Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

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Anti-Trust is not the best path

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

A laundry list of new barriers to entry is going to prevent consolidation in an industry?

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.

The only thing in my list that could even remotely be a barrier to entry would be the additional requirements of official government communications, which IMO would be a good thing because I dont think there should be any official government communications happening on any of these platforms in the first place.

Your ToS processes will be perfect for keeping companies out that aren't already affiliated with a big tech and using their legal.

I see no way that would be true, for example there should be no problem with a video platform telling a user that "Your Video @ 22:50 violated Section 5 of our TOS"

I am unclear how that would that would add a barrier to entry.

Great, now if you are YouTube, that will cost 100m to automate, you won't notice this cost. If you are Vimeo you either declare bankruptcy or have more semi-manual processes to implement the same eating your slim profits each quarter and further limiting the competitiveness of offers you can make.

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.

It does not cost anything extra, if you are moderating content then you already have viewed and analyzed the content in some way either human, crowdsource, or automated review. The data is already there, the requirement is this data be provided to the user not hidden which is how it done today.

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.

I'm baffled that you got downvoted. Saying what rule someone broke when punishing them would cost millions of dollars??

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