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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

This is why "promises" and "industry self regulation" are meaningless. People need government to protect them from companies' greed, which here means: regulatory agencies with teeth.

"Self regulation" only works when there is a monetary incentive for companies to keep their word, for example in ecological agriculture.

As for mitigation, does anyone know if MVNO users are also subjected to their data being sold?

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Self regulation works in industries in which there aren't significant barriers to entry.

Unfortunately, Telecommunications is notoriously asset heavy and complex and the historical lack of competition creates behemoths with outsized influence in politics. The FCC then is effectively powerless barring the election of a president who personally cares about the matter.

In sum, self regulation works in free markets. You would switch to a better carrier if there were one, I'm certain.

Are today's government officials more starstruck with or paid off by big corporations than they were back in the Microsoft antitrust era? Big business gets away with so much bad behavior today but, in the US at least, it seems like years go by and nobody cares enough to pass regulation to preserve the basic right to privacy.

With notable exceptions, today's political campaigns are often financed by wealthy individuals and companies. The type of politicians which receive contributions are, unsurprisingly, the type whose views best align with those individuals and companies. This funding is instrumental in lifting many of these politicians into office. When a question of political control or regulation of companies arises, it is also unsurprising that these politicians often see things from a certain perspective.

Corporations aren’t allowed to “finance” “political campaigns.” When OpenSecrets says stuff like “Google” contributed $X million to Democrats, it’s lying. What really happens is Google employees contributed that money.

While on paper there is are still limits on direct contributions to campaign organizations, the Citizen's United decision (combined with SpeechNOW vs. FEC) enables companies to instead donate to SuperPACs which are in theory independently controlled. I personally believe the distinction is for all intents and purposes meaningless. Doubly so when considering how little enforcement of the separation has actually been pursued.

So, yes, I do believe companies finance political campaigns. Whether the money flows through campaign organizations is not an important distinction to me.

It’s not a matter of what you “believe.” In election law, the “campaign” is a specific thing and financing it is something with specific meaning. Having an independent entity run ads because it happens to support that candidate is not “financing the campaign.”

Leaving that aside, SuperPACs account for just 15% of election spending in 2016. It’s inaccurate to even suggest that corporate money and money from wealthy donors is the dominant factor in campaigns.

While this is technically true, it's de facto false. With the Citizens United ruling, corporations can donate unlimited funds: "[Super PACs] can raise funds from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups without any legal limit on donation size."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee

SuperPACs can’t use that money to “finance campaigns.”

For most intents and purposes this changed with Citizens United v FEC.

What about when the FEC says that Google's PAC donated to particular Republican politicians?

Google’s PAC is just a way to pool donations from Google’s employees. That money can’t come out of the corporate treasury.

That's ostensibly true, but if you talk to people who actually donate to these PACs you find they break down into high-level management (ie: the company itself; people with more-than-normal control over compensation) and "employees who sort of opt-in as a show of support for the company but who have no real idea what the PAC does".

I think it's more than fair to attribute the Google PAC to Google, and not to a diffuse group of Google employees.

The Republican Party’s official position is that business should be as unregulated as possible [1]. So we shouldn’t expect to see any regulatory action under Republican administrations.

Obama focused on blocking mergers among companies with products that they charged consumers for. It looks mainly like the precedent of consumer harm is undefined when the products are free to start with, and no one has gone back to try to patch the hole.

[1] https://gop.com/platform/restoring-the-american-dream/

Dozens of politicians are elected over and over. Richard Byrd from Virginia retired from the Senate in 2010 after 51 years. That's the current "record".

It's similar in the House. John Conyers just stepped down due to scandal after 52 years.

IMO, that there are no term limits is absurd. Thomas Jefferson got it:

https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-jeffers...

As we've improved our understanding of the human brain through neuroscience, and how can see that ideals will get lodged in people's brains and not change, having people serve that long just leads to stagnant idealism controlling politics.

We’re in a decades long reaction to government regulation that pervades the west. The government used to tell airlines and trucking companies what routes they could sell and what prices they could charge. That level of government regulation proved to be such a disaster, that everybody abandoned it starting in the 1980s. As a result, you have an entire generation of administrators, on both sides of the aisle, who grew up with an extreme aversion to government intervention.

> As for mitigation, does anyone know if MVNO users are also subjected to their data being sold?

