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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Government-led heavy-handed oversight is so terrible that it also gave us rivers free of coal sludge, products that work as advertised, drugs that have to be tested before they are sold, airplanes that usually don't crash, and cars that are safer, more fuel efficient, and cleaner then they were before mandated seat belts, air bags, emission limits, and mileage gains.

At this point, the nuclear option, like the GDPR, is the only way to align the interests of large data firms with the public.

If you think otherwise, consider how the market punished Equifax for their data breaches. Or Kaiser. Or Target. Or Facebook.

When given the choice between doing the right thing, and the expedient thing, this industry has a long, and shitty track record of always choosing the expedient thing.

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And the patriot act, and prohibition, and on and on. Not sure why pointing out unrelated positive or negative legislation affects the issue at hand. It's disingenuous to debate that way. Back to the issue at hand, I am specifically talking about heavy-handed oversight of the internet. The not-as-heavy-handed internet oversight we either already have or has been attempted is problematic and we should not double down on it. In the absence of a good solution to a problem that exists, we should not make a second problem. We might want it to work, but existing examples have shown us that what we want to work is not enough to make it so.

What are your views on net neutrality?

A bit unrelated as it's more of a physical issue than a digital one, but I'll answer anyways. In general my position on digital public policy is to promote competition and transparency and I'm usually against restrictions and punitive-only measures. Wrt net neutrality, I'd support transparency requirements to increase awareness. With that step in place, if the monopolization of the physical space for wires is not overcome by a now-more-informed citizenry, other steps can be taken. Granted, I find forced monopolization vs monopolization by citizen choice to be very different. I always want citizen choice on digital services, even if that means consciously choosing one others might not like. I could write about this forever, I'll stop here.

Government also gave us concentration camps, Communist blacklists, famines, and a bunch of other “good” stuff. Government gave us Venezuela starvation.

My point is that governments have a “long and shitty track record” too.

Not saying that government is bad, but it’s clear that governments, when given the power, can be far more dangerous than any company. They can do a lot of good as well, but they have a pretty bad track record.

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