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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

So if you wanted tech giants to have less power what exactly would you do?

I suppose you could tell your representative, but then they'd have to somehow influence the senators of your state, but even if that happens you need a majority rule to do something, when it comes to an eventual vote, right? Even if they did have a majority, the Supreme Court, which is inherently stacked one way or another, could simply negate whatever decision was made, no?

It's amazing that despite all of the technological growth, there are more middle people than ever skimming off the top. Somehow it feels that technology is simply making things even more inefficient.

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> Even if they did have a majority, the Supreme Court, which is inherently stacked one way or another, could simply negate whatever decision was made, no?

It could, but that's kind of a stretch. In terms of anti-trust the courts have the Sherman Antitrust act (1890). This is the substance of the law:

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

There is a little more elaboration in the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) and later amendments, but not much.

The courts have been left to develop a large body of judge made law in this area because Congress has done so little legislating. If Congress wished to put antitrust law on a firm and detailed statutory basis, my sense is that the courts would be very glad to be rid of the responsibility of developing it almost out of whole cloth.

>So if you wanted tech giants to have less power what exactly would you do?

It's really easy. This is the nuclear option, but it's very doable: eliminate their Section 230 immunity [1]. All of these internet businesses and platforms are running markets online, but they face zero liability for anything bad that happens on their platform. It's what gives Google and Facebook such high margins. They employ a relatively small number of highly paid software engineers and let the buyers and sellers take it from there on their marketplace.

If they were actually responsible or liable for what happened on their platform, it would mean they'd have a lot more policing to do. And policing costs money. Customer service costs money (which is why there's no one to call at Facebook or Google when something's wrong with your account).

Suddenly those highly efficient, zero liability two-sided markets have a lot more frictional costs, and that will ultimately limit their power because the flywheel won't snowball as much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

That's "easy", except for controlling the unintended consequences...

That isn't "give them less power", that's "kill all of them dead unless they're huge enough to tank a massive and never-ending money pit". What you're suggesting could be folded into an expensive but manageable cost of doing business for companies the size of Google or Facebook, but would utterly destroy a small company. That would shift the balance of power towards large companies and away from small ones, and large companies don't need any more advantages than they already have.

Look any time anyone suggests a regulation this is always what everyone responds with. But this isn't even a new regulation, this would be the elimination of a freebie for the tech industry.

It'd be extremely easy to limit the impact of it by not eliminating the freebie for everyone, recognizing that there's societal value in enabling these online marketplaces.

Think Systematically Important Financial Institutions [1]. The "too big to fail" banks bear the toughest capital requirements, your local community bank doesn't. The same can be done for the tech industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemically_important_financi...

Adding more regulation to one industry just because other industries have it is not sane policy making. One must consider how each operates as an independent system and think about all the implications when one tries to poke it.

Getting rid of platform immunity would result in massive censorship and decreased freedoms for the individual USERS of that service.

These platforms would just ban everything that is slightly controversial, on the off chance that they could be sued for it.

It is not about the rights of the companies that I care about. What I don't want is for this kind of massive censorship to happen to the users of these sites.

Immunity allows users to remain free and mostly unregulated. It is what makes the internet useful.

And I care about this issue, even though it would be "legal" for these companies to ban everything controversial, so please don't say "The 1st amendment protects you from the government, not private companiezzz!!"

Newsflash: the thing you're afraid of happening is already happening.

Google, Facebook, Amazon exercise editorial control of their platforms all the time. They delete spam, malware, porn. Just this week Google pulled right wing YouTube content as they moved to remove gun content [1]. They banned anything with the word "gun" in their shopping search [2]. These were never neutral platforms and they never pretended to be. The tech industry lobbyists cloak themselves in the language of free speech and liberty to avert regulation, but they have always been censoring content on their platform if it served their commercial interests.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-28/youtube-s...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/27/google-gun-shopping-sear...

And your proposal, to hold them liable for content on their platform, would making things a hundred times worse, as they'd now take down more content because they are afraid of being sued for it.

