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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Google is also an order of magnitude bigger than a local TV station. They have no excuse.

On the other hand, a local TV station only needs to know and comply with the election laws of their own city. Google needs to know and comply with the local laws of every city in the world.

This isn’t even remotely compelling. Companies have to comply with local laws. “We’re too big to follow the rules” is no excuse.

If you need an example (which you should not) I worked for a small (~100 employee) phone company and we complied with all tax laws nationwide at a federal, state, county and municipality level. That’s a lot of regulation. It was a lot of work. We did it. What’s Google’s excuse?

Yes it is an excuse. Having to comply with all these regional laws to run an ad service has a chilling effect on speech. A small or large one, depending on compliance costs.

A chilling effect on running an ad service, maybe. Following the law is a cost of doing business.

A specific sales tax on newspapers is also cost of doing business. But it is unconstitutional. Making the law really complicated so that it's expensive to follow is the same thing. How can I make an online community and sell ads profitable (like some people I know that ran profitable forums) if I have to vet ads and follow laws of fifty states? The result of such laws being enforced is, these online communities cease to exist, and people aren't able to talk to each other.

The same law Google is accused of not following also applies to newspapers. Are you saying the law is unconstitutional? Is it still ethical for Google to not comply with a law because they believe it is unconstitutional? If this is the case why has Google not offered this defense? Is this a viable defense for breaking other laws?

It looks to me like Google knew what they were doing, knew what the penalties could be and decided it was worth it.

This is the whole point of outsourcing your ads to a company like Google, since they do it at scale they are able to do the due diligence of making sure the ads follow the law. That's one of the things you are paying them for.

I think you're understating this potential breach in law. This isn't a local law of some city in the world - it is a state law in the country these companies were founded in.

And it isn't some odd law that the company would easily forget about - FB and Google both get their revenue from advertising, and political advertising disclosure laws are pretty common. While Washington might have some stricter rules, I'd expect the companies to have a division working on compliance.

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