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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered

Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.

But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

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This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.

In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.

What is stopping any of the 1 billion Facebook users from using whatsapp, snapchat, or any other messaging service?

It's the inconvenience of having multiple accounts and logins with multiple services. Sure it's not as inconvenient as having multiple phone line accounts so AT&T customers can talk to Bell Atlantic customers but at the end of the day, your data is providing revenue to these companies and the companies continue to silo themselves.

Wouldn't that be easily solved if all the other services offered a "log in with Facebook" feature and routed messages to other people who also logged in with Facebook?

I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)

Part of the gaping flaw is that Facebook will very quickly disable your API account so you can't offer login with Facebook, if you're competing with them. :)

Don't forget that Whatsapp is also owned by Facebook

That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

> Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.

Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.

So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.

Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).

One theoretical framework that justifies regulating telecoms, but not necessarily Facebook is that telecoms usually have special privileges granted to them by governments, up to and including monopoly status.

Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.

Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.

Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.

>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.

I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.

It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.

Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;

  Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for 
  developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based 
  and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of 
  technologies including hardware-based trusted execution 
  environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure 
  mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables 
  the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency, 
  and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal 
  data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms, 
  and verified attributes and provides each user with a 
  3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives 
  individuals control over their identities and their data   
  and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive, 
  and transparent digital ecosystems.

https://idcubed.org/open-platform/platform/

https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond

* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.

Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png

> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network

well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.

adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.

I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:

-Supplies an essential good or service

-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment

-Inelastic demand

-Region-specific

-Few or zero consumer alternatives

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