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Comment by door5 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is about money, not standards. There's no money in the free and open web. Capitalism is fundamentally antagonistic to the web as a platform. It wants to build barriers and walled gardens and spam the system with advertisements, because without all this junk, there's no money to be made. We need to realize this fundamental antagonism and look into nationalizing or strongly publicly funding / regulating the web in a manner consistent with public good, like we do with other utilities (rail, electricity, water, etc)

This may seem radical, but this antagonism will only get stronger over time. The capitalists who run these businesses are certainly aware of and worried about this future, & at least one presidential candidate (Elizabeth Warren) is thinking in these terms.

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Capitalism involves private ownership, voluntary exchange, and competitive markets. These are all things "the capitalists who run these businesses" are trying to undermine. Netflix/Spotify are built on a stream-don't-own model. Apple wants to lock you into their walled garden where you have no choice but their products. And all the FAANG use regulation and corporate buyouts to keep the competition at bay.

If capitalism is really what you're after, the answer to that is an open, free, and private web where people own their hardware/software/information, have total freedom of choice thanks to free and open standards, and can compete on the strength of their service without fear of antagonistic regulation or buyouts.

The key problem with regulation is that all the large tech companies want the same kind of regulation which helps secure their position against competition and they're all well off enough to afford sizable lobbying budgets. So any regulation will have their say on it, while having little voice in that discussion for the public good (we have, what, the EFF and the CDT?).

If you think that's paranoid, simply review the history of the railroad barons.

Capitalism itself is actually supportive of the web as a platform and it's just that the aspiring "internet barons" are the antagonists. If we let them define more regulation of the internet, we're only securing their position for them and reducing the likelihood of real competition.

Capitalism as a theoretical, static picture of a well-functioning economy is somewhat supportive of the open web. Capitalism as seen from the inside, accounting for its dynamics, is absolutely against open web. It's also against free markets (you can make more money by making markets less free), against competition (the end-goal of every company is monopoly) and against voluntary exchange (the less voluntary the exchange, the more likely it is to happen and be profitable). The tension between what we need for a well-functioning economy vs. what economical actors want is the very source of growth and innovation in the market economy. Left ungoverned, unbalanced, the desires of market players are self-destructive.

Capitalism would be great, if it wasn't for those damned capitalists.

It's exactly like that.

To overextend the usual analogy of capitalism as the ICE of innovation - gasoline itself is toxic, volatile and dangerous. By its nature, it just wants to violently oxidize. Its true value for humanity is only realized under extremely controlled conditions - those of an ICE, where correct amounts are injected and burned off with appropriate cadence. Deviance from those conditions causes issues ranging from annoyance to fiery death.

Capitalists are like gasoline.

I like this summary, as it captures how much it's an overloaded term that lumps all sorts of things good and bad together.

The point I was trying to make is that regulation is being posed as the antidote to the self-destructive desires when it will merely legitimize them because it's those desires that will influence how the regulation turns out.

If we had a government free of corporate lobbyist influence, I would probably agree that legislation would be a good approach. As it stands, I'm not currently convinced.

> If you think that's paranoid, simply review the history of the railroad barons

The end of which was an extremely regulated market with partial nationalization -- exactly my point

On that we agree. Where we seem to disagree is whether that would be a good thing when applied to the tech industry.

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