18 ms·

IMO, if your market share is bigger than ${some number}, you shouldn't be able to deny service without a documented reason, it should have some sort of time-to-

IMO, if your market share is bigger than ${some number}, you shouldn't be able to deny service without a documented reason, it should have some sort of time-to-live (i.e 1 year), and there should be an appeals process. In a functioning marketplace, companies would be naturally incentivized to care about customers but that stops working in uncompetitive industries (which currently describes most of the economy).

shadowgovt 5y ago
This rule would functionally kill small Internet service provision and build the biggest moat around the incumbent providers that has ever been handed to them. ... which may, indeed, be the right solution.
- mysecretaccount 5y ago
  As long as ${some number} is large enough it will not impact "small ISP" at all.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's the thing about being an Internet startup... You never know when you're going to explode and suddenly jump from a ten-thousand-user service to a milliion-user service. So supporting this would require a company to take all manner of new precautions that companies currently don't (circuit-breaker on the new account creation system? But then your growth stalls and your potential customers go to a competitor instead, and you don't blow up into a YouTube or a Twitter like YouTube and Twitter did).
    - pdpi 5y ago
      Or the simpler solution: Once your revenue goes over the threshold, you have a period of 6/12 months to go into compliance, or something similar.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      If you're suddenly a million-user service, you should easily have enough revenue to implement the regulations during a grace period.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Assuming you have a revenue model. What was Twitter's revenue model when they had their first million users?
    - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
      Grace period - A grace period is a period immediately after the deadline for an obligation during which a late fee, or other action that would have been taken as a result of failing to meet the deadline, is waived provided that the obligation is satisfied during the grace period. In other words, it is a length of time during which rules or penalties are waived or deferred. Grace periods can range from a number of minutes to a number of days or longer, and can apply in situations including arrival at a job, paying a bill, or meeting a government or legal requirement. In law, a grace period is a time period during which a particular rule exceptionally does not apply, or only partially applies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_period
- samhw 5y ago
  Do you mean because those 'small Internet service providers' would be included in his 'larger than $MARKET_SHARE' group, or because it would mean no one was kicked out of the incumbent services and therefore there would be fewer new customers available?
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I mean because a company tends to explode from "smaller than $MARKET_SHARE" to "larger than $MARKET_SHARE" in a discontinuous fashion. So since a company can't really predict when it will happen, every company providing service would need to prep from the ground up to provide the described level of relatively non-automated high-touch support this proposal describes. It'd raise the cost to build a startup. ... not to imply it's a bad idea; there's no golden rule that says an ecosystem of millions of competing companies is always a superior alternative to a few well-regulated players. It's just important to note the hidden costs.
    - matsemann 5y ago
      Same argument used against gdpr all the time, and proven false all the time. It's easy to be small and compliant.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        You can comply with GDPR by refraining from collecting data. You can't provide an online service while refraining from providing an online service.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I think this limitation is an artifact of the fact that the proposal is an idea being tossed out on social media. A real law would have some sort of grace period. That grace period could be chosen arbitrarily, it should be set such that any well-run company would have time to respond.
    - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
      If you have automated rule enforcement, then you already have a formal specification of your rules, and informing the user of what rule they have broken should be trivial. If you have humans doing the bans manually, then you already have a human in the loop.
klyrs 5y ago
What if spammers outnumber honest users 10:1? I don't think there's a simple solution to any of this.
- ouid 5y ago
  "reason: user was spam"
  - samhw 5y ago
    Soon to become a very popular reason ;)
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Not unless you provide evidence that you are in fact a real person.
      - samhw 5y ago
        It won't be popular [/be used against you] unless you provide evidence you're a real person? I think that's a slightly Freudian slip right there.
- coryrc 5y ago
  They could validate their users first. Oh no! Then they can't fake growth.
goldfeld 5y ago
Phew! And here I was thinking the problem would lie in using it! mercifully big tech is saved.
fourseventy 5y ago
I disagree, I think the free market will take care of this on its own.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  "Free market" is why our planet is dying, so no, I don't think so. Some regulation is needed.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Just like it took care of adding plastics and PFAS to the ocean, yea? Sometimes regulation is needed
  - sircastor 5y ago
    In theory, if this was considered a big enough problem, yes - the market would resolve this. And by "big enough problem" we have to remember that market-driven economies respond to market demand forces. Plastic in the ocean is definitely a huge problem, but it's not a market problem - not yet. When consumers are willing to pay to get plastics out of the ocean, hundreds of companies will appear eager to solve the problem. There's a comment above (@pdpi: "At what timescale?") that identifies the issue at hand. In this case (and in a lot of cases) we need regulation because market demand to solve this isn't fast enough (or may never exist)
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      So when does it become a market problem? Before or after we lose biodiversity on the planet?
- pdpi 5y ago
  At what timescale? How many more years of recurring "got randomly blocked from the App Store/Play Store/Facebook Ads/whatever other mission-critical service" posts on Hacker News do we need before the market corrects itself?
- wolverine876 5y ago
jaredklewis 5y ago
Who decides which “markets” a company is in and measures their market share in those markets? How is market share measured? Is Tinder a dating service or social media company? If Facebook starts offering a dating feature in app and becomes the biggest player in the dating space, which market is facebook in? Both? If both, does all of facebook's market cap/DAU/whatever metric we settle on to measure market share get fully applied to both markets or split in some way? Basically, I think implementing "if $market_share > n" is not a trivial problem that will be litigated to death. The companies with the best lawyers will win.
- foepys 5y ago
  Let's not pretend like this is an impossible task. Some EU countries already have laws that base regulations on company size and number of customers.
  - jaredklewis 5y ago
