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Comment by spacehome | Hacker News Reader

I was struck that on the surface it looked quite adversarial. Senators were trying to ask fairly pointed questions (despite any technical ignorance). But underneath the surface, the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it. I'm sure they're going to collaborate to find something that works well for both of their interests. We're witnessing the death of the free internet. It was a nice experiment while it lasted.

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it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations.

If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at it from the IC perspective FB is too big to fail:

- Remember Palantir worked with CA on the Facebook data it acquired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721

- Remember how confident in May 2016 Thiel was of a Trump presidency and when he openly started endorsing Trump? Was he operating with more knowledge than available to the general public: http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/

- His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting now: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do...

- Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal...

- This is who runs PRISM: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism

Oh and Palantir enables Immigration Agents to Access Information From the CIA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827

Also more uncomfortable questions: https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349

Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time.

We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases.

Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data.

When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF).

Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc.

That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally.

Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody.

I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.

I really doubt this is true, given how poorly targeted advertising performs, how much stuff credit-reporting agencies get wrong, and how much stuff intelligence services miss.

I'm sure they have a lot of data, but like anyone else, it's dirty data, and it's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

What measure of proof do you require?

PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases. The successful example I remember was matching MOs from a set of crimes in multiple areas and then identifying all the persons matching the profile who could also be in those areas at those times.

> What measure of proof do you require?

How about a single targeted advert for a product I want to buy? (Note: products I already bought and then start seeing tons of advertisements for don't count)

> PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases.

Did it actually help solve those cases? I haven't heard of any dramatic drops in unsolved murders, or huge numbers of cold cases being closed.

If they really do "effectively know everything about everybody", they're keeping damn quiet about it.

Man, I really wish the paranoia around Palantir would die. It's a federated database search system, and that's it. It searches multiple databases, and returns combined results. With all this complete paranoia around it as a company, people seem to have the impression that it's magically summoning data out of thin air, when in reality it's a glorified JOIN statement (obviously a simplification, but you get the sentiment).

Yeah, Thiel is more conservative than most big names in tech, but that's not surprising given that Palantir started focused on the national defense space.

Oh, and "PRISM"? Yeah, that's just a data importer. Completely separate from the secret CIA project, it's just a classic naming conflict. It was originally named "Palantir Data Importer" or something of that ilk, but Palantir loves fancy names, so re-branded it Prism (which is actually a clever name, as prisms takes white light and separates it into colors, much like the importer takes unstructured or semi-structured data and separates the entities and relationships).

Source: Am former Palantir engineer

Here's the Palantir section of the hearing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10...

SEN. MARIA CANTWELL (D-WASH): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome Mr. Zuckerberg.

Do you know who Palantir is?

ZUCKERBERG: I do.

CANTWELL: Some people refer to them as a Stanford Analytica. Do you agree?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I have not heard that.

CANTWELL: Okay.

Do you think Palantir taught Cambridge Analytica, as press reports are saying, how to do these tactics?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I do not know.

CANTWELL: Do you think that Palantir has ever scraped data from Facebook?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not aware of that.

...

CANTWELL: Have you heard of Total Information Awareness? Do you know what I'm talking about?

ZUCKERBERG: No, I do not.

CANTWELL: Okay. Total Information Awareness was, 2003, John Ashcroft and others trying to do similar things to what I think is behind all of this — geopolitical forces trying to get data and information to influence a process.

So, when I look at Palantir and what they're doing; and I look at WhatsApp, which is another acquisition; and I look at where you are, from the 2011 consent decree, and where you are today; I am thinking, “Is this guy outfoxing the foxes? Or is he going along with what is a major trend in an information age, to try to harvest information for political forces?”

And so my question to you is, do you see that those applications, that those companies — Palantir and even WhatsApp — are going to fall into the same situation that you've just fallen into, over the last several years?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not — I'm not sure, specifically. Overall, I — I do think that these issues around information access are challenging.

To the specifics about those apps, I'm not really that familiar with what Palantir does. WhatsApp collects very little information and, I — I think, is less likely to have the kind of issues because of the way that the service is architected. But, certainly, I think that these are broad issues across the tech industry.

> CANTWELL: Have you heard of Total Information Awareness? Do you know what I'm talking about?

