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Comment by my_first_acct | Hacker News Reader

> The real problem is that people are selling this bullshit that the only alternatives are someone spying on you through your metaphorical bedroom window or you blindfold every company that interacts with you.

There's a middle ground, called "regulation".

For many decades now there have been rules regulating advertisements ("commercial speech"), sources of addictive behavior (gambling, alcohol, cigarettes), and monopolies. It seems reasonable to propose that these rules should apply to Facebook and other "new media", to the extent that they are ad-supported, may promote addictive behavior, and may be monopolies.

Applying these regulations to the internet does not mean shutting down ad-supported websites, any more than they prevented ad-supported newspapers and TV stations from thriving back in the day.

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Yes, but the dialogue has become unhinged. So many of the critics don’t want reasonable middle-ground regulation. They want to destroy these companies, or have the state take them over and operate them as a public utility. There is no measure of reasonable regulations that doesn’t strip Zuckerberg and Bezos of their wealth and prestige that will satisfy many critics.

There was a story yesterday about how Twitter had a bug on Android that toggled a setting by mistake and people were clamoring for heavy penalties, that this should be illegal, that these companies need to die in a fire. Over a simple bug that’s probably of a class that literally every developer on this site has made many times.

Reddit is even worse. Anything critical of these companies, no matter how minor or untrue, garners tens of thousands of upvotes and a pitchfork-wielding mob in the comments. Good luck trying to explain that we need reasonable regulation but that Mark will still be a billionaire running one of the world’s most valuable companies and getting richer off ads.

Sure, you can find extremists on both sides: the "nationalize Facebook" people, and the "nothing on the internet should ever be regulated" folks. Not having read the book under review ("Surveillance Capitalism"), I can't say whether the author is all the way over in the "nationalize" camp.

But currently, we need more regulation, not less, on internet companies whose business model is based on selling your attention to persuaders at a time when you are most vulnerable to persuasion. So although I don't favor nationalization, and I don't begrudge Zuckerberg his vast wealth, I want to see things move in the direction of more regulation, not less.

There is a slippery slope no matter where you stand, but yet, you have to stand somewhere.

I like that last sentence. Well said.

I'm not against regulation. I just want to ensure that it allows me to get a no-access-fee Internet when I want without screwing the guy giving it to me. That outcome is less desirable to me than the current state. The outcome that is more desirable to me than the current state is when opting out is easy, opting in is easy, and I can fairly give someone my data in exchange for a service for some duration of time.

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