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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the group has a point. We should regulate Facebook to some degree, and I'm glad to know about their involvement here, but some people think the company should be destroyed and I don't see what they're hoping to accomplish. The realistic present alternative to a world dominated by Facebook proper and Instagram is a world dominated by WeChat and Weibo.

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Regulate how exactly? While better than the indistinguishable from bots "destroy/break up Facebook" ad nausuem repetition I have seen plenty of calls for regulation with zero thought as to what regulations they would add. The few examples I have seen proposed are either blatantly unconstitutional, ineffectual, and/or obviously doomed to backfire. Politician's syllogism (we need to do something and this is something) gets us nowhere.

One possible regulation that should resonate with the HN crowd would be a real form of due process or arbitration for users who have been censored. If platforms like Facebook are going to be the universal arbiters of acceptable public speech, then we ought to have formal recourse when they silence us. As it stands, we are completely at the mercy of the algorithm or outsourced contractors.

"if the world is going to be dominated by big tech, it'd better be by an AMERICAN company, not some CHINESE!!"

No. Protocol based Internet was the right idea - walled gardens are nation states recreated on the Internet.

Humanity in general started out much more open too, but we all moved to nation-states fairly quickly, because they are more stable and resilient in the long run.

Decentralized stuff is great, but it has a hard time competing with the efficiency of centralization.

Well, as has often been said, we now have cloud feudalism. The lord in the castle decides what's okay today in his domain, and his incompetent and inconsistent henchmen might throw you out for no reason, not even allowing you to take your belongings. You try to object, but no one is there to listen, only when many in the community (or people who has friends in the castle) raise enough noise, could you get a hearing. (Compare this to losing your access to your Google or Facebook account).

If the providers of the world can move to something like a democracy, with checks and balances and appeals processes (and not just banishment, deleting everything you have) that would be welcome.

Why not both? The beauty of the internet is a lack of spatial constraints or need for mutual exclusivity. The benefit of walled gardens is seamlessness. The benefit of open protocols is to be able to take control, extend, and experiment.

It's just, I'd feel more sympathetic if Facebook hadn't spent the last several years being unethical

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