Hacker News Reader

I don't think the FDA has turned healthcare into a boondoggle, especially since incidents like Thalidomide have revealed why the pharma industry must follow a compliance framework for R&D.

I don't think the USDA has turned agriculture or consumer food into a boondoggle. The Jungle is still a gripping read today, because the conditions of unregulated meatpacking factories were unbelievably grotesque, beyond the absolute worst of contemporary hidden camera food industry scandals.

I don't think the EPA has turned the environment into a boondoggle. Acid rain was an incredibly serious problem in the 1980s that's pretty much behind us today, because regulation of sulfur dioxide emissions in the clean air act incenticized companies to lower their emissions.[0]

[0]https://www.edf.org/approach/markets/acid-rain

Other commenters have accurately pointed out the more directly disagreeable parts of your post, but you have absolutely not provided an accurate representation of the government's historical role in regulated markets. I believe it is more possible to vote in a competent government if you are willing to accept the challenge that it is possible for one to exist.

If you want to see what pharmaceuticals would look like without the FDA, look at the "dietary supplements" industry, which is a drug industry that the FDA is explicitly prohibited from regulating, except in the most narrow truth-in-advertising and product-safety areas. The companies can't be bothered to actually put their claimed active ingredients in their products.

Great, and I'll be the first person arguing against FDA regulation of dietary supplements.

How many people die every year from dietary supplements? Not many.

It's not the governments job to regulate quality. The free market is doing that just fine with sites like labdoor.com

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/supplements-now-more-li...

http://www.whatstheharm.net/herbalremedies.html

Healthcare?

Name me one country with free-market healthcare.

I'll wait.

Also, your friend chose to live in that house, along with all the regulations that came with it. Spare us the sob story.

You clearly don't understand why NN was put in place. All the telcos were prioritizing content, taking advantage of their monopoly power. Starting a telco is serious work, and that isn't simply due to government regulation.

Try again.

Veterinary care. Cheap, quick, high quality...free market and unregulated

It's cheap because it's "ok" to let animals die. If an operation is > $5000, most people just don't do it.

Try applying the same logic to people. It's fine in a Randian utopia but for people who aren't delusional, dying because you need your appendix out kind of sucks ass.

How is it unregulated? People have been sent to jail in US for practicing veterinary medicine improperly.

Hacker News is so full of pedants that I can't use a word without hedging.

Ok, "virutally unregulated compared to human health care". That's what I meant.

You might want to take a step back and understand that these are different markets.

To be fair, they're kinda similar too. Both provide health care to biological organisms. Of course human doctors will probably have better training.

Call us when veterinary care becomes the model for Healthcare anywhere in the world. Your statement is so ridiculous and ignorant that it's self-criticizing.

I don't know, man. You cherry-pick some examples of government inefficiency, but our society benefits greatly from all the rules that the government enforces in order to benefit citizens (e.g. the FDA approving new food products).

First of all, the government has its hands in almost everything, so any list small enough to fit into a hacker news comment is necessarily going to be "cherry picked".

I'm not one of those people who thinks we don't need any regulations. I think they need to be a last-resort when everything else has been tried.

Everything else has not been tried here.

I mean, 5G and the SpaceX satellite internet plan are right around the corner.

It's pretty easy to cherry-pick areas of business which are pretty much a big mess and a boondoggle as well. Especially large businesses. Bureaucracy is inevitable with size. United States high speed is actually dominated by businesses that very accurately could be described as "big messes" and "boondoggles" (check the consumer ratings of big cable companies for instance).

From what I see with these corporations, they are quite happy creating "regulations" of their own that benefit them and do not benefit their competitors. So I'm not getting this reaction, personally, which seems reflexively anti-government because bureaucracy. In a regulatory vacuum, eventually, someone's eventually going to step in with their own "regulations". And these rules will most likely benefit themselves... not the public.

I'm mainly okay with net neutrality because high speed broadband is a quasi monopoly in the United States. If this changes (which includes eliminating any regulations that stifle competition among US high speed Internet), net neutrality is probably not necessary.

> I mean, 5G and the SpaceX satellite internet plan are right around the corner.

Woah, your corner must be awesome.

> I think they need to be a last-resort when everything else has been tried.

Problem is you can always always cry that not everything has been tried and perpetually put off regulation until we try this or that or this again (it might work because things are slightly different now). It's also easy to argue that existing regulations were put in place by morons who had no reason to regulate anything, and ignore all the history and precedent how civilians, businesses and even government entities can't be trusted to operate above board without a gun to their head.

Even if you're naive enough you can see the utopia with limited regulation where everyone acts responsibly and for the greatest goof, plenty of people don't really want to be subjected to the reality of that perpetual experiment. We've had generations, centuries even where people had an opportunity to do the right thing sans regulation and the minute it costs more than $0 those ideals go out the window, if they ever existed.

And certainly seems like some of the nicest places to live are fairly heavily regulated in many aspects. And places that have very little regulation tend to be hellholes of pollution and varying degrees of human suffering and environmental damage.

So where is utopia of meager regulation that can be used as a shining example?

Lasik eye surgery. Veterinary care. Cell phone service (as opposed to landlines). Consumer electronics. Computer software.

