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Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and n

Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing moats at worst. But we have to try. As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in today. So far tech has relied on creative destruction as compute power grew and form factors shrunk rapidly, leading to ever increasing waves of adoption, and "software eating the world". However at this point most people have a smartphone in their pocket and the attention economy is maxed out. A lot of future innovation will be capital (and data) intensive, and with adoption already saturated, the natural power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon will not be naturally disrupted the way PCs disrupted mainframes or the web disrupted Windows hegemony. Of course there's nothing worse than bad regulation, and historically tech regulation has been a minefield due to the general cluelessness of congress. The good news is that this will improve with turnover and younger staffers helping build a broader understanding of the issues. Hopefully we can start to pivot away from distractions like section 230 and asking corporations to be arbiters of truth, and instead focus on anti-trust and data privacy angles, with specific focus on size and power.

dcow 5y ago
Why do we have to regulate? It seems an alternate yet much more difficult path would be that we could grow a societal backbone and make certain destructive practices illegal instead of trying to figure out a central list of allowed practices and licenses and policies and permits and bureaucracy etc. For example, it’s pretty clear that internet scale data markets and user attention platforms harm the individual. Why is step one always to reach for a regulatory solution instead of a slightly more radical “outlaw such machines and then figure things out from there” approach? A naive example might be a law stating: “It is illegal to profit from the sale of advertisements to your own users.” In the same vein, why cant we outlaw DRM because it’s bad for users and tell movie studios we care more about users health and well being than we do about your “piracy” problem?
- simonh 5y ago
  Outlaw what specifically though? You're falling into the same trap OP is calling out, that your extremely vague hand wavey proposed laws would only ban "the bad guys".
  - dcow 5y ago
    I list two examples (as does Doctorow) of things that are pretty clearly bad for users: 1. attention marketplaces, 2: DRM. I am falling for no such trap I really don’t understand your angle there. My suggested solution to 1 is rather than try to regulate Facebook, which I agree is hand wavey, just ban the business model altogether because it demonstrably breeds machines and software that harm users. The “good guy” user attention businesses are collateral, yes, but this is a move to protect us not our ad marketplaces and the hypothesis is that the incentives just aren't aligned for there to exist a “good guy” ad platform. (If one exists please show me so I can understand the extent of any collateral harm I might be advocating.) I like this solution because it’s principled and specifically not hand wavey. The collateral seems worth it IMO. Same with DRM.
    - simonh 5y ago
      what's an attention marketplace? facebook, twitter, reddit, ok, all gone. But then advertising is attention and a marketplace, so does that mean banning all online or app based advertising? Amazon has attention and it's a marketplace, so does Etsy.
      - dcow 5y ago
        No you don’t ban by name like that. A start might be to say: it is illegal both run a content platform and also to profit from the sale of targeted ads on your platform. Or simply but more radically: you cannot use user data collected in the operation of a software platform in order to target advertisements to your users. The goal would be to ban the bad incentives by eliminating the ability to profit. Yes that kills the profit. That’s the point. I don't think anybody is at war with e.g. a news site that runs an integrated ad on their headline or landing page or even a search engine that inserts its own contextual ads. We’re talking about dismantling the user content advertising platforms where the incentive becomes maximizing the time users spend on the platform.
livueta 5y ago
> As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. I don't think this is exactly true. There have been many words written about the effectiveness of technological countermeasures vs. regulation, but I think the proof is in the pudding: Facebook wouldn't go nuclear against Unfollow Everything if it didn't work (i.e. tilt the balance of power back towards the end-user). Google wouldn't be trying the whole manifest v3 shenanigans if they weren't concerned about content blockers. But here, as Doctorow points out, _regulation_ stands in the way of these effective technological countermeasures. I think that the apparent slowdown of technological disruption and creative destruction you reference has at least some grounding in the increasing use and chilling effect of applying IP law against adversarial interop, rather than some inherent limit of attention or hardware. So, I agree with the parent in bring surprised by the combo of Doctorow's insightful analysis around the Unfollow Everything debacle and a call for additional regulation via existing agencies. I'm not as hopeful as you that younger staffers will bring some kind of renaissance of enlightened regulation - consider how popular the "let's make Facebook ban the nazis" take appears to be across generational divides. To sum up, I'm afraid that anything we pass now is going to be a lot closer to the DMCA, in terms of how it protects corporate interests over individual rights, than the sort of utopian wishlist that is usually quoted as an ideal. On a positive note: I've recently been interested by some of the electoral successes of the Czech Pirate Party (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party) and wonder if the way forward for internet rights is to tie the idea to a broader campaign for transparent, effective, and highly democratic governance.