> ZUCKERBERG: No, I do not.

Hard to believe someone who has spent the past decade looking at how to monetize data has never heard of TIA.

I mean, it's probably more convincing than "I'm not really that familiar with what Palantir does".

Your average Ivy League CS grad is familiar with the bottom-line summary of what Palantir does - all the claims about secret projects aside, they do give tech talks and put product demos online. Zuckerberg is claiming he's not even familiar with that stuff?

The initial section about Palantir was very well rehearsed - Zuckerberg immediately clammed up.

oh and Sarah Jeong just now:

"Going to tweet out amounts received by each Congressperson from Facebook since 2014 as they speak in this hearing"

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/984075571981266944

this is worth gold!

Sweet! There should be a rule where, whenever a politician is on TV talking about some subject, there needs to be a graphic in the corner showing the total dollar amount of donations that politician received from the 3 most relevant companies.

Like Amazon that Amazon prime feature, X-ray! That would be amazing.

Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.

> Facebook never was part of 'the free internet', in fact it is a force strongly against the free internet.

That's the point.

Imagine the result of all this is a piece of legislation that doesn't hamper Facebook in any significant way but imposes large fixed compliance costs on tech companies.

Facebook is huge, they pay the costs without even noticing. People who want to dethrone Facebook, or replace it with some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead.

Facebook gets what they want and the Senators get to look like they've done something, meanwhile nobody pay attention to the fact that the same Senators are about to get a load of campaign money from Facebook.

> some decentralized alternative that actually protects privacy, are killed in the cradle by the new fixed overhead

I don't follow you, how would a decentralized (and presumably non commercial) alternative be affected by this?

Besides the fact that legislation is typically a local affair Facebook would have an advantage versus another commercial player, and whoever wrote the law would most likely focus on those aspects that would have an impact on such players as well.

So for a non-commercial, decentralized and/or federated alternative this would be a huge boon, rather than that it would be killed in the cradle.

> I don't follow you, how would a decentralized (and presumably non commercial) alternative be affected by this?

Are you anticipating a specific exemption for non-commercial operations? That hasn't been true historically.

For example, the notice and takedown rules in the DMCA require you to register an agent with the copyright office. There is no good reason for this when you have the info listed right on your site, but it makes a great trap for the unwary for anyone without the resources to hire a lawyer to tell them that, and causes grief for distributed networks where it isn't clear who should have to register and it almost certainly isn't the case that every participant actually has. Because the law came about as a negotiation between the big players with nobody even considering how it would affect small businesses and individuals or network architectures different from the then-dominant ones.

Or the regulatory nightmare in finance that has successfully destroyed a huge number of small nonprofit credit unions, or the medical industry where none shall enter without an entire law firm on retainer, etc.

People have just gotten used to it so they don't see what's missing. The idea that any individual or even pair of individuals could conduct a medical trial in today's environment is quite ridiculous, so nobody expects it to happen and then no one is surprised when it doesn't. But that was once the source of most of the progress in modern medicine before it was de facto prohibited by law.

It may be true that federated systems won't be affected because of a lack of enforcement, but that's cold comfort. Plenty will opt out of a system where they have to break the law in order to operate, even if the law is almost never enforced. And laws that everyone violates but are almost never enforced are inherently dangerous because they give the government a pretext to go after whoever they want for unrelated and pernicious reasons.

Yup. Textbook regulatory capture.

Ok so what’s the solution? Is the only other option no regulation and accepting the fact that what Cambridge Analytica did is going to be the way things are done from now on? Just wondering what the constructive path for advocacy is now.

> Ok so what’s the solution? Is the only other option no regulation and accepting the fact that what Cambridge Analytica did is going to be the way things are done from now on? Just wondering what the constructive path for advocacy is now.

A little antitrust enforcement certainly wouldn't hurt -- stop letting Facebook buy its competitors. More competition would do two things. First, less people on each network, so less impact for each mistake. Second, more competition creates market pressure. It's much more problematic for Facebook to be able to do this and get away with it because they have a monopoly and users have no alternative, than for them to do this and lose all their users to a vibrant competitive marketplace, serving as a lesson to anyone who would do the same thing.

