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Comment by sv123 | Hacker News Reader

If everything that Facebook does to maximize profits is legal, but some of it is horrible, then we should write new laws to make the horrible stuff illegal. If Facebook does things that are bad for the world then policymakers should try to make it stop.

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By all means. But you can't write laws targeting one company..

For example.- from what is being discussed - "Requiring Facebook to publicly disclose its internal research". -- either make all companies disclose internal research or none of them. You can't just pick and choose.

Precisely. Passing legislation regulating all social media companies is valid. Targeting a specific company in legislation, in addition to not making sense, will quickly be struck down by courts.

Easy workaround: Any publicly-traded company worth more than $1B in total stock.

Now you aren't targeting Facebook, you're targeting all wealthy corporations.

Why should we not also apply these laws to companies worth 100M that are doing the same crap? We gain nothing by finely targetting these laws especially if it allows some facebook-like clone to enter the market and change one minor thing to dodge having the same oversight.

I mean, sure, then it isn't targeting a specific company. But it baffles me why you'd want to put a Market Cap threshold instead of regulating all social media companies evenly regardless of size. Your "rule" wouldn't have applied to Parler, for example.

We need to be careful with regulations. It's good to regulate giants, but creating barriers to entry that prevent new players from competing with the giants is a bad outcome we need to remain cognizant of.

Maybe $1B is too high. Maybe $1M is too low. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot.

You can, however, closely examine a company[1] and the horrible things they're doing to create sane laws to restrict the whole market. Any anti-facebook law will probably strongly impact twitter and reddit among others - but it still can reasonably affect facebook in the largest manner. If it affects facebook in the largest manner because we all hate facebook then that's a load of horsedung - but it can affect facebook in the largest manner because they're doing all the stuff we don't want anyone to do.

1. (formally "a near monopoly" instead of "a company" - edited for clarity)

>closely examine a near monopoly

Facebook is a near monopoly? In what? Ads? They're not even the biggest advertising company, Google is bigger.

"Social media"? There's Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Tiktok, Tumblr, Youtube and dozens of others.

Can you clarify what you mean by "near-monopoly" in this context?

I'm sorry - that's the only part of my statement you're going to read? The throw away context at the beginning?

I'll remove the mention of it being a near monopoly since that's really unnecessary for the main statement.

Well yes, alleging a monopoly implies they are running afoul of anti-trust laws but the whistleblower is alleging FB made false statements to investors. The hearing does not have to do with monopolies/antitrust.

Hrm - that's fair. I've adjusted my statement to remove any mention of monopolies.

Not the OP, but I think Facebook is a near monopoly in 'posting vapid selfies for likes' category via Instagram.

Government can regulate markets. If Facebook is a monopoly then by regulating the market, you regulate FB.

Thoroughly agree all social media should show more transparency on the kinds of things FB is alleged to be doing.

Why stop at social media? Imagine that 50 years ago, Big Tobacco had to disclose its research. Imagine the same for Big Oil. Wouldn't that have been a good thing?

Now, you can go too far. You don't want to make every tech company disclose their research on, say, improved silicon layout algorithms. But if it involves harm to customers or the public, yes, they should have to disclose it.

Do you think if all companies are required to disclose such research, that they are still going to conduct it to begin with? If they don't already know the answer, they will just not ask the questions- just like a trial lawyer.

A regulation like that has to be examined for the incentives it creates, not just the goal. If companies are forced to disclose research that involves customer or public harm, they will probably just stop doing the research, or fabricate false results. Thus, information is lost rather than disclosed. No companies want to say “our product is harmful to our customers.”

> But you can't write laws targeting one company..

Why not?

And it's certainly been done in the past, see the history of Standard Oil.

> You can't just pick and choose.

Actually we can just pick and choose. Targeting the largest actor has the most effect.

Our court system uses subpoenas all the time to get access to important information.

And right now, it seems that facebook has some important information that our lawmakers should know.

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