It would certainly be great if the big tech companies engaged in less censorship. Which is why we need more policies that encourage them to be neutral platform, possibly like the utilities laws we have, instead of doing the opposite of making them more likely to take down content.

Lets move them towards being a more neutral platform with less or no editorial control. That would be wonderful.

> Lets move them towards being a more neutral platform with less or no editorial control. That would be wonderful.

Ugh, no. Editorial control and moderation makes the difference between a community and an open sewer.

But let's make sure we don't create such a liability that nobody wants to host user content at all. Because the easiest thing to do is to omit user content and focus exclusively on licensed, first-party, commercial content that has a contract associated with it. That doesn't create communities.

This is blanket false. Our legal system already factors in culpability and reasonableness. Intent is a crucial part of our legal system. The problem is, Section 230 helps big companies avoid responsibility even when they ARE culpable. A small company doing their best to moderate their site is not going to be held legally responsible for bad user content, companies making hundreds of billions by avoiding spending money moderating content, are.

Section 230 has to go if we're going to do anything to fix the Internet.

Do you really believe is that easy?

Eliminating the Section 230 would incur additional barriers to entry for small companies, as they would have to spend more resources to police their platforms, while also opening themselves up to expensive legal battles before their platforms even take off. While the tech giants have plenty of legal, financial and engineering resources to take on the challenges posed by eliminating Section 230.

What you're proposing would actually give the tech giants even more power.

Doesn't 230 just cover the publishing of user generated content?

I don't see how if affects "two-sided markets" at all.

It seems like it would make far more sense to make operators of two-sided market places liable without destroying every small forum and every blogging platform and possible every public chat platform.

Section 230 only effectively helps large companies. Any small site taking reasonable measures to manage their site would be fine. But companies which sit on hundreds of billions in cash while making a profit on illegal activity (as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all guilty of), should not be immune to prosecution for their willful violations of the law.

I don't see how you can say that. Section 230 was made to allow service providers to monitor content without becoming responsible for all the content that gets posted by users.

Let's say you run a small forum and someone starts harrassing users and creates a very toxic environment. 230 allows you to delete this person's comments/account without suddenly being liable for everything users post on your site.

Big companies will just have a team create an automatic filtering tool with strong rules to prevent lawsuits. The forum runner doesn't have the money or resources for that. Maybe startups would pop up and sell filtering services but Joe Smith who was just trying to host a community gardening forum isn't going to want to/be able to pay for that. Either he pays, let's trolls run wild, or brings down the site. It's a lose-lose scenario.

Suggesting that US law makes a company legally culpable for all interaction with that company's website has no basis in our legal system. That isn't how our law has ever worked. The first and foremost thing to understand about law is that intent is as important as the actual act itself.

So, no, there is no way removing the blank check we cut big tech is going to hurt small startups or a community forum. And most of those are going to have human moderators that do a much better job than those "automatic filtering tools" you seem to suggest are a solution.

The whole point here is that automatic filtering doesn't work. We've seen YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter prove that. Of course, Google has hundreds of billions of dollars at it's disposal, but it isn't hiring human moderators, because it has no reason to: Our government holds that Google isn't responsible for anything on it's platform, so it is better off keeping the money as profit.

Now, where it starts to get interesting is perverse incentives: Much of advertising profits comes from malware and scams. Ad companies make billions off this illegal, criminal behavior. And since we've granted them platform immunity, because it's "user content", they're free to keep making that money. They have no reason to take down illegal content, they can't be held responsible for cash cow scams like the fake rehab center fiasco that make them millions. (Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go...) Even if they get pressured to shut them down, they get to keep all of the profits.

Section 230 protects companies which knowingly (and this is key, intent is important) do not remove illegal and criminal conduct because it is profitable, and they can't be held responsible for it. Section 230 does not protect small businesses, and the marketing to protect it relies on fundamental misconceptions about basic legal responsibility. Companies without intent to profit off criminal conduct are protected by the basic concepts of our legal system: That you can't commit a crime without intent.