It also wouldn't hurt if the government would just overtly support decentralized systems. The internet itself, The Tor Project and most of the other decentralized technologies we have all came out of government research grants. Which we don't do nearly as much as we used to in this space.

We could also roll back some of the existing bad laws -- like SESTA -- that are already making it harder for small players to compete.

I think that was his point. Facebook's ascension corrodes the Free Internet

On an unrelated note: I always wonder how people nowadays identify the Internet with WWW. There are so many ways to use the Internet in a way not even remotely related to the current power struggles between greedy businesses and duped users, with incompetent governments meddling in from time to time.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that less than 5% of current internet users have ever knowingly and intentionally used "the internet" via any protocol that wasn't HTTP. Even that might be an overestimation.

Companies like Google and Facebook have effectively turned the web into "the internet" for the vast majority of people. Even e-mail has essentially become "the web" for most people thanks to services like gmail capturing so many uninformed and unsophisticated users. IRC, too, is mostly lost to services like Slack.

Corporate interests have mostly erased the concept of an open, decentralized, multi-protocol internet from the public consciousness.

Could you elaborate?

The Internet is the infrastructure plus a set of protocols, with HTTP being just one of them. The protocols the most heavily used tend to be regulated (at least in the EU...), the rest - not so much. So each time I hear someone talking about "the death of the Internet" when they mean regulation related to the WWW, I feel at least we as "hackers" should remember this important distinction because sooner or later, once the web becomes even more regulated, we might want to turn to these remaining protocols in order to communicate more freely, and without the blessing of people who create web browsers (that became so complex you practically can't compete here unless you have tons of money).

There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network.

I can see this becoming so bad that the only way to communicate freely would be to tunnel our stuff through TLS on port 443. (That is, doing what looks like HTTPS.)

> There's a flip side to this: in part thanks to this lack of regulation, anything outside the popular protocols tend to be blocked in an increasing number of network.

That is definitely not the result of a lack of regulation. The networks doing that are predominantly not public networks like Comcast, they're private internal corporate networks. The issue is they're a large enough minority that they can't be ignored. But that can't be fixed with regulation of public networks.

In fact, it's caused by certain regulations and pseudo-regulations like PCI-DSS, which require the default-deny policies you're referring to.

I stand corrected, thanks.

That's true. Fortunately, if everything else fails, we should always be able to connect on 443 via stunnel for example, no matter what protocol we use. That's the price to pay for the net getting more complex and more abused.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Corporate networks got rid of plain old proxies that just passed anything SSL on 443 many years ago. In order to meet regulatory requirements to record employee communications, pretty much every US company of any decent size uses a proxy (blue coat, zscaler, palo alto, etc.) that executes MiTM attacks on all SSL traffic. If it's something other than HTTP over SSL, or if it's to a blocked hostname, it won't go through.

The sad part is that a lot of people don't even seem to care.

When my relatively small company announced that they were installing a Palo Alto firewall and that everyone needed to install client side certificates in order for web browsers to continue working, it set off major alarm bells in my head that led to one conclusion -- "No more non-work related web browsing at the office. No exceptions."

Most of my coworkers (albeit mostly those in support and not developers, but still people at least somewhat familiar with the way computers work) only cared that they'd still be allowed to visit Facebook during the day.

I was assured that "nobody was actively looking at employee web traffic" but that doesn't matter. They didn't even think it was a big deal to put this new monitoring in writing until I made a big stink out of it, and they added this to the employee handbook:

>Each of these communication avenues are subject to monitoring by the IT Security Manager, a supervisor, or the President. When using any of these communications, be aware that a business record is made, which is retained by the company and becomes the company's property. This business record may potentially contain sensitive personal information related to the sites you are viewing and into which you are logging on, including user/password information. If you do not wish to share such information, it is suggested you do not access those items using [employer]'s network.

We can go one step further, and put our payload into an encrypted body in an innocent looking HTTP request. Thus begins the game of cat and mouse…

I couldn't agree more, the world wide web is definitely just a piece of the internet. I remember the battles over chat protocols, the scourge of p2p protocols and even the move from email to webmail and back again.

The web has always been a bit contentious for instance the browser wars are still being fought in some way even today. The problem is that the web is where developers were able to build without concern over who the powers that be even were but now the web has been turned into a creepy surveillance machine.

