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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of "regulate/break them up" articles I keep seeing about tech companies.

Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.

I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents

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> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list

Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.

Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.

Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-...

Could you elaborate on their aloofness? What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them?

They seem to take the privacy of their users far more seriously than other competitors as well as the government (US - net neutrality).

What does net neutrality have to do with privacy?

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/11/15258230/net-neutrality-p...

> Could you elaborate on their aloofness?

For Google:

If your site gets incorrectly fucked over by one of Google's ranking algorithm changes, try to find someone to talk to who cares enough to try to fix the issue.

Ditto if your Gmail account gets wrongly flagged and closed for some reason. There's no one for you to call and you're fucked, unless you happen know someone inside Google.

Neither of these have happened to me personally, but I've followed cases of each pretty closely.

For Facebook:

It's recent newsfeed changes have had a huge detrimental impact on legitimate news organizations, even more in some foreign markets than int the US. See how much Facebook cares.

> What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them?

The standard stuff, like elimination of unfair competition (e.g. Google using Search to push its other stuff). I'd also like to see some breakups/forced divestitures to increase overall competition.

In Facebook's case, specifically: I'd like to see Instagram and Whatsapp spun off; and the core Facebook social network decentralized into several independent instances, with mandates to conform to open interoperability standards. Those standards should include a mandatory privacy permissioning system, to control how personal data is used across instance boundaries.

Yes, they do both control a lot of information that people see, BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes. Not saying they're doing it perfectly or even well, but still.

On the other hand

Tobacco companies for years lied about the risks and promoted false science

Energy companies regularly fund climate change denial organizations (see Heartland Institute)

Monsanto sends detectives after farmers who get tangled with them (https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/Monsanto/farme...)

Tyson, Purdue regularly keep chicken farmers in poverty and silenced about chicken farming conditions.

Volkswagen created emission cheating software to hide their emissions...

Again, tech companies aren't great and control a lot of information, but what about the food we eat and the air we breathe?

While I do agree that all these areas need regulatory improvements, I feel like you're falling into the what-about-ism trap. I personally feel like increased regulatory scrutiny about tech companies (i.e. regulating information) would be a strong first step in allowing society to then regulate the other industries that you mentioned.

I think you make a good point about what-about-ism. Unfortunately, the attention of regulators, the U.S. government, and the media is a rival good and areas of focus are definitely mutually exclusive.

It's a sad fact of the national attention span, but still likely a fact.

Every one of those other companies is incredibly heavily regulated.

>Tobacco companies for years lied about the risks and promoted false science

And were punished severely, rightly so. They paid out billions.

>Energy companies regularly fund climate change denial organizations (see Heartland Institute)

This is difficult to solve within the existing legal infrastructure and might require a constitutional amendment

>Monsanto sends detectives after farmers who get tangled with them (https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/Monsanto/farme...)

I'm not sure that should be illegal - they sued the farmers and lawyers use investigators.

>Tyson, Purdue regularly keep chicken farmers in poverty and silenced about chicken farming conditions.

This should be more regulated and there are serious calls to do so.

>Volkswagen created emission cheating software to hide their emissions...

And are now paying billions for it.

I'm seeing you listing bad companies, but I'm not seeing a reason not to regulate the big tech ones.

Not to mention, it's not like the government can't do both at once. Most of those industries you mentioned have other departments that regulate them.

  BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes

I can't rid myself of the impression that such changes are only applied to avoid the hammer coming down.

For example : Facebook gave exactly zero fucks about harrassing - or hate posts in specific markets despite the fact that such posts were illegal in such markets. Only when Germany started to crack down severely you saw change.

Same with other tech companies. Uber and Airbnb don't only not give a shit they actively flout the law and you only see changes in their behavior when the hammer of the law threatened to come crashing down.

While I agree with your examples that doesn't mean that we should give tech companies a pass. Rotten (and potentially illegal) behavior is hurting us all for the benefits of very, very few.

