What does this mean? This is completely self-contradictory. Clearly Facebook has demonstrated that regulation is required. How could Tim Cook possibly still say that the best regulation is no regulation? Clearly Tim should want a healthier tech ecosystem than what we have now and clearly be agrees regulation is needed. Very confusing quote.
- Tim Cook
You are arguing with half of the quotation, and ignoring this other half. He doesn't seem to be advocating self-regulation as a practical policy.
Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on HN again. Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. I don't understand why HN thinks it is better for me to reply like this than in the now-banned reply box below. Oh well, here is my response to the comment below.
> He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.
Ookay, but to me, that says that self-regulation was never going to work, and we should just admit it and move on. We should have had regulation on social media from the beginning. We didn't "mess up" self-regulation. Self-regulation in a hyper-capitalist environment is obviously going to fail. It has been shown time and time again, every day, that corporations will be selfish and do everything they can, legally or not, especially exploiting new dubious legal territory, to extract cash in the short term using dubiously moral and legal methods no matter what.
Corporations should be regulation and it's insane that Tim Cook is just saying "ahhh ooops they messed up, guess it wouldn't work out that way, too bad" but it has always been that way. There was never a world in which Facebook was going to "self-regulate".
To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it.
I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace?
It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users?
The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site.
> We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it.
This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused.
> We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood.
I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened.
> The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.
But look on the bright side: you have way more karma than me, and only one of my comments has been in the grey, ever.
it's not so clear to me that it's "required". and in fact, I think that detail will be an enormous part of the discussion we get to listen to now.
what's certainly apparent though, is that these systems aren't helping us in the way they are currently structured. it may wind up being the case that our governments use regulation to address the issue, but I am not sure it will solve the larger problem of individuals not having the education (& willpower?) to protect themselves from the sorts of disadvantageous relationships that FANG is willing to engage in with them.
Clearly better regulation has always been required. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess.
There's also the fact that "regulation" is a nebulous term that says nothing of what the actual laws are that manage to get passed/implemented. If history is a lesson, we should all be weary of rules written up by people who do not fully understand the domain they are trying to regulate, and who are often lobbied by the very firms that would be most subject to said regulation.
So, no guarantees in the slightest that regulations will bring about a healthier tech ecosystem.