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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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