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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.

I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.

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> how can people with no concept of technology legislate it

Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did.

And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for.

Big tech is a runaway train.

Of course, they do know the answer to those questions but their legal team told them to keep their mouths shut.

> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.

You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market.

I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU.

I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.

It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers would negatively affect the total stock market in aggregate, by making business less efficient overall. (scale == efficiency).

Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)

Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality always takes it toll however much they insist that it isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly what they were warned about happening.

You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english.

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

And let China be the only one with scale advantage?

> I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US

The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national level.

There are ways to do the above without specifically restricting inter-state commerce. The CCPA is one example of a state raising the barrier to entry that a business can either comply with or leave the market. I wouldn't exactly call it an ideal situation, but if each individual state created their own version there would certainly be businesses that refuse to do business in certain states rather than dealing with the regulatory headaches.

> You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

The problem was never the scale of the company. If YouTube was instead 100 different companies, there would still be a total of 49 years worth of video being uploaded every day which nobody would have the resources to review. Each company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the revenue and the cost would be just as insurmountable.

And creators would either upload their videos to 100 different services, or users would only be able to find 1% as much content.

That one is the easiest to solve -- separate discovery from hosting. You want to find a video, you go to a search engine. Any search engine you like. They all index all the videos everywhere. Some may even be dedicated to video or make recommendations etc.

The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you to use their search and do what they can to get in the way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But this is where some kind of P2P service could really have an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because there are a thousand companies who would love to be in the video search/discovery business and not have to pay the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a centralized third party host locking them out next week.

So now when I want to find videos on a topic, for many of the videos I’ll get a hundred hits for the same video uploaded to each service. But if the one I want was only uploaded to one device, it’ll be buried in a sea of hundreds of duplicates.

If using a search engine is the ordinary method of discovery then there would be no need to upload the same video to multiple services. Meanwhile if people did that anyway, the search engine would want to figure out how to merge the duplicates.

I'm not sure why you brought up reviewing the videos. I couldn't find it as I glanced through this thread. If YT was 100 different companies competing against each other, then there would be positive effects as each on tried to out-innovate each other. They wouldn't just be 100 static mini YT's..and if some of them did that they wouldn't make it.

The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition, that's the issue, not necessarily that they can't affordably review the 49 years worth of video.

This whole debate originated in some people noticing that there was a lot of wrongthink on the internet and then starting to yell at tech companies for not fixing it. But it turns out that problem is legitimately hard and the tech companies don't have a magic wand, so all their attempts have been ham-fisted disasters that trample all over everything like a frightened elephant.

That problem in particular isn't really one that competition would solve, because it's fundamentally a demand for censorship, and more competition would make censorship harder. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.

As a consumer I don’t necessarily want competition in say video. I want to be able to go to one place to find a user created video, search once and find all the videos on that topic. I want to learn one UI for that and I want to know that the vast majority of video content will be there. YouTube’s scale grants me, as a consumer, huge advantages. The same goes for content creators.

That doesn’t mean I dont want oversight. I think there may be a role for regulation in the public interest, but blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is ‘competition’ really going to compensate for the loss of convenience? There have always been competing video upload sites, but people go where the scale is because they like the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.

The same goes for the App Store. I’m a happy Apple customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well, but I’m not entirely against government scrutiny of how it operates, in principle. Yes I’m concerned Apple could abuse its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality? Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to connect with customers and earn revenue? I’m not convinced.

>perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition

A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.

So much this.

There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?"

I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.

They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.

I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.

I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so. In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the government to draw expertise from the right sources

Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were talking about the breadth of all of the industries that Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive. I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't great at finding those "right sources" with enough consistency.

> For instance, banking and electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so.

You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.

It is a matter of "less dysfunctional with regulation" as opposed to not being dysfunctional with regulation unfortunately.

There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them".

Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.

I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes.

What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?

The biggest improvement they could make would be to create a class of accounts intended to never have a large enough account balance to be capable of incurring severe losses, and then waive most of the regulations for those accounts. Then you use the regulated accounts for your retirement savings, but keep a hundred bucks in an unregulated one to use for buying stuff on the internet, which could then be completely anonymous and have minimal transaction fees.

And what's to stop me creating thousands of these anonymous unregulated accounts to launder money? There are a lot of aspects to regulating the financial industry that have to account for the many different scenarios involved. The regulations for the finance industry aren't perfect but it is an incredibly difficult balance to strike.

What stops you from doing the same thing with cash and cash businesses? Nothing, why is why AML rules are pointless and should be abandoned because they're doing dramatically more harm than good.

This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a dangerous mindset.

Piling over your comment regarding YouTube - what is worse? Google owning YouTube and the search engine plus everything else or the fact that YouTube has probably more than 30-40% of the market? One is a problem of monopoly, the second is a problem of choice.

I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment.

For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.

Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

Google does not have an absolute right to operate at their current scale. If legislation around content moderation or consumer protection made their business untenable at its current scale then so be it. Their business will have to change to adapt to the society in which it is a participant.

I see that talking point everywhere about "too much scale/too big" but never have I heard an answer as to how the hell scale can be regulated let alone an answer that shows even a minutae of understanding let alone implementability.

Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.

To potentially reinterpret the GP, it isn't that we need to regulate scale, but that scale doesn't excuse you from being regulated.

Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.

If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.

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