    Sure, but market share and company size are two fundamentally different problems. Measuring the size of a company is a lot easier: you pick some metric (employees, revenue, profit, customers, etc...) and apply it to all companies. Measuring market share requires that you categorize all companies into "markets," which think is pretty subjective. Is Jet Brains an IDE company? A software company? How about Apple? If multiple, are metrics split? Whatever rules you pick, they're going to be biased towards some companies (including some big ones not popular on HN) and against other companies (including some companies HN loves).
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  Humans
  - jaredklewis 5y ago
    Well yes, lawyers are humans, but that doesn't help us.
    - 5y ago
thomastjeffery 5y ago
You're almost there. Companies that aren't competitive should be broken up.
- lolinder 5y ago
  What would it mean to break up Tinder? How do you partition a company that only has one product?
  - butokai 5y ago
    Not sure what you mean by this, but Tinder's parent company controls several well known dating services (OkCupid, Meetic, Twoo and many more)
    - lolinder 5y ago
      Ah, fair enough. I was thinking OP meant Tinder specifically, but at the very least OkCupid could be split out.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Partition it geographically. If they want to compete in certain cities/regions/countries where the user base exceeds a certain number, they must spin off subsidiaries for that area. I can't imagine people looking for a date on the other end of the country outside of very specific circumstances.
    - Majestic121 5y ago
      It's pretty common to use Tinder for hook ups during holidays
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        This is a specialised use case, just as I mentioned. Most people aren't on holiday at any given time.
    - 5y ago
antiterra 5y ago
Unfortunately there are scenarios where providing a documented reason or appeal is a vulnerability, illegal or both. A too-clear disclosure gives bad actors information on how to circumvent controls around safety, abuse, and fraud. If the reason an account is deleted includes some sort of KYC/Money Laundering issue, OFAC style sanction or child porn, then there can be legal obligation, with severe penalty, to both report and not tip off the user.
- ball_of_lint 5y ago
  Although that might be applicable to businesses that let people deal with money, why would any of those be an issue for Tinder?
- coryrc 5y ago
  It would be legal if there was a law making it so, just as GP suggested. This is trivially solvable if creating an account required an in-person verification, like when you go into a bank to open an account. Since it's not mandatory, anybody who does so is beaten by anyone who doesn't (worse is better). So we should make it mandatory.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  Any and all of these possibilities (vulnerability, illegal, or both) must be legalized or otherwise reframed as a cost of doing business. Every human deserves to be informed, whoever they are, regardless of status, wherever they are in the world. That we've allowed blackbox proceedings to take over these small quadrants of human society is a societal failure. The burden to secure such systems shall always fall upon the makers of those systems. Let me be very clear that any excuse made under the veil of security including the enshrining of such in our books of law is incompatible with a society that respects the dignity to live free. It is a vicious abuse of power by those with knowledge over those robbed of it.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    A good compromise might be to require explanations or shadow bans to be revealed say, 30 days after the action, in the case of bans because of suspected crimes. In the case of CP or terrorism this gives reasonable time for the Feds to find and arrest you and your conspirators. This is how the Patriot Act worked with publishing warrants, for better or worse.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
Inverted totalitarianism symptoms may include shutting an individual out of a large portion of their life for no real reason, for a misunderstanding, or for daring to challenge corporate power. Often this occurs with minimal or no human intervention, and lack of due process becomes normalized. Welcome to Dystopian Hell, population: everyone not digitally cancelled.
- samhw 5y ago
  Other symptoms include: a remarkable tendency of people to say "oh, that's OK, they're just coming for the conservatives".
  - errcorrectcode 5y ago
    There's something to that, and I skew towards democratic socialist. Doing nothing because it appears to target a perceived "foe" attribute or other demonstrates a lack of integrity in the bystander. Fair is fair, while selective impact games build resentment. One love and so on. We have to get past putting people in boxes for arbitrary disagreement/animosity. Formalized politics must be made obsolete.
    - bloaf 5y ago
      The fundamental rule of conservatism is this: >There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group that the law binds but does not protect. That is why conservatives are so prickly about being regulated: to be bound by the rules is "proof" that they are no longer the in-group. Your very assertion that the law can be applied fairly (to the point group membership is irrelevant) is a denial of the fundamental thesis of conservatism. I agree that we should aspire to fairness and equality-before-the-rules, but there are too many people who do deeply believe that fundamental theorem to just deny and ignore.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        Could you provide any reading material for that fundamental rule? I'd like to read more about it and how it came to be.
gok 5y ago
How is internet dating an uncompetitive industry? There are dozens of competitors. The biggest (Tinder) has barely 30% marketshare.
- trident5000 5y ago
  Match Group (owner of tinder) basically has a monopoly in combination with their other apps. Even Facebook tried to challenge them and failed.
unabridged 5y ago
Instead of regulation, I'd like to see the government offer a free service. A digital commons. In this case the public library version of Tinder, with strict rules of who can be banned and where everyone is treated equally.
- klyrs 5y ago
  You want the government to be that involved in pair-selection in the population??? I am disturbed. Eugenics aside: you know that a direct result of this is that border services, local police, etc will have access to a database of dick pics, don't you?
  - unabridged 5y ago
    If they used and published a fair algorithm for matching, they wouldn't really be involved in the matching they would just be providing a venue. Similar to a city providing public space for people to meet, like a fair. Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?
    - google234123 5y ago
      No, that's conspiracy theorists stuff. Of course, they can maybe get access with a court order.
    - samhw 5y ago
      Even if true, "have access to" is doing a lot of work here. If I had a Borges-style Library of Babel with all the possible books in the world, all configurations of the letters of the alphabet, I would technically "have access to" all human knowledge. But that's very different from having a curated collection which includes specifically only those things, filtered perfectly for you.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      NSA match? Based on your porn search habits, google search history, amazon order history, geographic location, and a social graph based on phone record metadata we recommend you the best possible match.
perryizgr8 5y ago
I agree, internet biggies are de facto monopolies due to the extreme network effects they enjoy. If you are serving more than X millions of users, you are subject to certain rules that make you behave more like a public space.