dcow 5y ago

Why do we have to regulate? It seems an alternate yet much more difficult path would be that we could grow a societal backbone and make certain destructive practices illegal instead of trying to figure out a central list of allowed practices and licenses and policies and permits and bureaucracy etc. For example, it’s pretty clear that internet scale data markets and user attention platforms harm the individual. Why is step one always to reach for a regulatory solution instead of a slightly more radical “outlaw such machines and then figure things out from there” approach? A naive example might be a law stating: “It is illegal to profit from the sale of advertisements to your own users.” In the same vein, why cant we outlaw DRM because it’s bad for users and tell movie studios we care more about users health and well being than we do about your “piracy” problem?

simonh 5y ago
Outlaw what specifically though? You're falling into the same trap OP is calling out, that your extremely vague hand wavey proposed laws would only ban "the bad guys".
- dcow 5y ago
  I list two examples (as does Doctorow) of things that are pretty clearly bad for users: 1. attention marketplaces, 2: DRM. I am falling for no such trap I really don’t understand your angle there. My suggested solution to 1 is rather than try to regulate Facebook, which I agree is hand wavey, just ban the business model altogether because it demonstrably breeds machines and software that harm users. The “good guy” user attention businesses are collateral, yes, but this is a move to protect us not our ad marketplaces and the hypothesis is that the incentives just aren't aligned for there to exist a “good guy” ad platform. (If one exists please show me so I can understand the extent of any collateral harm I might be advocating.) I like this solution because it’s principled and specifically not hand wavey. The collateral seems worth it IMO. Same with DRM.
  - simonh 5y ago
    what's an attention marketplace? facebook, twitter, reddit, ok, all gone. But then advertising is attention and a marketplace, so does that mean banning all online or app based advertising? Amazon has attention and it's a marketplace, so does Etsy.
    - dcow 5y ago
      No you don’t ban by name like that. A start might be to say: it is illegal both run a content platform and also to profit from the sale of targeted ads on your platform. Or simply but more radically: you cannot use user data collected in the operation of a software platform in order to target advertisements to your users. The goal would be to ban the bad incentives by eliminating the ability to profit. Yes that kills the profit. That’s the point. I don't think anybody is at war with e.g. a news site that runs an integrated ad on their headline or landing page or even a search engine that inserts its own contextual ads. We’re talking about dismantling the user content advertising platforms where the incentive becomes maximizing the time users spend on the platform.

livueta 5y ago

> As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. I don't think this is exactly true. There have been many words written about the effectiveness of technological countermeasures vs. regulation, but I think the proof is in the pudding: Facebook wouldn't go nuclear against Unfollow Everything if it didn't work (i.e. tilt the balance of power back towards the end-user). Google wouldn't be trying the whole manifest v3 shenanigans if they weren't concerned about content blockers. But here, as Doctorow points out, _regulation_ stands in the way of these effective technological countermeasures. I think that the apparent slowdown of technological disruption and creative destruction you reference has at least some grounding in the increasing use and chilling effect of applying IP law against adversarial interop, rather than some inherent limit of attention or hardware. So, I agree with the parent in bring surprised by the combo of Doctorow's insightful analysis around the Unfollow Everything debacle and a call for additional regulation via existing agencies. I'm not as hopeful as you that younger staffers will bring some kind of renaissance of enlightened regulation - consider how popular the "let's make Facebook ban the nazis" take appears to be across generational divides. To sum up, I'm afraid that anything we pass now is going to be a lot closer to the DMCA, in terms of how it protects corporate interests over individual rights, than the sort of utopian wishlist that is usually quoted as an ideal. On a positive note: I've recently been interested by some of the electoral successes of the Czech Pirate Party (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party) and wonder if the way forward for internet rights is to tie the idea to a broader campaign for transparent, effective, and highly democratic governance.