Silicon Valley's Regulatory Exceptionalism Comes to an End
lawfareblog.com
lawfareblog.com
1)Silicon Valley surrendered the high ground in terms of free speech. In the past, Silicon Valley at least used to preach a near absolute commitment to free speech. Now, they don't anymore.
2) Consolidation of content. Before, the internet was very distributed. Number of nights a 1000 poeple might regularly visit could be in the thousands. Now, a significant number of people just visit Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or one of a maybe a dozen top sites. This makes enforcing regulations much easier.
3) Silicon Valley managed to pull off the near impossible feat of angering both sides of the political spectrum at the same time. The left was angered by the perception that the tech companies', especially Facebook's lackluster enforcement of policies allowed Donald Trump to be selected President. The right was angered by the apparent enforcement of political correctness at the expense of free speech. In addition, it became clear with this election that many in silicon valley despised the Right. Thus, Silicon Valley was left with few defenders.
4) Governments realize how disruptive tech can be to entrenched power structures. Things like the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump's election would have been much more difficult without the Internet and social media in partiy. The powerful across the gloves in China, Russia, EU, and now the United States have realized that an uncontrolled Internet can be a huge danger to their ongoing status.
Put all these together and it is very likely that this is just the first wave of further regulation of Silicon Valley.
"The evil statists are only bringing down the hammer because the glorious technologists DARED to threaten their power!"
The reality is that what's driving this is the end of the honeymoon phase with tech. There used to be a general sense of trust in the big tech companies. People could take Google's "Don't Be Evil" stance seriously. This very comment has this view as its unspoken premise, that the tech companies are good and glorious and it's outside forces that are harmful and want to suppress them. As a result, they were treated with a special hands-off approach in most areas.
It was the tech companies themselves that eroded that trust over the last decade + through their behavior and interaction with people. As a result, there's no longer that store of goodwill and a willingness to extend them special treatment, so now they get treated like every other company.
Because, of course, whatever they tried to sell the world, they WERE just like any other company the whole time. They just had a shinier surface.
Reality is slow to catch up to new things, but it is utterly inevitable.
These regs will likely turn technology into yet another entrenched power structure. You won't be able to bootstrap a video hosting service as easily anymore if you need to provide a lot of moderation services, hire a legal team to keep you above board on all the requirements, etc.
There might not be another facebook or google if you need facebook or google money to even get started.
The average website owner need not worry about SESTA, for example, because they can easily take individual action on an individual violation of the law as they discover it. But a giant corporation who knows that they likely have violations numbering in the five digits needs a compliance department to handle all of it.
Startups will not be heavily restricted by regulation, because by the time their regulatory requirements are challenging, they'll just need to factor the additional costs into their scale-up plans. And on the contrary, the increased requirements for large players will add cost and challenge to the established players that will likely make room for new startups to take advantage of and work in under the margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
...so if Google gets severely impacted by regulations, they have the money, connections, and power to get the rules (or at least their enforcement) altered. Small players just go out of business and we forget about them.
See all the community banks and hospitals that have been getting punished in the last ten years. Big banks and big hospitals are figuring out all the new changes just fine. But the disparate outcomes are clear enough that I am surprised by arguments that regulations are good for little players and bad for small ones.
The average, maybe. But consider a hobbyist-operated website used by millions. Proactive compliance is just not possible for everyone.
The truth is, the powerful have come to realize "free speech" being protected was only a safe position for them when people were unable to organize en mass without serious sacrifices. Now that they have, they feel a need to make it stop.
It is the same reason they killed Unions and tried to kill Protesting. Both are threats to those in power. Online organizational ability is another threat and they are testing the waters on punishing people there as well. They can't stop it, just reduce it.
Thank goodness that we are close to having the tools we need to decentralize a broad array of the applications we use the internet for today. If anything the introduction of regulation will accelerate this -- it's certainly easy to imagine a decentralized Facebook and Twitter that is immune to any form of government control beyond shutting down access to the Internet itself. Hopefully the idea of regulating online discussion and sharing on social media will soon be as absurd a proposition as trying to regulate the web as a whole.