As a Google Fi user I am very interested in this.

And forced arbitration of class claims has destroyed the private accountability mechanism. Government is literally the only option.

Out of curiosity, how do they force arbitration? Do companies have military personnel they send to threaten those who want to sue them?

Courts simply reject these cases because you "voluntarily" agreed to waive your right to a a court proceeding.

These courts belong to the government, right? The one that is "literally the only option"?

No. Courts don’t govern. They mediate disputes.

When your state AG or the CFPB are the only way to stop collective harm, it’s a problem. Private rights of action were a thing until recently. I’d imagine a whole lot of these privacy breach issues would be closer to resolved if class actions were holding these big companies accountable.

Then you have the issue of regulatory capture. Often those in charge of the regulations are just as corrupt: selective enforcement is the name of the game.

c'mon lets get real, 'Self Regulating' means someone actually has to be honest of something but as long as there is profit to be made, honesty takes a back seat.

No it doesn't. Self-regulation is often motivated by 1) collective action problems where coordination benefits every company in a way that individual action wouldn't or 2) to ward off govt regulation by showing the govt that you can behave, as an industry.

Neither of these require anything but self-interest and the profit motive from the involved parties.

> collective action problems where coordination benefits every company in a way that individual action wouldn't

Remember we are talking about Capitalist corporations that answer to investors.

Your point is great if there is an incentive to only benefit the consumer. The benefit in this case is to maximize profit at all cost. Profit creed(not greed) is to ingrained the need to maximize profit. Because of that, greed is the ultimate driver against achieving 'self regulation', hence the reason why we have gov regulations in the first place.

> Your point is great if there is an incentive to only benefit the consumer.

The entire point of my comment was explicitly claiming that this isn't required in order for regulation to benefit companies' bottom-line. I'll repeat: there are collective action problems where coordination (between companies) benefits every party (company) in a way that individual (company) action wouldn't, even when the coordination takes the form of constraints on individual behavior. My comment was assuming the model of corporations as solely profit-maximizers, and it still occurs under that assumption.

It's fairly basic game theory. If the defect-defect equilibrium leaves everyone worse off, and defect-cooperate leaves the defector better off than cooperate-cooperate would, then then under certain fairly reasonable assumptions, putting constraints on the behavior of all parties (i.e., regulation) makes the cooperate-cooperate equilibrium stable in a way it otherwise wouldn't be.

Things like the MPAA rating system seem to work, even though it is against the financial interests of studios.

There is a perfectly good and time tested alternative to regulatory agencies:

Promises in the form of legally binding contracts.

Frankly, given carrier behavior, re-nationalizing telecom starts looking appealing.

If you're concerned with privacy from government, don't be - you already lost that war.

If you're concerned with a drop in innovation, don't be - we're already far behind most of the rest of the developed world.

If you're concerned about prices going up, don't be - we already pay insanely high rates compared to peer-countries.

Welcome to the "free" "market".

One reason to be more concerned about privacy in a nationalized communication network is because it removes a middle man - one who cares at least a little about PR backlash - from the current system. In a nationalized system, there is likely much less friction for a bureaucrat to block entire classes of content than there is today (where they need to deal with a handful of companies whose goal is to make money rather than silence dissident opinion).

> If you're concerned with a drop in innovation, don't be - we're already far behind most of the rest of the developed world.

Not convinced by that - mobile telephony is pretty equal in technological innovation across most of the developed world (LTE rolled out, VoLTE rolled out by most carriers, 5G in planning), and handsets are pretty much the same for all markets.

I am much more worried about the government spying for my phone than about corporations spying for my phone. All that corporations want is money.

I agree with you, in theory. But these days, with the revolving door between gov leadership and corporate leadership (1) this is a distinction without much of a difference.

And we all probably know about the vast data collection by the PRISM program (2), and access given to tech databases by the Freedom Act (3). And of course our current president signed 702 rauthorization last Jan. (4) so this cozy relationship could continue.

I guess my point is that it sure feels like we’re in a pretty hopeless state, given the deep ties between business and government.

At one time I was not so cynical about this topic. But after seeing the inside of the political process in both campaign work and working in the defense industry, my eyes have been opened.

The only solution involves political activism on topics most people either don’t understand or don’t care about.

(1)https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-revol...

(2)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_progra...

(3)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act

(4)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveil...

Governments tend to have quite a bit of money.

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