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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

And how would you regulate Google, by whom? US government? EU, China, Russia? Who is in charge of the Internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that? Do we create some UN body to regulate it? Put some international professional bureaucrats in charge of it, who would then be open to corruption and day-to-day political games of power, like we see in every other aspect of UN work. It's not enough to say "I don't like the way it is", we also need to come up with some sort of solution that has a chance of working better. And I haven't heard it yet...

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Multinationals already comply with a litany of different market-specific regulations, so the country listing is more rhetoric than substance.

Civilization depends on rules. Some are written, some aren't. The best rules are the ones that have evolved through trial-and-error. Trial is the first part. We've stopped doing that out of fear of offending the invisible hand, so we end up with guys like Schmidt just dropping a site off the face of the earth without any form of due process.

China has already shown that capitalism is not the guarantor of freedom, so now it's either the rule of law or bust.

Yeah, personally I'm happy having multinationals regulated in multiple countries. It gives us laboratories of different regulatory regimes, allowing trial and error to iterate more rapidly. If anything, I think we need more of that.

Only danger is if Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" thesis holds, and we all end up conforming to Chinese regulation. There were several articles about Hollywood self-censoring for that market.

Aside from that, great point!

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-...

> And how would you regulate Google, by whom? [...] Who is in charge of the internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that?

But we're not talking about Google. We're talking about ISPs and Net Neutrality.

- The absence of solution to problem B (Google & Friends are hugely influential) does not imply the existing solution (Net Neutrality) to problem A (ISPs can be hugely influential) is moot.

- An imperfect solution is better than a less-perfect solution.

It seems to me you are just arguing that multinational corporations should be able to ignore all laws from every country because none of them have the global authority to regulate a global company, which is ridiculous and the opposite of how things have ever worked.

Break the law in the US, get punished in the US. Break the law in the EU, get banned from the EU. Companies have to comply with the law in a country if they want to do business there. Governments beat corporations as they should, every time -- any system in which this is not the case is corporate oligarchy.

No, I'm arguing that trying to micro-manage Internet with local laws is just not gonna work, and will hurt small companies in the process, because they don't have the resources to come up with a legal workarounds and political pressure like the big guys.

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