough account balance to be capable of incurring severe losses, and then waive most of the regulations for those accounts. Then you use the regulated accounts for your retirement savings, but keep a hundred bucks in an unregulated one to use for buying stuff on the internet, which could then be completely anonymous and have minimal transaction fees.
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a dangerous mindset.
kyran_adept 6y ago
Piling over your comment regarding YouTube - what is worse? Google owning YouTube and the search engine plus everything else or the fact that YouTube has probably more than 30-40% of the market? One is a problem of monopoly, the second is a problem of choice. I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment. For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.
ysavir 6y ago
> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate. You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical. Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market. I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU. I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.
- DabbyDabberson 6y ago
  It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers would negatively affect the total stock market in aggregate, by making business less efficient overall. (scale == efficiency). Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality always takes it toll however much they insist that it isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly what they were warned about happening.
- gabrielfv 6y ago
  You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english. I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.
thephyber 6y ago
So much this. There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?" I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.
__s 6y ago
Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4
mdoms 6y ago
Google does not have an absolute right to operate at their current scale. If legislation around content moderation or consumer protection made their business untenable at its current scale then so be it. Their business will have to change to adapt to the society in which it is a participant.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I see that talking point everywhere about "too much scale/too big" but never have I heard an answer as to how the hell scale can be regulated let alone an answer that shows even a minutae of understanding let alone implementability. Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.
  - anon98356 6y ago
    To potentially reinterpret the GP, it isn't that we need to regulate scale, but that scale doesn't excuse you from being regulated. Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale. If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> how can people with no concept of technology legislate it Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did. And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for. Big tech is a runaway train.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Of course, they do know the answer to those questions but their legal team told them to keep their mouths shut.

class4behavior 6y ago

They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.

dantheman 6y ago
I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.
- pedrosbmartins 6y ago
  I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      It is a matter of "less dysfunctional with regulation" as opposed to not being dysfunctional with regulation unfortunately. There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them". Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.
      - bhupy 6y ago
        I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes. What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The biggest improvement they could make would be to create a class of accounts intended to never have a large enough account balance to be capable of incurring severe losses, and then waive most of the regulations for those accounts. Then you use the regulated accounts for your retirement savings, but keep a hundred bucks in an unregulated one to use for buying stuff on the internet, which could then be completely anonymous and have minimal transaction fees.
rpastuszak 6y ago
This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a dangerous mindset.

kyran_adept 6y ago

Piling over your comment regarding YouTube - what is worse? Google owning YouTube and the search engine plus everything else or the fact that YouTube has probably more than 30-40% of the market? One is a problem of monopoly, the second is a problem of choice. I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment. For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.

ysavir 6y ago

> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate. You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical. Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market. I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU. I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.

DabbyDabberson 6y ago
It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers would negatively affect the total stock market in aggregate, by making business less efficient overall. (scale == efficiency). Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality always takes it toll however much they insist that it isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly what they were warned about happening.
gabrielfv 6y ago
You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english. I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

thephyber 6y ago

So much this. There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?" I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.

__s 6y ago

Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

mdoms 6y ago

Google does not have an absolute right to operate at their current scale. If legislation around content moderation or consumer protection made their business untenable at its current scale then so be it. Their business will have to change to adapt to the society in which it is a participant.

Nasrudith 6y ago
I see that talking point everywhere about "too much scale/too big" but never have I heard an answer as to how the hell scale can be regulated let alone an answer that shows even a minutae of understanding let alone implementability. Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.
- anon98356 6y ago
  To potentially reinterpret the GP, it isn't that we need to regulate scale, but that scale doesn't excuse you from being regulated. Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale. If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

> how can people with no concept of technology legislate it Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did. And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for. Big tech is a runaway train.

saagarjha 6y ago
Of course, they do know the answer to those questions but their legal team told them to keep their mouths shut.