shadowgovt 5y ago

This rule would functionally kill small Internet service provision and build the biggest moat around the incumbent providers that has ever been handed to them. ... which may, indeed, be the right solution.

mysecretaccount 5y ago
As long as ${some number} is large enough it will not impact "small ISP" at all.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's the thing about being an Internet startup... You never know when you're going to explode and suddenly jump from a ten-thousand-user service to a milliion-user service. So supporting this would require a company to take all manner of new precautions that companies currently don't (circuit-breaker on the new account creation system? But then your growth stalls and your potential customers go to a competitor instead, and you don't blow up into a YouTube or a Twitter like YouTube and Twitter did).
  - pdpi 5y ago
    Or the simpler solution: Once your revenue goes over the threshold, you have a period of 6/12 months to go into compliance, or something similar.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    If you're suddenly a million-user service, you should easily have enough revenue to implement the regulations during a grace period.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Assuming you have a revenue model. What was Twitter's revenue model when they had their first million users?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    Grace period - A grace period is a period immediately after the deadline for an obligation during which a late fee, or other action that would have been taken as a result of failing to meet the deadline, is waived provided that the obligation is satisfied during the grace period. In other words, it is a length of time during which rules or penalties are waived or deferred. Grace periods can range from a number of minutes to a number of days or longer, and can apply in situations including arrival at a job, paying a bill, or meeting a government or legal requirement. In law, a grace period is a time period during which a particular rule exceptionally does not apply, or only partially applies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_period
samhw 5y ago
Do you mean because those 'small Internet service providers' would be included in his 'larger than $MARKET_SHARE' group, or because it would mean no one was kicked out of the incumbent services and therefore there would be fewer new customers available?
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I mean because a company tends to explode from "smaller than $MARKET_SHARE" to "larger than $MARKET_SHARE" in a discontinuous fashion. So since a company can't really predict when it will happen, every company providing service would need to prep from the ground up to provide the described level of relatively non-automated high-touch support this proposal describes. It'd raise the cost to build a startup. ... not to imply it's a bad idea; there's no golden rule that says an ecosystem of millions of competing companies is always a superior alternative to a few well-regulated players. It's just important to note the hidden costs.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    Same argument used against gdpr all the time, and proven false all the time. It's easy to be small and compliant.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      You can comply with GDPR by refraining from collecting data. You can't provide an online service while refraining from providing an online service.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I think this limitation is an artifact of the fact that the proposal is an idea being tossed out on social media. A real law would have some sort of grace period. That grace period could be chosen arbitrarily, it should be set such that any well-run company would have time to respond.
  - OkayPhysicist 5y ago
    If you have automated rule enforcement, then you already have a formal specification of your rules, and informing the user of what rule they have broken should be trivial. If you have humans doing the bans manually, then you already have a human in the loop.

