5 ms·

There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to fo

There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host. It's kinda funny, because it's effectively saying that they want to nationalize tech companies for being successful.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
No that's not true, there is a vast difference between regulation on business practices like this and nationalization.
Gollapalli 5y ago
If you think about it, publicly traded companies are precisely that: nationalized. They exist as partly as government fiat, and partly of managerial control, but not as property. They are, by necessity, of somewhat unknowable, and almost always unaccountable ownership, ownership so diffuse it may be regarded as a generally representative subset of and equivalent to the general public. As such, can any public company be regarded as private? Or treated as private? Their ownership is public, and no individual, or small, knowable, and generally convenable group of people can say: these are our servers. On the contrary, a group of people equivalent to the general public, a subset of them in fact public or pseudo-public institutions (pension funds, university endowments), are the owners. As such, public institutions should very much be treated as public entities. After all, it is the general public which owns them.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  Publicly traded companies have a main goal of making profits for shareholders. This seldom aligns with the public's interest. For many (most?) companies, only the rich have any voting power, whereas the majority of the population just has to follow along. Publicly traded companies are like a democracy where you get more votes the more money you have. The implication here is that your voice/needs are only important if you're rich, and are unimportant if you're average or poor (which kind of explains why the US is the way it is).
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    Yeah, that's what we're all taught. But, the actual incentive structure of "who controls the corporation?" is not shareholders, whose ownership is a) so diffuse as to be unknowable, sans documentation from a stock exchange b) very often held by proxies, with voting rights exercised by those proxies as well [1], c) nearly impossible to coordinate, even when the majority of shares in in private hands, and d) frequently bought back and owned by management itself. Looking at this structure, one can say that the actual control of the corporation is held a) by the people that manage it, b) by the people that capitalize it (not the same thing as stockholdership) and c) by the people that regulate it. c) is very clearly the government. You could make a very good case that b) is indirectly the government as well, since it comes from banking institutions who receive money to lend from the federal government, or rather, the ability to create debt. My point is that, given the diffusion and non-coordination of ownership of a publicly traded company, combined with the effect of regulation, (and if you know anything about regulatory capture), the coordination of regulation with the large interests being regulated, public corporations may be treated, quite reasonably as public. [1] Something to the tune of a fifth of all shares of Fortune 500 companies are held by Blackrock, Fidelity and Vanguard, as a part of how they issue index funds. These financial institutions are the ones who execute the voting rights on those shares, not the people who bought the index funds. See: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-brokers-index-funds-and-the-public-interest/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-bro...
krageon 5y ago
> nationalize tech companies for being successful It's not saying that at all (nationalising companies is a very specific action that doesn't have anything to do with what you described). That said, I don't agree with your premise which appears to be that this is bad. Converting something that is basically a utility already (i.e. everyone uses it and everyone expects to be able to. It's almost unthinkable to have daily life without it) to a nationalised company would be a good thing.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  For the record, I'm actually quite in favor of not leaving necessary infrastructure in the hands of private companies. Although I don't think social media sites are necessary infrastructure personally.
addicted 5y ago
You are right. The US has basically been a communist country since the 70s when it passed the ADA requiring businesses not only to serve the disabled but spend money to make sure disabled people can access their services. There’s basically no difference between the US and the USSR ever since.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Why start there? What about when they illegally seized the property of slaveholders?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  That's actually a good point, except that the ADA only concerns itself with accessibility to content, not the content itself. What we're talking about is forcing businesses to hang up signs for NAMBLA on their bulletin board if they let anyone hang stuff up at all.
cbradford 5y ago
For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Been that way since telephones and railroads. People should understand history, this is not a new challenge and the solutions are already on the books. https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-content-moderation/ https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-con...
- gruez 5y ago
  >For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly?
  - kaibee 5y ago
    > Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly? The first one. Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The first one. Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies. > Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy. I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
      - kaibee 5y ago
        > Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? No, I'm not a lawyer/historian. > According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies. Airlines, cruise ships, and shipping companies, do not own the 'land' (in the georgist sense) that they traverse, so they're just completely irrelevant to the discussion. As for cell phone companies, you may remember that a certain company known as AT&T was famously broken up into dozens of smaller companies (that have since re-congealed). Also those companies are legally required to interoperate with each other, ie: your T-Mobile phone will "roam" on AT&T's network. > I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines". As far as I'm aware, the state, does not forbid anyone from laying another set of phone lines or railroad lines or roads, for the same reason that it doesn't forbid anyone from violating conservation of energy.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Is nationalisation evil in itself? The private sector just doesn't have sufficient incentive to serve the public over their own interest. We've seen this time and time again.
- commieplant 5y ago
  The private sector has its share of issues, but be very careful assuming ownership by the state always serves the public interest.
- axelroze 5y ago
  > Is nationalisation evil in itself? Oh very much it is. Come to the lovely Eastern Europe and see for yourself how good national owned companies are. Full of useless bureaucrats put there to ensure voters so the ruling party can continue ruling. Also in huge debts which are paid by more taxes so the working people pay for the lazy. Unless the human race somehow chains itself to selflessness, nationalization + democracy is a sure way to destroy any organization. Now privately owned is not much better but in theory can be replaced with a competitor. Not so much for a national organization. Source: Living and suffering daily in Eastern Europe.
  - trasz 5y ago
    On the other hand, outside the Eastern Europe many of the state-owned corporations work pretty well, and usually the service goes down the drain after selling them off - see UK railways.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      UK railways are a classic example of privatisation going wrong. They even quietly re-nationalised then recently.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I'm from Eastern Europe too (actually Central Europe - if you know what I mean, you'll know exactly which country), but I've been living in the UK for many years so I have a different perspective. Privatisation of the British railways was a disaster, and the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service is a disaster in the making as well. As far as I'm concerned, when we're talking about well-understood, national-scale services, private sector almost always starves the service out of greed or is outright incompetent.
ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
The government should step in to enforce data standards and data-transfer functionalities so that large tech companies do not have oversized monopoly like influence due to natural network effects.
- happybirds07 5y ago
  Under GDPR you have the right to data portability, i.e. you can demand your data in a commonly used digital format to take it to another provider.
  - ersii 5y ago
    Which usually, at least in Sweden means you'll get your data dump in a PDF. Not a joke, unfortunally.
    - happybirds07 5y ago
      It should be "structured, commonly-used and machine readable", and I'm not sure PDF qualifies for that. I'd file a complaint with IMY. In any case, I've never received anything other than json, xml and csv. Jag är inte svenska, though.
sinyug 5y ago
> There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host. I am part of that group. I am willing to accept a free-for-all till a company reaches a certain size as far as its user-or-customer base is concerned: something between the population of New Zealand and that of Australia. Beyond that it should be answerable to the people. I also think supranational corporations should either be banned or very tightly regulated.
pessimizer 5y ago
Do you think that the phone company should be allowed to ban women from using their lines?
- gruez 5y ago
  Women, maybe not, because they're not Bad People. However, the "contingent" that GP was talking about are totally fine with banning Bad People.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