I can already hear your objections..."But there's some regulation in all of those!"

Yes, but it's much less than in other fields. The fact that the government is so pervasive that it's very hard to find an example of a truly free market is not an argument against a free market.

What about the internet seems broken to you that loss of net neutrality will fix?

Once the government gets its hands out of the internet, ISPs can finally offer premium internet packages with higher quality bits.

I'm so tired of my bits coming into my house all fuzzy and distorted. Once my ISP replaces their wires with oxygen-free gold-plated fibre, my spotify playlists will sound way more pristine.

>"Net Neutrality" is nothing more than an Orwellian named, amorphous and vague idea that nobody really knows what it means.

Do you really think that? Do you really think nobody knows what it means? The previous policy... was it words someone might understand... or not?

I don't believe that anyone here, without looking it up, could explain what exactly "net neutrality" means, without falling back on talking points and vague aspirational language, rather than what actually is written in the regulations.

For starters, the FCC did an end run around Congress because they couldn't get Congress to pass it, so they had to take previous regulations intended for telephone service and cram a square peg into a round hole with all kinds of promises not to enforce certain parts, etc.

I'll bet 90% of the people reading this comment don't even know what that means.

I think most folks here (and who care elsewhere) get the gist and impact of net neutrality. There's quite a few discussions that seem to illustrate their knowledge pretty clearly. You just have to read them. I mean can you honestly recite the regulations? Would that disqualify your opposition to it?

The gist of your position seems to be the supporters are dumb and you generally don't like government regulation .... and the rest honestly seem like handed out talking points about things like "couldn't get it through congress" in an article about congressional action.

No, my position is that supporters are naive and uninformed, not dumb.

I'm not sure that really changes anything.

Stop pretending that you are smarter than everyone here.

There is a reason why only the telcos want to get rid of NN.

How is internet traffic meaningfully different from phone network traffic? It's all signals carrying data over transmission cables...

I appreciate your posts -- and the few others that voice their ideas that are astray of whatever the current YC-manipulated ethos is.

For one, I have little fucking clue what any of those statements mean. However, from the understanding I have gleaned, I've found to be more close to the metal, than what either, heavily-lobbied side, can offer.

Back to lurking. No place is safe from manipulation. Not [0-9(a-z){0,3}]chan, neither HackerNews. Meritocracy of ideas is dying, etc. etc. ad captandum vulgus.

The problem isn't the idea of "net neutrality". The problem is special interest groups and lobbyists, but those are the same problems we've always had. Nothing's changed.

Admittedly, it could get worse, but the need for "drawing the line" (in this case, deciding what gets regulated) has to be done somewhere, and it seems most of us here think it's a good idea to draw it at what would likely be a critical bottleneck. Perhaps the regulations themselves aren't needed but the high likelihood that they might be made law might encourage ISPs to stay on the friendlier side, so promoting net neutrality is still good.

> "Net Neutrality" is nothing more than an Orwellian named, amorphous and vague idea that nobody really knows what it means.

What are you talking about? Net Neutrality isn't complicated at all, it's just saying that Internet providers need to deliver Internet connections without prioritizing or blocking certain sites/connections.

The only complication is that telcos and businesses have different ideas about how far it should go (ie should zero-rating content be included). This is like arguing that because we have disagreements about the extent of free speech that the entire concept of free speech is just poorly defined government propaganda.

This is nothing like GDPR, this not a government created oligopoly, you're thinking about this completely backwards. Net neutrality decreases government control over the Internet; it enshrines that businesses, states, and governments aren't allowed to control access or play favorites in a freely competitive online market.

There are valid reasons why someone might oppose legislated net neutrality, but "the government taking over" isn't one of them. You lose a lot of credibility when you use words like 'Orwellian' to describe a policy that explicitly makes it harder to censor things.

> Unintended consequences will prevent new technologies from forming (Look at what the GDPR laws are doing to blockchain...must be able to delete your data, you say? And the ink isn't even DRY!)

Preventing new technologies which have undesired consequences (whether intended or not) is an intended consequence of regulation.

> "Net Neutrality" is nothing more than an Orwellian named, amorphous and vague idea that nobody really knows what it means.

The 2015 Open Internet order's rules take up all of 8 pages. You could know what it means if you actually wanted to and were willing to put in a little effort.

(This is a response to a response to my comment by @ppf. That comment is dead, so I cannot reply directly to it)

Sure. Take that document you linked to, and take out the hundreds of pages that are summaries of the rules, recounts of the history of net neutrality regulation, explanations of why we need net neutrality, analysis of the legal authority for the rules, discussion of past court cases on net neutrality, the Commissioner's comments, and all the other extra things in there that are not the rules, and you'll be left with 8 pages that are the actual rules.

To save you some time, the authors of that document have already done that for you, and put the results in APPENDIX A -- FINAL RULES, which starts at page 283 of that particular version [1] of the document.

[1] I've seen other versions that are the same content, but are paginated differently.

Some government regulations are stupid, certainly. Something should probably be done about those. When you start saying that regulation as a whole is stupid--that being allowed to use cheap windows is more important than, say, keeping thalidomide out of the US--is where you lose me.

Upvoted. I disagree strongly but the comment seems like a sincere and valid contribution to the discussion.