klyrs 5y ago

What if spammers outnumber honest users 10:1? I don't think there's a simple solution to any of this.

ouid 5y ago
"reason: user was spam"
- samhw 5y ago
  Soon to become a very popular reason ;)
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Not unless you provide evidence that you are in fact a real person.
    - samhw 5y ago
      It won't be popular [/be used against you] unless you provide evidence you're a real person? I think that's a slightly Freudian slip right there.
coryrc 5y ago
They could validate their users first. Oh no! Then they can't fake growth.

goldfeld 5y ago

Phew! And here I was thinking the problem would lie in using it! mercifully big tech is saved.

fourseventy 5y ago

I disagree, I think the free market will take care of this on its own.

selfhoster11 5y ago
"Free market" is why our planet is dying, so no, I don't think so. Some regulation is needed.
netizen-936824 5y ago
Just like it took care of adding plastics and PFAS to the ocean, yea? Sometimes regulation is needed
- sircastor 5y ago
  In theory, if this was considered a big enough problem, yes - the market would resolve this. And by "big enough problem" we have to remember that market-driven economies respond to market demand forces. Plastic in the ocean is definitely a huge problem, but it's not a market problem - not yet. When consumers are willing to pay to get plastics out of the ocean, hundreds of companies will appear eager to solve the problem. There's a comment above (@pdpi: "At what timescale?") that identifies the issue at hand. In this case (and in a lot of cases) we need regulation because market demand to solve this isn't fast enough (or may never exist)
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    So when does it become a market problem? Before or after we lose biodiversity on the planet?
pdpi 5y ago
At what timescale? How many more years of recurring "got randomly blocked from the App Store/Play Store/Facebook Ads/whatever other mission-critical service" posts on Hacker News do we need before the market corrects itself?
wolverine876 5y ago

jaredklewis 5y ago

Who decides which “markets” a company is in and measures their market share in those markets? How is market share measured? Is Tinder a dating service or social media company? If Facebook starts offering a dating feature in app and becomes the biggest player in the dating space, which market is facebook in? Both? If both, does all of facebook's market cap/DAU/whatever metric we settle on to measure market share get fully applied to both markets or split in some way? Basically, I think implementing "if $market_share > n" is not a trivial problem that will be litigated to death. The companies with the best lawyers will win.

foepys 5y ago
Let's not pretend like this is an impossible task. Some EU countries already have laws that base regulations on company size and number of customers.
- jaredklewis 5y ago
  Sure, but market share and company size are two fundamentally different problems. Measuring the size of a company is a lot easier: you pick some metric (employees, revenue, profit, customers, etc...) and apply it to all companies. Measuring market share requires that you categorize all companies into "markets," which think is pretty subjective. Is Jet Brains an IDE company? A software company? How about Apple? If multiple, are metrics split? Whatever rules you pick, they're going to be biased towards some companies (including some big ones not popular on HN) and against other companies (including some companies HN loves).
thomastjeffery 5y ago
Humans
- jaredklewis 5y ago
  Well yes, lawyers are humans, but that doesn't help us.
  - 5y ago

thomastjeffery 5y ago

You're almost there. Companies that aren't competitive should be broken up.

lolinder 5y ago
What would it mean to break up Tinder? How do you partition a company that only has one product?
- butokai 5y ago
  Not sure what you mean by this, but Tinder's parent company controls several well known dating services (OkCupid, Meetic, Twoo and many more)
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Ah, fair enough. I was thinking OP meant Tinder specifically, but at the very least OkCupid could be split out.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Partition it geographically. If they want to compete in certain cities/regions/countries where the user base exceeds a certain number, they must spin off subsidiaries for that area. I can't imagine people looking for a date on the other end of the country outside of very specific circumstances.
  - Majestic121 5y ago
    It's pretty common to use Tinder for hook ups during holidays
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      This is a specialised use case, just as I mentioned. Most people aren't on holiday at any given time.
  - 5y ago

antiterra 5y ago

Unfortunately there are scenarios where providing a documented reason or appeal is a vulnerability, illegal or both. A too-clear disclosure gives bad actors information on how to circumvent controls around safety, abuse, and fraud. If the reason an account is deleted includes some sort of KYC/Money Laundering issue, OFAC style sanction or child porn, then there can be legal obligation, with severe penalty, to both report and not tip off the user.