I'm glad, that Europe is at least trying to put a stop at the most egregious behavior. The US seems more inclined to give a pass even when borderline crimninal behavior is involved. (Equifax?)

It's not society can only pursue one bad actor at a time. This is a tech forum so we're going to focus on the tech side.

Also, I would say the flow if information is a more pressing priority, because its vital to solving those other problems as well. Imagine a future Facebook that takes a payoff from Monsanto to opaquely bury all criticism of it.

> BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes. Not saying they're doing it perfectly or even well, but still.

Facebook's algorithm tweaks don't solve the problem of its market position and dominance.

There ARE real limits to regulatory capacity though.

- Major merger approvals tie up DC for months at a time. - The SEC is perpetually unable to keep up with Wall Streets’ shenanigans - Major procurement programs like the F35 dominate the military’s buying capacity

Etc etc

> Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.

Isn't that precrime?

no, it's reasonable foresight and concern for our collective future condition

There's a problem in the UK where people get splashed with acid. A UK kid made a prank out of it (using water instead to scare them) .. and Google banned his entire YouTube channel.

Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.

Because of the dependence on that platform, Google can kill anything they deem unworthy. You could say, "Well so could television companies, or Netflix/Amazon Video," but you typically enter in a contract with those companies, and there's some degree of oversight on the content. Here people are giving YouTube their content, and then monetizing it only if/after they get popular.

> Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.

Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.

Depends on which govt. I am no expert, but being a news junky the past few years I would think that Germany may side with censoring, and I would hope that the US would push for free speech above all else. The UK is looking at pushing google, visa/mc, and ISPs to choke anything sexually arousing online and then forcing blocks nationwide. Getting rid of religious stuff has been interesting the past couple of years. I am looking forward to more routers like the disney router to make these choices easier for households, and less about the portals relaying info posted by others. At the same time people should have easy access to unfiltered net as well. Too many groups pushing to censor millions of minds here and there. Govt could make it better, and of course they could make it worse. Can tech really give those choices to the adults to make for themselves?

>> Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.

> Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.

In the US, the government would absolutely be OK with it. Protection of speech from government interference is one of the most fundamental and sacred cornerstones of US law.

out of all of the examples I can think of for unjustly banned youtube content, that is one of the least compelling example I've ever heard of. I'm not a lawyer but that "prank" is almost certainly a crime.

Seems like he got off lightly. Wouldn't be surprised if someone is looking if a prosecution is viable. Assault perhaps?

First he's not "a kid", looks more like 18 - 22. So old enough to know better.

Second there's something of an epidemic of acid attacks in London recently. So scare the shit out of random strangers for clicks n giggles.

He should try his "humour" in an airport or on a copper - I'm sure he'd get plenty of extra views.

I have no sympathy for that person. If you want to cite a reason why Google/YouTube should be regulated, that was not it.

That kid should be grateful he was not put in a hospital, he got off lightly.

Acid attacks are extremely, extremely horrible and damaging.

Having political or cultural influence, or holding market dominance aren't crimes in a capitalist economy. Those aren't valid reasons to "regulate" the success out of those companies.

What is?

I don't know. But I feel like the assumption here is that these companies are harmful merely because of their size and influence, which I understand, but don't believe is necessarily true. Or at least not true enough to write laws about.

One of the arguments is that companies that are too large stifle innovation. The author claims that our current crop of companies came about because of Microsoft anti-trust legislation. Do you not think this is true?

>One of the arguments is that companies that are too large stifle innovation.

They might, but is "innovation" something that should be enforced by law? Do companies have a right to expect equal access to a market regardless of the successes or advantages of their competitors?

Isn't that the entire point of antitrust?

> Having political or cultural influence, or holding market dominance aren't crimes in a capitalist economy. Those aren't valid reasons to "regulate" the success out of those companies.

Capitalism isn't the only idea by which we run our society, nor is the market society's only priority.

Also, we have experience with the pernicious effects of too much market dominance, which is why we developed antitrust law.

> Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly.