No that's not true, there is a vast difference between regulation on business practices like this and nationalization.

Gollapalli 5y ago

If you think about it, publicly traded companies are precisely that: nationalized. They exist as partly as government fiat, and partly of managerial control, but not as property. They are, by necessity, of somewhat unknowable, and almost always unaccountable ownership, ownership so diffuse it may be regarded as a generally representative subset of and equivalent to the general public. As such, can any public company be regarded as private? Or treated as private? Their ownership is public, and no individual, or small, knowable, and generally convenable group of people can say: these are our servers. On the contrary, a group of people equivalent to the general public, a subset of them in fact public or pseudo-public institutions (pension funds, university endowments), are the owners. As such, public institutions should very much be treated as public entities. After all, it is the general public which owns them.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Publicly traded companies have a main goal of making profits for shareholders. This seldom aligns with the public's interest. For many (most?) companies, only the rich have any voting power, whereas the majority of the population just has to follow along. Publicly traded companies are like a democracy where you get more votes the more money you have. The implication here is that your voice/needs are only important if you're rich, and are unimportant if you're average or poor (which kind of explains why the US is the way it is).
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  Yeah, that's what we're all taught. But, the actual incentive structure of "who controls the corporation?" is not shareholders, whose ownership is a) so diffuse as to be unknowable, sans documentation from a stock exchange b) very often held by proxies, with voting rights exercised by those proxies as well [1], c) nearly impossible to coordinate, even when the majority of shares in in private hands, and d) frequently bought back and owned by management itself. Looking at this structure, one can say that the actual control of the corporation is held a) by the people that manage it, b) by the people that capitalize it (not the same thing as stockholdership) and c) by the people that regulate it. c) is very clearly the government. You could make a very good case that b) is indirectly the government as well, since it comes from banking institutions who receive money to lend from the federal government, or rather, the ability to create debt. My point is that, given the diffusion and non-coordination of ownership of a publicly traded company, combined with the effect of regulation, (and if you know anything about regulatory capture), the coordination of regulation with the large interests being regulated, public corporations may be treated, quite reasonably as public. [1] Something to the tune of a fifth of all shares of Fortune 500 companies are held by Blackrock, Fidelity and Vanguard, as a part of how they issue index funds. These financial institutions are the ones who execute the voting rights on those shares, not the people who bought the index funds. See: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-brokers-index-funds-and-the-public-interest/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/the-new-power-bro...