Having the tools has never been the problem, getting people to use them is. You don't know the meaning of the words "total, utter disinterest" until you've tried to convince a non-technical person to use a federated alternative to Facebook.
Good design costs money because most people won't do it for free (as they would do other things as evidenced by OSS out there today.) The fact someone can run an ICO to fund the development of a well designed decentralized Facebook that once launched is effectively self-sustaining is encouraging.
..which is why Facebook and Google supported SESTA.
That said, what we really need is GDPR type regulation to come to the US. Not all regulation is bad, and privacy violations have been completely out of control for far too long.
Original: https://internetassociation.org/introduction-stop-enabling-s...
Reversed: https://internetassociation.org/statement-in-support-of-the-...
If the FBI hadn't found an alternate route to the contents of that phone, it's very possible Apple would have been forced into a high stakes legal battle with the FBI, and subsequently could have triggered a draconian legislative response. The seriousness with which Tim Cook took the issue and his highly public responses at the time is testament to how badly (for encryption advocates) that could have turned out. The FBI are still very publicly criticizing Apple's stance recently too.
There are no shortage of politicians out there who see things like mandated back doors for law enforcement as a great idea, and all it will take is the next San Bernadino style stand-off to throw this thing back into the public consciousness. I strongly believe proposals to regulate encryption on consumer devices will absolutely rear their ugly head again in the future. Encryption technology had a long history of legal regulation too, wasn't really until the Clinton administration that much of this was rolled back.
Every time this comes up, I am unable to simultaneously reconcile the the fact that backdoor are inevitably bad for almost everyone, while at the same time we, as people created a society to govern us, and the law enforcement of this society needs to do its job.
To me this boils down to a fundamental, and for me unanswered question about the relationship between society i.e. social structures/government/etc and individuals, and how the society behaves like a living organism of its own, with its own motivations that are often in stark opposition to the motivations of its constituent pieces, and how to find a good path forward.
Or did it end with Intel? They spent the entire 1990s holding a regulatory & anti-trust settlement party. [1]
Or did it end with the 12 years of anti-trust pursuit of IBM?
There's actually nothing new going on here. The new titans, the same as the old titans, running up against cultural and political fears of unchecked power.
[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/data-center/int...
I recall that during the "Arab Spring" Facebook was heralded as a force for good precisely because it did undermine political processes (if those processes were considered to be authoritarian/tyrannical by the US government).
At the status quo, any politician is at risk of being killed by an angry mob just like Gaddafi if they fail to outbid their opponents. CA showed us that by profiling users it's possible to skew the perception of the public on issues in dramatic ways that are not necessarily in line with the truth at all.
Unlike mass media propaganda, the validity of these messages are not discussed because everyone gets a different message. Even if you try to outbid your opponent, it may not help without reverse engineering their propaganda algorithm.
Even if the Arab spring was an organic outcome, there's no reason why you can't achieve the same effect with bots, data and a creative team of copywriters and graphic artist.
In the former state, ethics and good faith suffice. John Postel could hand out IP addresses, and people followed his lead to 'be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept'. Forums like Usenet were a small group of geeks - read the Etiquette FAQ, and just don't be an ahole. 'Assume good faith' is a guideline somewhere (I forget where). But when there is a high value asset to be had, the economics of money and power take over. There are bad people who will ignore all ethics and public good and take every advantage they can, driving their competition to do the same in order to survive.
When Facebook was a bunch of college friends sharing stories and pictures, those people didn't care. When it's a way to exert unprecedented influence on the public, that gets intense attention from government propaganda operations and their corporate counterparts. It was predictable that it would happen.
In the latter environment, 'don't be an ahole' doesn't work any more; I don't think Putin read the Usenet Etiquette FAQ (and his people read the HN guidelines only to find a way to use them to their advantage). Regulations become necessary to protect the weak and all of society from bad actors.
[0] There's probably a better way to conceptualize it, but I can't think of it right this moment.
Once you’re involved in everything from healthcare, and automobiles, to drone strikes, you’re sll grown up and the training wheels need to die. The alternative is that this pressure continues to build and the public demands extreme regulation without understanding what they’re regulsting.
Tl;dr grow up, or they’ll come for the good (encryption) along with the bad (carelessness with human lives a la Uber).