It's amazing how the organizations promoting how critical Section 230 is to "small businesses" are funded by the five largest companies in the US by market cap. (The Center for Democracy & Technology spoke out against SESTA-FOSTA in some articles today, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are all top tier sponsors.)

> Suggesting that US law makes a company legally culpable for all interaction with that company's website has no basis in our legal system. That isn't how our law has ever worked.

As far as I can tell (and I am not a lawyer) you are wrong about this and there is case law to prove it. As wikipedia says:

"The act was passed in part in reaction to the 1995 decision in Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.,[3] which suggested that service providers who assumed an editorial role with regard to customer content, thus became publishers, and legally responsible for libel and other torts committed by customers. This act was passed to specifically enhance service providers' ability to delete or otherwise monitor content without themselves becoming publishers. In Zeran v. America Online, Inc., the Court notes that "Congress enacted § 230 to remove the disincentives to self-regulation created by the Stratton Oakmont decision."

And here is the link to the court decision being referenced:

https://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/Stratton_Oakmont_Porush_v_Pro...

> Any small site taking reasonable measures to manage their site would be fine.

The case law indicates the opposite. Without 230, small sites would have to take NO MEASURE to manage other peoples content on their site. As soon as they took any "reasonable measures" to restrict that content they would assume the role of publisher and become liable.

Making it more inefficient? Or making more obvious the inherent inefficiency of the mantra “everyone must have a job to thrive and the economy must always grow”

I rather think the latter. We’ve just now been able to shine light on 60 years of this bullshit social memes real costs

Cancer rates seem to have gone up. But then one looks closer and it’s diagnosis rates due to improved techniques.

Similar idea: we can measure effort better. Oh look at all the waste

>So if you wanted tech giants to have less power what exactly would you do?

I'm trying the "work for a tech giant and do a poor job" approach to this problem. I don't think it's working.

We, as the tech community, tend to be trusted by our friends and family for recommendations. Start pushing your friends and family away from the tech giants. You aren't going to win every battle, but if people know you have concerns, it does subtly change the message, people are coming around to understanding what these companies are and how they work. They have billions of people's data they're built on, but we can still start to erode it. Remember how Google Search and Gmail all became popular in the first place: We, everyone's "computer expert nephews" told people about them, and how great they were. Now we can tell them about DuckDuckGo and our favorite privacy-oriented mail service.

Additionally, we can avoid working ourselves for companies doing unethical things, like paying off academic researchers to make public statements supporting them, financing think tanks and lobbyist groups to push their agendas, and acting in blatantly anticompetitive ways. Sure, all of these tech giants have tons of people waiting to work there, but we can still reduce the pool of candidates, people who know better need to walk away. This not only reduces their talent, but means that talent is available to start and improve new competitors to the entrenched parties.

And I absolutely believe we need to advocate that legislators and judiciaries start taking a renewed look at antitrust enforcement, and we need to advocate for removing blanket immunities that these companies enjoy. Congress just realized in the past two years that these companies have a lot of sway over elections, and if anything gets Congress moving, it's protecting their reelection campaigns.

It's amazing that despite all of the technological growth, there are more middle people than ever skimming off the top. Somehow it feels that technology is simply making things even more inefficient.

Technology doesn't change people's motivations - it simply rearranges who gets to fulfill their wishes a little.

As long as people want to live 'I GOTTA get mine, worry about the rest later', we're going to continue being the cancerous species that we are, biting the hand that feeds us (our community, our planet, etc)

Well, we could eliminate corporate subsidies, for one. It wouldn't curb these giants all that much I presume, but they and other large corporations do receive substantial subsidies.

Big gov't and big business go together.

The obvious answer is that if an industry or company is a monopolistic or oligopolistic rent-seeker, then it should be nationalized or converted to a public utility.

Do you want web search, or logistics, or OS development, or air transport, or social media to be government controlled? (I disagree that any of those are monopolies, but people occasionally bellyache about those as possibly uncompetitive markets.)

When I think about my experiences with other government services, I’m not hopeful that they’d do a job I’d be interested in having done.

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