Our current president even paid Cambridge Analytica to socially engineer all of us. Turns out the tricks that hackers used to employ have been appropriated for use by the web monopolies. I can't think of a way in which this turns into anything good for the average person.

  the scourge of p2p protocols

Scourge? Which of the peer-to-peer networking protocols is a scourge?

Surely, you aren't suggesting p2p itself is conceptually an abomination in general?

How many people use it this way? Internet without people doesn't have much use. Internet with only geeks on is better, but still pretty limited.

I operate my own mail server. To send and receive email, I use the imap and smtp protocols. No need for the web there, unlike Gmail captives.

There was this thing called "newsgroups", some day before my time. Wasn't the web.

IRC is still a thing. So is XMPP. Isn't the web.

I'm not sure what you mean by "internet without people". There are plenty of people outside of HTTP.

I use Gmail over IMAP and SMTP, only logging in through the web to change server-side mail filtering rules.

But yes, as much as I love the web, it's funny how people forget (or never realized) there are other protocols.

> less freedom on the Internet

The regulations should be non-technology specific. Simply it should provide rules about customer/user data. Even if I use pigeons. (But not RFC 1149.)

Some regulatory requirements are manageable by a large, established company but not a startup. For instance, requiring human review of user content is going to be tough in a high growth phase.

America needs to look at citizen privacy laws like they have in Canada and the E.U.

For example if I log into the Facebook business manager for a company I can see tons of data on Americans but not nearly as many details for Canadians, it's because of these laws. The new E.U. laws are even stricter with regards to personal data and how it's used, no matter who you are.

Why there is no demand for this level of protection in the States by its citizens and representatives is crazy.

Anyone who expects goodwill from Facebook, Google or any company is seriously misguided. Privacy laws need to be in place, actual laws that are bound my the federal legal system, and not just state regulations.

> Why there is no demand for this level of protection in the States by its citizens and representatives is crazy.

The U.S. is culturally much more opposed to government interference in citizens' interactions, compared to Europe. The U.S. started as a rebellion against an authoritarian government.

I suspect this is because a lot of the first Europeans who migrated to North America were the self-reliant type who actually would flourish best if left alone. What we see as help or protection, they see as interference. (This doesn't explain Canada. Inexplicability is one of Canada's many charms.)

Canada is still a constitutional monarchy so that's a difference from the U.S. that has shaped its culture.

But that's exactly how it works in many other lines of businesses, e.g. in construction. Many small companies can't provide compliance with the required codes, so they're forced to work their way up the ladder slowly or create joint ventures. Sure, that way you probably can't become a billionaire in a few years, but also bridges fall down less often because of it, so in the end it's not necessarily a bad thing for the society.

Software and construction are not analogous. For one thing, no one is talking about regulation of social media that has to do with life and death matters. Are you proposing that no one should be allowed to create a video sharing platform unless they can prove in advance they can actively monitor all uploaded content, regardless of how popular they get?

> For one thing, no one is talking about regulation of social media that has to do with life and death matters

You may not believe that if you live in Myanmar or Kenya. Large amounts of behavioral information in the hands of the wrong people can absolutely be a life or death issue.

I'm not saying there are no life and death matters, I'm saying no one is talking about regulation that would address them. I could be wrong, I'm not current regarding the relevance of Facebook and those countries.

What makes you think large companies are more capable of developing reliable, secure software?

Huh? Isn't the point of this whole comment chain that large companies are able to comply with regulations that protect user safety that small companies might not be able to? In that case it's self evident why a large company is better able to protect user safety.

Organization size doesn't really correlate to software reliability or security. But that's not where the problems with Facebook and online privacy generally are. Any org of any size can follow rules like not sharing user information with third parties (though eliminating business models dependent upon that could be limiting).

Smaller organizations would have a much harder time complying with legal changes that significantly erode the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA that make platforms not responsible for the actions of their users.

That’s assuming the regulations work instead of just throw obstacles in the way of new companies.

> That’s assuming the regulations work instead of just throw obstacles in the way of new companies.

Not only that, laws have a tendency to set a particular model in stone.

The model large companies use is to collect everything they possibly can and then use bureaucratic processes to control access.