krageon 5y ago

> nationalize tech companies for being successful It's not saying that at all (nationalising companies is a very specific action that doesn't have anything to do with what you described). That said, I don't agree with your premise which appears to be that this is bad. Converting something that is basically a utility already (i.e. everyone uses it and everyone expects to be able to. It's almost unthinkable to have daily life without it) to a nationalised company would be a good thing.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
For the record, I'm actually quite in favor of not leaving necessary infrastructure in the hands of private companies. Although I don't think social media sites are necessary infrastructure personally.

addicted 5y ago

You are right. The US has basically been a communist country since the 70s when it passed the ADA requiring businesses not only to serve the disabled but spend money to make sure disabled people can access their services. There’s basically no difference between the US and the USSR ever since.

pessimizer 5y ago
Why start there? What about when they illegally seized the property of slaveholders?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
That's actually a good point, except that the ADA only concerns itself with accessibility to content, not the content itself. What we're talking about is forcing businesses to hang up signs for NAMBLA on their bulletin board if they let anyone hang stuff up at all.

cbradford 5y ago

For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Been that way since telephones and railroads. People should understand history, this is not a new challenge and the solutions are already on the books. https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-content-moderation/ https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-con...

gruez 5y ago
>For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly?
- kaibee 5y ago
  > Was that because they got big, or was it because they were granted a government monopoly? The first one. Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The first one. Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies. > Natural monopolies exist. This libertarian talking point of "there wouldn't be monopolies without government intervention" is lunacy. I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines".
    - kaibee 5y ago
      > Can you provide the legislative history that supports this? No, I'm not a lawyer/historian. > According to wikipedia airlines, cell phone companies, cruise ships, and shipping companies operate as common carriers, even though none of them are controlled by monopolies. Airlines, cruise ships, and shipping companies, do not own the 'land' (in the georgist sense) that they traverse, so they're just completely irrelevant to the discussion. As for cell phone companies, you may remember that a certain company known as AT&T was famously broken up into dozens of smaller companies (that have since re-congealed). Also those companies are legally required to interoperate with each other, ie: your T-Mobile phone will "roam" on AT&T's network. > I'm not a libertarian, but I can still see the difference between "it would be really expensive to lay another set of phone lines" and "the state forbids you from laying another set of phone lines". As far as I'm aware, the state, does not forbid anyone from laying another set of phone lines or railroad lines or roads, for the same reason that it doesn't forbid anyone from violating conservation of energy.

selfhoster11 5y ago

Is nationalisation evil in itself? The private sector just doesn't have sufficient incentive to serve the public over their own interest. We've seen this time and time again.

commieplant 5y ago
The private sector has its share of issues, but be very careful assuming ownership by the state always serves the public interest.
axelroze 5y ago
> Is nationalisation evil in itself? Oh very much it is. Come to the lovely Eastern Europe and see for yourself how good national owned companies are. Full of useless bureaucrats put there to ensure voters so the ruling party can continue ruling. Also in huge debts which are paid by more taxes so the working people pay for the lazy. Unless the human race somehow chains itself to selflessness, nationalization + democracy is a sure way to destroy any organization. Now privately owned is not much better but in theory can be replaced with a competitor. Not so much for a national organization. Source: Living and suffering daily in Eastern Europe.
- trasz 5y ago
  On the other hand, outside the Eastern Europe many of the state-owned corporations work pretty well, and usually the service goes down the drain after selling them off - see UK railways.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    UK railways are a classic example of privatisation going wrong. They even quietly re-nationalised then recently.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I'm from Eastern Europe too (actually Central Europe - if you know what I mean, you'll know exactly which country), but I've been living in the UK for many years so I have a different perspective. Privatisation of the British railways was a disaster, and the creeping privatisation of the National Health Service is a disaster in the making as well. As far as I'm concerned, when we're talking about well-understood, national-scale services, private sector almost always starves the service out of greed or is outright incompetent.

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

The government should step in to enforce data standards and data-transfer functionalities so that large tech companies do not have oversized monopoly like influence due to natural network effects.

happybirds07 5y ago
Under GDPR you have the right to data portability, i.e. you can demand your data in a commonly used digital format to take it to another provider.
- ersii 5y ago
  Which usually, at least in Sweden means you'll get your data dump in a PDF. Not a joke, unfortunally.
  - happybirds07 5y ago
    It should be "structured, commonly-used and machine readable", and I'm not sure PDF qualifies for that. I'd file a complaint with IMY. In any case, I've never received anything other than json, xml and csv. Jag är inte svenska, though.

sinyug 5y ago

> There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host. I am part of that group. I am willing to accept a free-for-all till a company reaches a certain size as far as its user-or-customer base is concerned: something between the population of New Zealand and that of Australia. Beyond that it should be answerable to the people. I also think supranational corporations should either be banned or very tightly regulated.

pessimizer 5y ago

Do you think that the phone company should be allowed to ban women from using their lines?

gruez 5y ago
Women, maybe not, because they're not Bad People. However, the "contingent" that GP was talking about are totally fine with banning Bad People.