Regulators and Reality | Hacker News Reader

Regulators and Reality

stratechery.com

32 pointsfeross14 comments

Would be better if the title here at hacker news mentioned the post is largely about analyzing the filing against Facebook. Maybe "Regulators and Reality - FCC against Facebook analysis"

Rewriting the title of posts to reflect the actual article should be permitted tbh, but I've had posts where I've done that and a mod has changed it back to whatever the page title was, even if it made no sense and didn't reflect the content.

Weird though, since I saw so many with different titles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Competition is the surest sign that there was not actually any anticompetitive conduct"

Anti-competitive conduct can be poorly executed, leaving some small room for competition, while still largely stifling new market entrants. A single 'competitor' isn't a healthy market. How many new small firms didn't get formed, or died on the runway to cash flow, because of Facebook?

Similarly, how many small firms that could grow up to be serious competitors won’t get started because of regulatory compliance demands. There is a reason companies become much more amenable to regulation once they are large and established. Lobbying for arduous regulation is often much cheaper than actually competing with new companies.

> Similarly, how many small firms that could grow up to be serious competitors won’t get started because of regulatory compliance demands.

This is about antitrust regulation, so that point is nonsense in this context.

I don't want large or small firms to engage in anti-competitive behavior, just like I don't want them committing arson.

>We have witnessed the federal government, under two different administrations, fumble its way through a pandemic, while its supposedly most capable branch oversaw a disastrous withdrawl from a 20-year nation-building effort that collapsed in a matter of days.

This is maddening. All the money the government has at it's disposal and it can't seem to find its way out of a paper bag with two holes in it. The only thing it seems adept at is collecting data with dubious constitutionality and propping up reckless businesses. Prepare ourselves for another automotive bailout because the US automakers wouldn't make their supply chains the least bit resilient. How did we get to this point?

> How did we get to this point?

Lobbying as a legal activity?

There's always been lobbying though, what's different today?

"What can we do to change that to an illegal activity?" absolutely as soon as possible is the real question.

>> We have witnessed the federal government, under two different administrations, fumble its way through a pandemic, while its supposedly most capable branch oversaw a disastrous withdrawl from a 20-year nation-building effort that collapsed in a matter of days.

> ...How did we get to this point?

Honestly, I think it's democracy/liberty but without some kind of "special sauce" that makes it actually work. I think that sauce is something along the line of a citizenry that actually sees itself as the rulers of country with the responsibility to solve its collective problems. Also spiteful partisanship.

The pandemic shows that specifically, since the core issue seems to be people who care more about exercising their rights to undermine a solution than actually implementing a solution.

Anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook are stupid and political. I think most people tech savvy get this.

There currently is one real problem monopoly and it is Google.

I fear your comment is somewhat contradictory...

The whole FAANG bunch is trouble, the only company I don't have an extremely negative association for is Netflix.

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