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Comment by dannyr | Hacker News Reader

I dislike Facebook but I kind of feel sorry for them now because any ambitious thing that they'll attempt will probably be blocked by governments now.

Facebook and Zuckerberg deserves it though.

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I think this is a great example of the power of local authority. If there were a single set of (literally) global rules, then global-scale companies could roll out dubious innovations easily.

However, if national or sub-national governments can impose restrictions, it forces companies to go the extra mile to appease a larger number of affected people, disrupting their rollout until everyone is on the same page.

California often serves this purpose within the US, creating regulations that have national impact because it's too large of a sub-unit to ignore.

It was ambitious, yes. It was also blatantly obvious at the point of inception of the idea itself that government would become a problem. They exist for the exact purpose (among other purposes) to prevent this exact idea from working (at least unregulated and without a proper banking license). All of the recent history and the laws made this obvious. It is truly astonishing that Facebook haven't thought about this before, or were naive enough to think that they could just do this because they were so big.

Once it becomes the currency that all the kids use for black market transactions (e.g. selling used items in facebook marketplace) it will be as hard to stop as trying to ban transactions denominated in US dollars instead of Euros.

Let's be honest, just because something is ambitious doesn't mean it's good for the world. Facebook has tremendous impact on the world already, and events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal have demonstrated that Facebook can't manage its own empire.

After a company grows beyond its ability to maintain order within its own activities, it should always prune down toward its essential businesses and reform itself before the next stage of growth. Facebook is trying to do the opposite by extending to currency instead of resolving its existing problems.

I don't feel sorry for Zuckerberg.

> After a company grows beyond its ability to maintain order within its own activities, it should always prune down toward its essential businesses and reform itself before the next stage of growth.

Why?

Because corporations are being corporate-ty and bad. The answer is more AT&Ts and ExxonMobils (both companies that were broken off monopolies)!

I don't. They couldn't even manage and maintain an internal currency, why is this suddenly a better idea 6 years down the road, done on an ambitious scale that threatens real currencies? It's a company, there will be other companies with ambitious efforts.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/12/goodbye-facebook-credit/

IMO it should really come down to every company has a limited number of ambitious things they should be able to get away with. If a company wants to branch out into new markets, that should be done through a spin-off.

Facebook is not a digital currency company, they are a Social Media company. If they want to produce a digital currency, Libra should be its own company and not piggyback off the success of the social media product. Social media needs chat, so WhatsApp and Messenger makes sense. Instagram is another social media company. But currency? Too far outside the core competency.

Same with Amazon... selling physical products is their core competency. Selling digital products is an offshoot of that. Allowing others to use your sales platform goes hand in hand too. But how in the world did they get to be a tech company hosting other people’s websites? How do they have a video rental business and also host a competing video rental business? AWS doesn’t make sense for Amazon the retail company.

In the trust-busting era none of this would have been allowed.

They probably should have started it without that huge buzz and in a couple of selected countries.

Very good point.

What happens when the unstoppable force of 21st century silicon valley tech-topia meets the immovable object of western financial regulations? We are finding out. Big, shouty, trying to do an end run round the regulators isn't a great opening gambit.

Unfortunately cryptocurrencies are all about buzz, buzz is valuation and adoption. Such as crypto showman Justin Sun, he will seize on any oppotunity to get as much eyeballs as possible.

This situation is a consequence of squandering the company's goodwill. All the big social media companies spent years arrogantly declaring that they --- not the people, not governments, but people in quirky SFBA meeting rooms --- get to decide what you people see, what they don't see, what's true, what's false, what's offensive, what's anodyne, what's legitimate activism and what's dastardly propaganda.

As it turns out, this "we know best" stance ticks off a lot of people, some of whom run states.

What would the alternative of content control be? I'd rather swap euros for libra than allow the Germans to decide what's in my news feed

but this is exactly what is happening to people not from the US. People in SF board rooms deciding what is in our news feeds, and now the same company is arrogantly declaring it wants to play with currency too.

Fb deciding what's on fb is not as harmful as a govt deciding what's on fb, IMO

this highly depends on what kind of ethics and culture your goverment has compared to what facebook has.

Not really. Over the long run almost all govts of any significance will do bad things. You limit the effects of these bad govts with proactively by restricting their powers at all times. This is why you shouldn't give more power to a govt because it's doing well in the 10 year window. Facebook's reach is limited by being on fb.

> I kind of feel sorry for them now

> Facebook and Zuckerberg deserves it though

Feels like those two feelings are at odds with each other. Either you feel like they deserve it, and not feeling sorry for them, or vice-versa.

It is at odds but why can't I feel both?

I believe people working directly on Libra have good intentions but Zuckerberg's previous actions are just making it almost impossible to achieve Libra's objectives.

At Facebook's scale, there are so many good things it can do. It's just that its leadership ruined things for the company.

- Facebook is a US company

- Facebook is at best tolerated by the European countries, they 100% didn't trust it. It is one step away to be claimed as public enemy.

Basically Libra is treated as erosion to EU's governance, and transfer that power to US government. Why would EU welcome this at all?

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