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Comment by wonder_er | Hacker News Reader

reasonable political ideologies can lead to "extreme" outcomes. (I consider an extreme outcome to be one that requires human nature to change, in order to be successful.)

Since I think bureaucrats are gonna bureaucrat, handing them power over anything is a terrible idea.

Are companies good? no, many of them are terrible.

But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist.

I've yet to see a similar mechanism work for changing something about a bureaucrat i don't like.

I.E. the same thing that causes you to distrust a company (human nature) plays out just the same with a government body. What is it about being a bureaucrat that fixes human nature?

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Comcast is one of the most hated companies ever but they only keep getting bigger.

"Bureaucrats" are ultimately responsive to the politicians which are ultimately responsive to us, as we see with Trump now getting the power to reshape Obama's FCC policies. I'll tell you this, if they really go through with giving the web over to the ISPs for them to ruin with nickel and dime schemes voters will eventually force your new favorite bureaucrats to back down.

Comcast is now a massive company that offers a lot more than telecommunication services. A lot of people really like many things that Comcast owns.

While we've set up a complex representative government to try and hold the people in power to account, that is still much more rigid and manipulable than the fluidity of a highly-competitive commercial market.

We need to focus on making the markets run well organically, not trying to make things happen by fiat.

Net neutrality is arguably part of that, but it's not the only, or even the major, part of it. The biggest part is finding some way to allow open competitive access to the in-the-ground infrastructure that runs modern telecoms. Net neutrality is a band-aid to cover up the fact that most Americans are beholden to a single ISP for data services. In a functioning marketplace, it wouldn't be necessary, because if $ISP_Y slowed down $Site_X, $ISP_Y's users would, in theory, move to $ISP_Z.

In reality, most consumers would probably happily accept a plan that allowed universal access at 5mbps and "turbo access" to some sites in exchange for a lower monthly fee. I understand that makes some people unhappy, but that doesn't mean we should deprive people of the freedom to make that tradeoff if they wish to do so.

Right, but Comcast doesn't imprison people for life and bomb other countries or throw you in jail for not paying for its services.

Also, bureaucrats are responsible to the organizations most influential to them. "The American People" can barely be motivated to vote in a presidential election, because they rightfully perceive that their votes don't matter, and a vote between two shitty options is a shitty vote.

So, businesses (like Comcast) can just earmark a few million dollars a year to keep buying whatever organization has the power to regulate them, and we (the people) can do nothing about it.

The reason I strongly dislike Net Neutrality is _because_ comcast is horrible and hated. It's reasonable to assume that as we speak, the comcast executive team is figuring out how to best wine and dine top FCC officials.

Because that's way cheaper than being a better company.

>So, businesses (like Comcast) can just earmark a few million dollars a year to keep buying whatever organization has the power to regulate them, and we (the people) can do nothing about it.

You are right that this is a big problem, however it is more an implementation flaw than a flaw of regulations. A more strict enforcement of information and financial transparency could address the bribery concerns.

There is another problem that is perpetual in the interaction of government and corporations, which is that the corporation lawyer has many times, 10x or 100x, the financial incentive to make the bureaucrat ineffective, than the bureaucrat himself has to be effective.

I would suggest a (difficult) solution that any governmental office or agency should have their success evaluated in terms of economic impact by something like a team of independent economists every year or two.

The agency's funding as well as staff compensation would then be derived from that, as a fixed percentage of the societal benefit. I have no idea of the exact numbers, but the point is to create the same motivational incentives as the corporations have.

One side is working for themselves and reap the significant benefits of their hard work. The other side is working for all of society and really should also reap the benefits of their hard work.

>But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist.

This is completely untrue. I'll give an analogy: If enough people don't like a tyrannical government, does the tyrannical government cease to exist? No, it has all the power to keep people in line and also to make life just bearable enough so people tolerate it. Any sign of uprising or resistance will be squished in infancy.

The only way is if the situation becomes so unbearable for the people that there is a massive uprising/revolution, and even then the people are not guaranteed victory. Furthermore, suppose the tyrant is overthrown, without the institutions of democracy in place it's more likely than not that there will just be another tyrant in his place.

This is the law of the jungle, and it is not the best way to run a society. That is why we have laws, and that is why we need regulations for our corporations.

Edit to clarify: On second reading the above may sound to some like hysteria but any entity that has monopoly on a very expensive but vital infrastructure in a completely free and unregulated market, has all the power over its "customers". Hence the tyrannical government analogy.

They have fewer resources and are easier to ignore.

The bureaucrats are easier to ignore?

If you violate some obscure statute, you can be fined. (At best.) If you don't pay the fine, the penalties can escalate until the local police or feds arrest you (at gunpoint, if you resist) and lock you in a box.

There's 180,000 pages in the federal register [0].

How is that "easy to ignore"?

I'll take "business that I can stop paying at any time" over "armed gunmen with the legal authority to arrest me" every time.

[0] https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/regulatory...

I encourage you to ignore the IRS, then. Or, hey, even the FCC.

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