The model small companies and individuals use is to minimize the data they collect and use technical means to ensure that the company has no access to the customer's data at all. This obviously tends to be more secure.

But if the bureaucratic process is required by law regardless of whether it's really protecting anything, the more secure model becomes impossible -- you have to collect all the data because it's the only way to make enough money to pay for the bureaucratic overhead.

> The model small companies and individuals use is to minimize the data they collect and use technical means to ensure that the company has no access to the customer's data at all.

There have been a zillion startups that have had collecting user data baked into their business model.

> There have been a zillion startups that have had collecting user data baked into their business model.

And they can rot like Facebook. Nobody is trying to save them. The problem is you're destroying anyone whose model isn't that.

Not sure what your definition of free internet is, but mine is one where the users are free, not the businesses.

Since when are businesses not users of the internet?

We obviously mean freedom for individual users lacking the resources of big organisations to defend themselves and protect their own rights.

Come on this isn't a game of semantics.

The experiment referred to was one where the web was a level playing field that didn't differentiate between different classes of users. The fact you see this is as a silly semantic point underscores the original point about that experiment being over.

Edit: I can only speculate as to why people don't like this, but in case it makes a difference it's intended only as historical background for people who missed the start of the experiment.

I think business are providers not users.

Those two things are positively correlated

Not necessarily. The ultimate aim of each business is to crush the competition and become a monopoly. If they succeed, and we do have some de facto monopolies now, they can do whatever they want and users/customers have little or no choice. Regulations limiting the power of companies are designed do counteract that.

It doesn't matter if Google crushes the competition in search. You do not actually have to use their search engine, that's part of the freedom of the Internet. Further, you're not entitled to their search engine, that's also a critical aspect of actually having the freedom to use the Internet as you see fit.

They can't do whatever they want. So long as the Internet is free from overbearing government restrictions and the ISPs aren't segmenting it (locking users into restricted sandboxes), you can go wherever you want without using Google search, or shopping at Amazon, or using Windows, or using Chrome, or using Facebook, or shopping on eBay, or paying with PayPal.

The only real limiting premise as it pertains to the Internet, are the ISPs and the backbones.

So long as you can get on a free Internet, engineers can perpetually build their own new products at will, crafting new tech universes that didn't exist before. They have been doing that non-stop in every category for the last two plus decades since the Web took off.

Don't like Chrome because it managed to acquire 99% of the market? Fine, spin up your own clone and put it out there. Or use Firefox or Edge a dozen other lesser used competitors.

Don't like Go or C# or Java? Fine, use one of 37 other languages.

Don't like Google search? Fine, use Bing or DuckDuckGo or a dozen other less well known search engines. Build a new one maybe, nobody is stopping you, maybe it's time for a new search paradigm.

Don't like AWS? Fine, use Hetzner, or Digital Ocean, or a dedicated box provider, or Vultr, or Linode or Google Cloud, or Azure, or build your own new competitor.

There are vastly more options today, in essentially every way, than there were in 1995 or 2005.

The free Internet has worked extraordinarily well. It has never stopped producing alternatives, and alternatives have never stopped existing. The only thing that can crush it is government regulation, specifically if they fuck that up.

I don't disagree with you. That is why I said positively correlated, rather than perfectly. My comment intended to concur with the parent comment: "the two parties here have fairly well aligned goals -- less freedom on the Internet. The senators want to show that they're doing something, and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it."

We most likely will not see any trust-busting as you're describing here. We'll more likely just see more side-effect legislation like the net neutrality repeal or FOSTA/SESTA that will just consolidate power for a few parties and the government at the expense of small businesses.

I don't really understand what the big deal is here. All this data was given to facebook. Ads are inherently propaganda, how is the use of this data any different? If I decide in my terms of service that i can use your data however i want, including mining your messages and selling it to an evil dictator, i should be able to do that. If you agree, you are free to use my plateform, if not, thats fine too, you can't. me, and a group of people whom i've paid have developed this app, how can you restrict my right to do as i please with everything that comes out of it? If i want to shut down facebook tomorrow, i can. If it's against what is in my terms of service, sue the living shit out of me, and force me to update my terms to reflect reality or delete the app.

>Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it

Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat.