I think CNN, NBC ("beauty of our weapons") and Fox news control a bigger fraction, but nobody's clamoring for them to be regulated. I wonder why it's just the upstarts being targeted.

The argument for breaking up these companies is not based on punishing them for wrongs. Instead, it’s based on the idea that they have so much manifest power that their natural order of business inherently has the effect of “abuse of monopoly (monopsony) power”, regardless of any ‘unfair intent’.

Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist.

An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...

Fortunately, there is one thing on the horizon that can stop all of this, which is to have AI that can recognize and remove ads: that would destroy all incentives for these companies to track us.

Like it or not ads are necessary. So if there is AI that removes ads then there will not be content to consume.

You seem to be talking about credit agencies though.

It's orders of magnitude easier to browse the internet in incognito mode than it is to live without a credit card or to not have a credit report. There's only two credit card networks and three credit reporting agencies.

Google and Facebook don't know exactly where you live but credit agencies do, and they also know your bank accounts, social security number, etc. Credit agencies openly sell their data, but Google and Facebook don't and never have. Google and Facebook don't actually have vast logs of everything you've ever done, they trash old logs after some period of time, and frankly most of is not useful to bother to do anything with to try to join it in the first place. But your credit card data and credit history lasts your whole life.

We could put some regulations on personally identifiable information... except actually that exists already, and the credit agencies have been the ones that have been hopelessly reckless with that and somehow always get away with it.

If you use either Google and Facebook on your phone they do know where you live. Most likely they know where you work, how you get there, your voice (Google), your income, your demographic information, what websites you visit, what you buy, who your friends and family are and what you look like.

Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies and they resell that data to the highest bidder numerous times a day. Google and Facebook have far more data on anyone in the US than any credit agency ever will.

No, seriously, they don't sell personal data to the highest bidder. There is no such data sales product that they offer. It doesn't exist. They don't compile lists of web sites you visit and sell it to anyone.

They don't keep vast logs of everything you've ever done because it's expensive to store and simply isn't worth anything, especially if it isn't recent. They do want to keep your age and gender and what city you live in, that sort of thing. They don't care what you look like.

> Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies

No they freaking don't. Facebook barely makes one dollar per month per user. Google makes something like $2 per month per user. Credit reports cost on the order of $20 each. Do the math.

Exactly. Wouldn't say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud/malfeasance?

Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.

And if you want tech, particularly in America there are ISPs and telcos in dire need of being broken up.

Yeah. I used to think the same thing. Maybe I will again, but here's what changed my specific situation:

I once had Time Warner. It was OK, I didn't need to deal with Customer Service and my cable never went out. No real issues other than a bill I thought was too high at times.

Then Google Fiber came here. Literally across the street. I couldn't taste that sweet, sweet gigabit even if I wanted to. Time Warner, sitting on it's laurels didn't care. I was their only choice if I wanted something faster than 15Mb/s.

Cue the Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter (Honestly, I don't know what order that was, but the billing took care of it) buyouts. Oh no! Things are going to be terrible. Except your old login still works with Spectrum/Charter. The QoS wasn't affected at all by the switching. Oh, and since Charter came out I get a free doubling of internet speed, because Google Fiber.

Now I'm using Spectrum (I think). All of a sudden, the option for 940Mb/s is available for me. That's close enough for wireless devices to call it "gigabit" to me.

Even though companies changed hands 2 or 3 times, I still have the same options (but better!) that I had before.

It's easy for me to get behind the hatred that monopolies have for communications in theory, but when they literally make the transition seamless, still provide all the same options as before, and allow me to get a taste of that sweet sweet gigabit; I just don't care anymore. Especially when they maintain competitive pricing.

On my part, I dislike the argument "there are people doing worse things than me, so don't try to stop me doing bad things!".

It's not one or the other.

No. No. No other company on the planet knows where billions of people exactly are and what they're doing at a given point or can predict their behavior. Not Coca Cola or Monsanto or any of them. There are very, very specific reason why people on HN are complaining about big tech now. We're mainly well-educated and have read a lot of sci-fi written by well-educated people.