ball_of_lint 5y ago
Although that might be applicable to businesses that let people deal with money, why would any of those be an issue for Tinder?
coryrc 5y ago
It would be legal if there was a law making it so, just as GP suggested. This is trivially solvable if creating an account required an in-person verification, like when you go into a bank to open an account. Since it's not mandatory, anybody who does so is beaten by anyone who doesn't (worse is better). So we should make it mandatory.
emptysongglass 5y ago
Any and all of these possibilities (vulnerability, illegal, or both) must be legalized or otherwise reframed as a cost of doing business. Every human deserves to be informed, whoever they are, regardless of status, wherever they are in the world. That we've allowed blackbox proceedings to take over these small quadrants of human society is a societal failure. The burden to secure such systems shall always fall upon the makers of those systems. Let me be very clear that any excuse made under the veil of security including the enshrining of such in our books of law is incompatible with a society that respects the dignity to live free. It is a vicious abuse of power by those with knowledge over those robbed of it.
- sterlind 5y ago
  A good compromise might be to require explanations or shadow bans to be revealed say, 30 days after the action, in the case of bans because of suspected crimes. In the case of CP or terrorism this gives reasonable time for the Feds to find and arrest you and your conspirators. This is how the Patriot Act worked with publishing warrants, for better or worse.

errcorrectcode 5y ago

Inverted totalitarianism symptoms may include shutting an individual out of a large portion of their life for no real reason, for a misunderstanding, or for daring to challenge corporate power. Often this occurs with minimal or no human intervention, and lack of due process becomes normalized. Welcome to Dystopian Hell, population: everyone not digitally cancelled.

samhw 5y ago
Other symptoms include: a remarkable tendency of people to say "oh, that's OK, they're just coming for the conservatives".
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  There's something to that, and I skew towards democratic socialist. Doing nothing because it appears to target a perceived "foe" attribute or other demonstrates a lack of integrity in the bystander. Fair is fair, while selective impact games build resentment. One love and so on. We have to get past putting people in boxes for arbitrary disagreement/animosity. Formalized politics must be made obsolete.
  - bloaf 5y ago
    The fundamental rule of conservatism is this: >There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group that the law binds but does not protect. That is why conservatives are so prickly about being regulated: to be bound by the rules is "proof" that they are no longer the in-group. Your very assertion that the law can be applied fairly (to the point group membership is irrelevant) is a denial of the fundamental thesis of conservatism. I agree that we should aspire to fairness and equality-before-the-rules, but there are too many people who do deeply believe that fundamental theorem to just deny and ignore.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Could you provide any reading material for that fundamental rule? I'd like to read more about it and how it came to be.

gok 5y ago

How is internet dating an uncompetitive industry? There are dozens of competitors. The biggest (Tinder) has barely 30% marketshare.

trident5000 5y ago
Match Group (owner of tinder) basically has a monopoly in combination with their other apps. Even Facebook tried to challenge them and failed.

unabridged 5y ago

Instead of regulation, I'd like to see the government offer a free service. A digital commons. In this case the public library version of Tinder, with strict rules of who can be banned and where everyone is treated equally.

klyrs 5y ago
You want the government to be that involved in pair-selection in the population??? I am disturbed. Eugenics aside: you know that a direct result of this is that border services, local police, etc will have access to a database of dick pics, don't you?
- unabridged 5y ago
  If they used and published a fair algorithm for matching, they wouldn't really be involved in the matching they would just be providing a venue. Similar to a city providing public space for people to meet, like a fair. Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?
  - google234123 5y ago
    No, that's conspiracy theorists stuff. Of course, they can maybe get access with a court order.
  - samhw 5y ago
    Even if true, "have access to" is doing a lot of work here. If I had a Borges-style Library of Babel with all the possible books in the world, all configurations of the letters of the alphabet, I would technically "have access to" all human knowledge. But that's very different from having a curated collection which includes specifically only those things, filtered perfectly for you.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    NSA match? Based on your porn search habits, google search history, amazon order history, geographic location, and a social graph based on phone record metadata we recommend you the best possible match.

perryizgr8 5y ago

I agree, internet biggies are de facto monopolies due to the extreme network effects they enjoy. If you are serving more than X millions of users, you are subject to certain rules that make you behave more like a public space.