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Comment by wittyreference | Hacker News Reader

If a business can't run profitably and legally at scale, then that business model is a bad fit for that scale and shouldn't exist at that scale (presuming the laws in question are reasonable, which I think 'banning child porn' qualifies as.)

It's super weird that people seem to constantly start from the premise of, "But their business couldn't possibly [comply with law] profitably at scale! Oh well. I guess until someone comes up with a feasible solution, we'll just have to exempt them from being responsible!"

Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up."

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> Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!" I have trouble imagining you saying, "Well, they obviously can't sacrifice scale, so let's just wait and see if a better quality inspection solution comes up."

Every drug has acceptable levels of impurities. There is a non-zero acceptable level of rat feces in your food. Your bank rounds the value of your account to some decimal place. The various parts of your car have some mean time between failures.

In the real world we place bounds on how much bad stuff is acceptable, and these bounds are determined mostly by practicality and economics. "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world. A real law takes the form "perform these steps or reasonable equivalents to limit X to a tolerable level." You can claim that reddit is not taking a step it is required to by law, but it's not breaking the law just because it hasn't developed a perfect solution to a problem that likely can only be solved approximately.

The only way this comparison to drug companies makes sense is if the drug companies had community sourced supply lines and were selling drugs a third party contributor had made in their bathtub alongside their normal drugs.

> "Ban all childporn" is certainly a reasonable philosophy, but it is no better a law than "ban all impurities" which would shut down every drug manufacturer in the world.

This would be a reasonable argument for a company like YouTube which has spent tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars putting controls in place. If PornHub had iron tight controls and one of the actors was caught using a fake ID, then it might be reasonable. But they didn't have iron tight controls... or apparently any controls. There was zero verification that participants had signed releases or were of age.

PornHub's controls were complete shit.

Maybe some people want drugs from Pfizer's "Community Sourced" drug program... I sure don't.

"gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!"

That is exactly why I only but medications from Valisure.

This is an extremely weak argument. At a certain scale, policy becomes about statistics rather than absolutes. This applies to absolutely everything, including the laws themselves. Companies in all industries have to occasionally issue recalls on dangerous or faulty products, just like PornHub or Reddit have to occasionally delete stolen or illegal content.

> Imagine if pharma companies went "gosh, but hiring quality inspectors to make sure all of our drugs are untainted just doesn't scale!"

What do you mean, "imagine?" They do say that[1], and it's a tremendous problem.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/2019/07/19/bottle-x-exposing-impuri...

Terrible example. What if that was true? You think that we would just shut down the companies that make essential drugs rather than change the regulation?

People are going to watch pirated porn. If they can't find it on American sites they'll go to sites that aren't effected by American laws/regulations/journalism. That would probably make trafficking worse as the new site has no reason to take down any videos as their value add is refusal to censor.

What you're effectively saying - just like all arguments of this form, which seems to be quite popular lately - is that ordinary people should not be able to share their own content that they create online, because it's too hard to 100% police everything that they do. (Presumably including sending things directly and privately to people that they know, given how much better a channel that is for child porn than somewhere like Pornhub.) That the internet should be a consume-only place for the output of big corporate content factories whose content can be verified. Except framed in such a way as to make this seem like an anti-corporate stance, rather than the massive pro-corporate grab it is.

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