My sense is that antitrust is as wrong a model for correcting this as the prior regime was that led to the creation of antitrust laws.
I know it sounds cliché, but that's the sign of a good citizen. You should distrust. Particularly since so much money is at stake. Anyone who doesn't distrust, is either being naive, or more likely, collecting on the graft.
I also share your concern that they want to have some convoluted anti-trust regime, rather than a simple, straightforward law that says no sharing of any user data for any commercial purpose at all, ever. With draconian penalties for any infraction. That would stop all this in its tracks, so you have to wonder why they let the privacy stuff go relatively unmolested?
The only answer I can come up with is that they fully intend to keep violating privacy. Maybe with different companies this time? Or different people collecting the money? But in the end, we the people are still getting shafted.
The problems come when doing right by their constituents is no longer the biggest thing that keeps them in office (e.g. instead of outspending opponents on marketing). Or when there are incentives that are hidden from the public.
You do know that for many of them they have a virtual lock on their seat and the incentive no longer aligns right?
For some/most, the primary driver can be characterized as self advancement.
I always try to understand which votes they are trying to buy.
Seriously.
If we model politicians as individuals evolving through an evolutionary algorithm it becomes very clear that their fitness function has very few variables. Money and votes. Not sure what else.
Once they learned that votes can be had with promises, rather than execution, all was lost. Politicians are now experts at manipulating the audience for votes through promises (which are nearly always false).
They also manipulate the audience through incredibly creative naming of bills and programs. Every single one of them sounds amazing. And yet, nearly every time you actually study one there's plenty to be horrified about.
I have no clue how we fix this. If the fitness function that drives this species does not include an evaluation of actual results (valuable, useful, positive, consistent long-term results) they will never have the evolutionary pressure required to mutate in a direction that benefits the people and the nation. They are so deep into self-serving and party-serving territory at this point that we would have to make massive changes to the way things run if there is to be any hope of correcting the type of person who goes into politics and their behavior once at their respective throne.
Radical transparency. With all data of public institutions open for accountability, and a layer of independent people studying their areas of interest and creating explanations of actual execution and how it really affects us.
The free press used to be this, before it got captured and become part of the opaque system. With open distributed networks, we get a second chance to build such a counter-information system, and this time make it de-centralized so it cannot be captured by owning a single node.
If anything there's too little money in politics, not too much.
There was a bill a while back to force bill contents to be narrowly scoped (I.e. no pork barrel spending). It failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push for its passage in the future anyway.
Tech companies did not start "targeting" one side for censorship, multiple internal reports have come out showing they actually have to be artificially lenient to right-wing views to avoid be perceived as being biased [1]. Right wing politics just has either a higher incidence of socially unacceptable speech, or a persecution complex - or more than likely, both.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/1/21544501/facebook-rules-p...
You can insert team blue or red in to either role depending on your political bias.
Either way though, you're under arrest xD
The GOP backed No Child Left Behind which was an abject failure. Back then, it was easy for the left to claim that they would do better when given the opportunity. However, now the left is pushing Critical Race Theory in schools which is equally stupid and damaging.
You can point to the left as doing a much worse job at this particular point in time but the reality is that both sides have made roughly equally stupid choices over the long run.
You can use “over the long term” to further any point you like because at one point the Republican Party was the liberal, progressive party before it adopted the original southern strategy.
Studying race and systemic racism in school is absolutely not “as damaging” as dictating the terms of school funding in a way that disadvantages the poor (and subsequently non-white people).
Also your argument is about the two parties being the same over the long term, but then you give a very short term anecdote, and one that isn’t very compelling.
I’m sorry to appear so argumentative but it seems you are falling into the trap of false equivalence on multiple levels.
To be fair, when people talk about CRT these days they’re talking about a specific set of beliefs about race, notably a variety of race essentialist beliefs. Reducing CRT to “merely studying race” is dishonest. Moreover, as race essentialist ideas are want to do, I posit that CRT does harm poorer people because it lets rich whites absolve themselves by way of ritual while characterizing poorer whites as the aggressors. Similarly, we prioritize issues that are almost certainly harmful for poorer communities of color, like (de facto or de jure) de-policing high-crime areas (we celebrate fewer police-related fatalities and sweep under the rug the enormous spike in murders).
Note that this isn’t a partisan issue. The best criticism of CRT comes largely from liberals, progressives, and independent conservatives (CRT seems like it should be a slam dunk for establishment Republicans but in increasingly normal form they are finding innovative ways to bungle it).
Critical race theory and Race essentialism are fundamentally incompatible theories of race. If you're equating the two, you, or whoever presented them to you, has a deeply flawed (or actively malicious) understand of one or the other.
CRT posits that differences among racial/ethnic groups are the result of, as wikipedia puts it, "social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." Even its critics claim it relies too heavily on social constructivism - the literal opposite of essentialism. (Racial essentialism, in contrast, claims that "races" are biologically district categories that result in innate individual differences)
Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.
I knew someone was going to be pedantic which is why I phrased it as I did. The term is becoming overloaded, and we can either debate semantics or we can engage substantially and I’m choosing the latter.
> Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.
Your account is called “LordDragonfang” with 800 karma, so you're not exactly posting with your legal name yourself. No, I’m not using my legal name, but this is my main account. I post here regularly, in good faith, and overall my contributions have been well-received.
No it's not. This bad version you imagine isn't being taught to anyone.
> and we can either debate semantics or we can engage substantially and I’m choosing the latter.
It's not "semantics" to talk about what is actually happening and being complained about.
Better action would be reforms in contract law to limit binding Arbitration, make ToS unenforceable if they do not have at least SOME provisions in favor of the users (i.e stop allowing unconscionable contracts as Terms of Service), and stronger enforcement of Truth in Advertisement
For ToS, one thing that should absolutely be require for a ToS to be enforceable is a mandate that Vendors are required to provide exact justification for them terminating the agreement (i.e banning you). They should have to clearly define what EXACT terms you violate, and WHEN exactly you violated them. There should should be a mandated review process
For Truth in Advertisement, many of these companies and services use Bait and Switch tactics all the time, advertising their platforms as "Free Speech" or "welcome to all person" only to then clearly and objectively favor one political convention
One final thing I would prefer to see over Anti-Trust is some kine of provision that kicks in if the platform accepts "official Government Messaging" i.e if Twitter wants to allow an official government account on their platform then their should be additional requirements as that now does become an equality under the law concern if people are blocked for official communications.
If they do not want to have those additional strings on their platform then they can simply refuse in the Terms to allow for any Official Government Communication
That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing.
I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.
I am unclear how that would that would add a barrier to entry.
Your arguments are largely similar to putting regulations on a Telco monopoly to give a little back as if there were competition. We know how that works, it doesn't address the problem and certainly doesn't make competition appear.
So again I fail to see how requiring a company to disclose to the user the exact reasons for their ban adds any additional burden on anyone. The company already knows the reasons, it simply refused to tell anyone under today's model
I think you have confused my statement with some kind of mandatory moderation scheme.