Beyond that and even if they make it slightly harder to build a social network in the future it doesn't mean that a reasonable amount of regulation is not worthwhile. If you want to start a bridge-building company you'll have to abide by a massive amount of rules, yet I'm not really sure I want to let the "completely free market" decide what a safe bridge looks like.

The concept of regulatory or legislative capture actually a mainstream one; hardly deserves the conspiracy label. Further, the author's claim is well supported by ongoing legislative efforts as well as those efforts of the administrative agencies. There's a legitimate and level-headed reason to have concern.

I'd call it skepticism or pessism at worst.

I'm not saying that regulatory capture doesn't happen, I'm saying that it doesn't necessarily happen every time a new piece of regulation is introduced. Saying that any hypothetical regulation introduced after this Facebook fiasco (and all the other data breaches of late) will benefit Facebook and hurt competitors is not exactly what I would call level-headed skepticism.

Doesn't mean that we shouldn't be very careful about what comes out of this whole discussion and maybe make our voices heard if we deem it unfair or ineffective but we're not there yet.

> Saying that any hypothetical regulation introduced after this Facebook fiasco (and all the other data breaches of late) will benefit Facebook and hurt competitors is not exactly what I would call level-headed skepticism.

Can you name a piece of US federal legislation regulating a major industry passed in the last, say, 30 years, where this was not the case?

Vehicle safety regulations.

There aren’t very many small or startup auto makers, so it’s hard to assert that safety regulations don’t function as a barrier to entry. Not that it isn’t a good barrier to have!

> There aren’t very many small or startup auto makers, so it’s hard to assert that safety regulations don’t function as a barrier to entry.

Well actually...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...

Notice the number created before vs. after 1967, when the feds started passing vehicle safety regulations.

Also notice how many of those created after 1967 (e.g. Geo, Saturn, Hummer) aren't actually independent, they're just retired marks of the existing incumbents.

Because the safety regulations are designed for huge companies. The companies literally provide cars to the government to be crashed for testing purposes, because destroying a few cars is nothing to Ford or GM.

Ralph Nader would disagree.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/17/ralph-nade...

Easy to say without seeing the proposals.

Regulation can be awful or insignificant.

My state requires strippers to fill out a license and pay 50$. Changed nothing.

However, my state also requires you to put down 1M to start a bank. Thats definitely regulatory capture.

Its too soon to know whats going to be required of data. Databases might become significantly worse to program and require teams to maintain at government standards.

> Regulation can be awful or insignificant.

No benefits at all, really?

Remember pre-regulation leaded gasoline and cars without seat belts?

I think both of those examples had regulation where industry had already moved forward.

I dont know the history of leaded gasoline, but I worked in safety, and car companies were definitely moving toward safe vehicles.

From 1985:

"Auto makers, who have been fighting the introduction of air bags for nearly a decade as too costly and only marginally effective, have gone a long way toward their goal of bypassing the federal regulations. "

http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-19/news/mn-546_1_seat-be...

From 1990:

"But the history of catalytic converters reveals another side of Detroit. The industry refined the technology only after Congress imposed strict limits and deadlines and foreign car makers threatened to develop cleaner engines."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/03/26/a...

From 1985:

"The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, said that the refining industry had been making efforts in anticipation of today's rules to ''insure against future supply disruptions.

'But the announced lead-reduction schedule will create a substantial problem for the refining industry in providing motorists with adequate quantities of high-quality gasoline at reasonable costs,'' the institute's statement said."

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/05/us/epa-orders-90-percent-...

> Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat.

What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Even assuming you have the data, Facebook's value is in the IP and ML algorithms. Facebook sure as hell isn't giving those up.

Even assuming all that, how does it take us further forward than what we have now?

There's a lot of arguments to the effect of 'something needs to be done' but not much detail on what an alternative looks like.

> What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network?

Making scraping of your personal data a statutory right, including the building and distributing of tools for it.

No need to force FB to publish anything, just prevent them from blocking anyone who uses a tool to scrape their own data through the regular UI. This should draw the boundaries of responsibility in the right place.

This would allow e.g. a “messaging” bridge which automatically interfaces with the messages part of the site, and bridges it to any tool (or API) you want. At least per user per account. This would force de facto federation without putting a burden on FB.

