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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have the luxury of raging against licensing and regulation because they don't remember the world before these existed.

It's just assumed that most people are honest about their work and the who aren't will be swiftly punished. But in most cases, it's the opposite: the honest people get driven out because scammers can promise the world for a penny because they know they will never deliver.

People were fed up with being swindled left and right, so they decided to get the government to step in. Obviously, they've been highly successful because Libertarians can't even imagine the world as it was 100 years ago.

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The world is also very different than it was 100 years ago. Today we can review a barbershop on Yelp and complain they aren't cleaning their tools. Today we can share digital medical records and delegate decisions to nurse practitioners while having the option to fall back to a doctor if necessary.

There may have been good reasons for certain licensing laws 100 years ago but that doesn't mean those reasons are still valid today.

I remember an unregulated internet. It was better.

The internet has literally never been unregulated.

I'd say it's fairly unregulated. Where else could the silk road, 4chan, or furnitureporn.com exist??

I can put a kilo of cocaine in my trunk and drive on the highway, that does't mean the roads are unregulated.

Very slowly through the postal system.

Didn't regulation create the Internet?

Although if your point is "some regulations are better than others" I definitely agree with you.

Software generally and the internet specifically are relative "wild wests" compared to most industries. Literally anyone can write software or create a website. You don't need any fancy degrees, you don't need a license/certification, and generally speaking you don't really need permission. There's very few things which are "difficult" to do, categories of content which will be difficult to get hosted.

This is slowly getting chipped away though. There's more and more national internet filters, even in relatively free places like UK. There's GDPR, DMCA, SESTA/FOSTA, etc.

Pics or it didn't happen.

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