Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

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I see you've shifted your argument. What happened to "Right, just the other guys should be regulated?"

I'm not sure what's not clear about the notion that large risk should be regulated. If a company is capable, due to size or what have you, of harming a large number of people due to malice or incompetence on the part of its corporate governance, then sanity demands it should be regulated.

However, small companies should be regulated as little as possible. I mean, assuming you want a working economy. I'm not sure you do - actually, I'm not sure what you want, but from the standpoint of pattern recognition of your strawman attacks, I'd assume you want to regulate all business as little as possible.

Where I suspect we differ is the degree of "possible".

In my opinion, any business that can destroy hundreds of miles of coastline for other people while still having a banner profit year? Yeah, that should probably be regulated, since the Invisible Hand ain't gonna do it. Look up the Tragedy of the Commons sometime; you might find it instructive. (Or perhaps not. It's hard to tell how honestly you're approaching this.)

There's no shifting here. It's the same topic.

The original subject was that large corporations can't be trusted to regulate themselves. But of course that's exactly what we're doing with the large dot coms. They're minimally regulated, certainly in comparison with the oil industry, which is in fact highly regulated.

Why do we trust large dot coms to regulate themselves? Because we think their leadership is somehow more trustworthy? Are they just naturally better people? On what basis do we make that judgement?

If Apple or Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google had malicious, greedy, or incompetent leadership do you not believe they could cause massive harm? Sure, it wouldn't make ugly pictures on tv (or would it? I can imagine ways in which it could), but that doesn't mean the potential damage is any less real. Why do we trust them to regulate themselves?

If you trust present leadership, what about the next generation, those that are just MBAs from the same schools that turned out the leadership of BP, Shell, and Exxon?

So, again, why do we think they shouldn't be regulated?

There's more information and more distribution of power to citizens, thus more checks and balances. Also, technology is evolving quickly, with much disruption, which means there is less entrenchment.

The oil industry, has only the government (which has been bought out) as it's check and balance. This is not a case of the free market at all, but a corrupt and closed one.

Regulated in what way? Something like Europe's data protection laws, with limits on information sharing without permission and duration of data retention? Or something else?

What is the specific liability you are claiming these companies share? Privacy breaches? Manipulation? What does corrupt dot com look like? I don't know, I'm not sure I've really known of one. Do you know of one? What do they do that is a $1bn+ liability?

Simply apply the accusations against BP to the realms in which these companies operate. There's a lot more than privacy at stake here.

The theory is that BP cut technical and engineering corners for the sake of saving time, aka profit.

All of these companies could do the same, to great potential public harm.

Say Windows ships with a flaw that causes all machines to shut down at noon on a certain day. Or Apple ships an entire generation of phone that puts out a high level of radiation in certain circumstances. And so on. Amazon sells computing instances. Google has fingers in nearly every pie out there.

These companies can cause significant worldwide harm, financial and in some cases physical.

What if they cut corners to meet goals and endanger people as a result. Do you really believe this will never happen?

You make good points. I don't believe that it will never happen but I'm not sure something of that magnitude has happened yet and much of our current tort law would cover the liability, I believe. I am very likely wrong, though, and we will have to wait and see (and then take governmental action if necessary). Internet companies are a relatively new beast with relatively poorly understood liabilities.

My problem with the BP situation is that the risks were fairly well understand as oil is a mature industry. I expect BP to be fully liable for their negligence just as I would expect Apple to be fully liable if they released a radioactive phone. Do you think BP is being held fully liable?

Ah. "Large" dot-coms. Well, I think your intuition tells you that "large" dot-coms are also capable of incurring public liability that is not held in check by their nominal liability. I'd argue that it's improbable that Apple or Google could do damage to the public on quite the scale that BP or Goldman-Sachs or Enron managed, but you could well be right.

But I think you really need to think about regulating risk, not classes of company - except insofar as classes of companies are in fact associated with certain categories of risk. Apple will not be causing a vast oil spill. Microsoft - well, Microsoft might be capable of destroying the global financial markets, but probably not as directly as AIG.

I consider the category of "dot-com" to be entirely orthogonal to this question. It's the risk, not the company. And moreover, it's instances where the risk to the public is far larger than the risk (or cost) to the company in the worst case. That's where regulation has to adjust the balance.

For instance, Google could accidentally deny email to about 176 million people at once, and that could arguably cause some damage. They could choose to stop offering free email with no notice. You could argue that this would cause them enough ill will that they wouldn't do it - but that argument clearly doesn't work for BP or the financial giants. So you might have an argument there.

It's almost in the definition of a dot-com, large and small, that the impact of any particular action they take is greater than the cost of that action to the company. That's why tech startups are so appealing.

But if you have such leveraged benefits, you also have such leveraged risk. The same leverage that lets a small team create great value also puts them in a position where they can cause great harm.

I used large dot coms because there was some insistence in the thread that regulation was only worth talking about with large companies. A red herring, of course, since the mom and pop corner dry cleaner is a regulated business, and for the common good. Size isn't really an issue.

The difference is that it's almost a tautology that dot coms have influence, good and bad, far out of proportion to their size...

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