But then this brings us back to square 1, "tools" can just scrape user messages/content without authorization and then use that to collect data on those users. If the whole point is to solve the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, this is just going to make the situation 10x worse.

How about "information submitted by a person to a third party is still considered private"?

The disingenuous loophole the government is so fond of whereby you sharing information with a third party suddenly negates ALL expectation of privacy and 4th Amendment protections is a farce. Signing up for Facebook should not be a "first sale" of your personal information or right to privacy.

Of course, no tech company that has ridden the free ride of harvesting personal data would be on board with ANYTHING like that.

They can keep their IP and algorithms if they want, but if I don't consent to the fruits of my existence being fed through them, then that is where it needs to stop.

No company should feel safe with involuntarily increasing a user's digital footprint. Period.

That covers not asking to and being explicitly told not to. A person has an inalienable right to maintain final authority over their digital presence. The only exception that makes sense to me is for the press. Though I haven't thought that implication through completely yet.

I genuinely don't have the answers to your questions. I'm just against shooting off the whole idea that there might be an answer worth considering because of the dogma held by some people that "regulations == bad". Let's wait until we actually see what these people propose (which at this point might very well be nothing at all), then we can scream bloody outrage that our freedom is in danger.

If something needs to be done let's at least give one chance to the people who seem to be trying to do something.

Measures to protect users' data and privacy will not strictly kill a "free" internet -- there are lots of reasonable caveats such as number of active users, total revenue, number of employees that would allow a small business to compete.

I always wonder who is saying things like "reasonable regulations"

Do you run your own company and find the regulations dont require you to hire a multi-thousand dollar legal team at every turn?

Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says wont be exploited?

I worry that my kids will be unable to start businesses due to regulations, or rather their friends wont be able to start businesses. I am a top 4%er and I'll simply pay for the legal teams needed. I know my competition making 40k/yr cannot.

I'll tell you, I've worked for a business small enough to avoid needing to hire a "multi-thousand dollar legal team" and a few of the things that I know happened while I was there leave me very suspicious of the things I didn't know about.

> Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says won't be exploited?

Nope, I'm a normal person, not actually a strawman. As long as there's government, it will be exploited; but, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by arguing that because people will exploit loopholes, we should eliminate (all) regulations. Instead of supporting a representative that tries to eliminate two regulations for every new one, how about supporting a half-intelligent representative?

You're worried people won't be able to start businesses? Where is Facebook's big competition? Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No -- so why are you worried that they won't be able to do something in the future that they can't do now?

>Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No

I disagree with this. I think at the current time they can.

I think you're overestimating how many people who don't read places like Hacker News actually care about this. But I'll admit I could be wrong on that.

In any case, the reason they might be able to at the current time is the blood in the water from the "reasonable regulations" people.

>and Facebook welcomes regulation in order to suffocate would-be competitors with it.

What??? I watched most of it, and while Zuckerberg agreed that legislation in some areas are needed, he was quite clear that most times that he does not think legislation is the answer. He said that they would internally implement things.

Multiple senators kept trying to get direct yes/no if he would support such regulation and he would say "I look forward to my team discussing that with you" when they wanted hard "yes" that he would champion regulation.

So I don't understand your post at all...

What counts as a free internet? Can an internet which is monitored and which the governments in power have ability to enforce penalties of what they consider misuse ever be considered free? How does one decide what material can be outlawed while still maintaining a free internet?

We really do need an Internet Party, the basis of the party is a fair open internet market.

The more you're free to amble around the Web 'liking' things the more data Facebook can accumulate and the more lucrative you become. Why would they want to restrict that?

As for stifling competitors, Facebook actually benefit from a free-for-all Internet because they can watch trends and identify what needs to be done to capture each successive generation of users, slowly folding them into the big Facebook family.

I don't like the company but I don't think they want to lock the Internet down . I reckon they know that will just lead to something really disruptive and destructive that they won't see coming, like some app that spreads by sideloading.

Just the next first step off the current plateau onto a slope of improvement. FB is garbage pork barrel software anyway. Something cooler is coming along right around the corner. The design space is wide open it's just about who can grab more users. FB UX has never really changed much in ten years and old people use it. Need I say more?

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