And yet, they benefit the most from lobying, taxes and profits, and dictate and have dictated the market for decades. They drain entire countries, they extract all their resources, most of their water, they pollute and are responsible for the extinction of entire ecosystems and quite a few human deaths. Imagine, they've done all of that without knowing exactly where you are and what you are doing right now.

What has Facebook done? Copied all of Snapchat and displayed some russian ads.

Well for one, Facebook, through crass negligence and a failure to own up to the duties that go along with their position in regulating the flow of information between people, played a key role in the election of an administration which supports the draining of countries, the extraction of resources, and the extinction of ecosystems...and if the recent stories about a lifetime cap on medicaid benefits are true, quite a few human deaths! (Obviously Facebook isn't solely or even mostly responsible, Monsanto is worse, yadda yadda yadda)

So did Fox News.

Let’s break up Fox News, NYT and all the other outlets that enables Trump

Thank you captain planet, most people are aware those corporations are scum and do not approve of their behavior.

I'm not really sure what to tell you - something closely approximating omniscience will be in the hands of a few organizations ran by a few people in 20 years. Hopefully society wisens up. This will be an interesting century. I would personally pick Monsanto if I were you.

Then Jesus will come.

Everybody has their version of the apocalypse.

No one cares which companies are the worst, they are all bad in their own way, but if you claim that the number one priority is to break up Facebook because they could harm people in the future with their omniscience, then don't get mad when someone calls you out and tells you it's been happening for decades, even without all of that techno-knowledge you are so afraid of.

But they know where you are and what you do! yes, so what, they can harm you without knowing, they have been. They've been telling people what to think since they invented talking.

Superintelligence is coming and guess what? Governments are gonna own it, full stop. Not a company, not two. Governments, with guns. And for the looks of it is gonna be China. The NSA has been fighting against the odds this whole time but who knows, maybe they still have a chance. Facebook is just a pawn, the tip of the wedge, and you've fallen for the distraction.

Or do you really think breaking up facebook will completely halt development of AI?

I think you overestimate the scope of two things:

1) How vast the useful data gulf is between Google/FB and dozens of other entities. Maybe they have more data overall and had a decade head start, but at this point there's tons of other software, hardware and data stakeholders that can construct a pretty complete map of your life. And even before Google/FB there was the whole financials infrastructure: banks, credit agencies, etc.

2) How actionable that data advantage is for Google/FB. Let's say you're right and they know a lot more than the next most knowledgeable entities. They're still constrained in how they can actually use that to manipulate your life to whatever nefarious ends. They're already under a lot of scrutiny, which is good, and no doubt will remain so. There are many obvious and overt steps they'd have to achieve (all of which would garner huge backlash) before consolidating some kind of truly hegemonic power. The leap from "has the best information" to your sci-fi scenarios is pretty significant for non-government entities with like-sized competitors to worry about in the private sector.

Google, Facebook & Amazon are all trying to own all aspects of your wallet and life. That data is extremely actionable as you can see by their market cap. These three companies are so pervasive and agressive in their reach into your life. And no one outside of those companies truly knows the amount of data being collected and it's borderline criminal in my opinion.

I'm not for breaking them apart but I am for limiting their data collection and privacy invasion outside of their own products.

It comes off as insincere to me. The rapid rise in anti-tech sentiments really seems like someone with an agenda is targeting tech companies, rather than a genuine response to perceived wrongs.

It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech.

I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.

> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list

Yes. Ironically, these companies are doing the regulation now. And they control an increasing share of the real economy.

Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point?

Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.

But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.

In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.

Well said.

I think that what’s becoming clear is that the downsides of our 21st century Information Age is similar to last century’s nuclear age. Like radioactive materials, data is extremely valuable, but prone to leaking and no one’s figured out how to store it safely long term. It can hang around for ages, and if (when) it gets out in an equifax-style meltdown the consequences can be devastating.

The only way to safely store it is to not have it.

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