I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for these calls to bring heavy regulation on to the tech industry.
Articles like this have a hypothetical ideal mental image of regulations that will punish only the bad guys while protecting themselves and the content they like. There’s also an implicit assumption that regulation will only apply to Facebook, without bringing negative effects on to the sites and services the tech community prefers.
This article may be well-meaning in intentions, but how would such regulation work in practice? Writing regulation that outlaws companies from forbidding customer API automation sounds good if you’re a tech user who wants to automate some clicks, but would that also mean that spammers must have free reign on the API as well? How would such a law be structured to force sites to allow consumers to use “good” tools while also allowing them to catch and stop the “bad” tools like auto-friend bots?
Some of these arguments are starting to feel like utopian fallacies where people want impossibly perfect regulations applied with the assumption that only their enemies will be affected. I’m also surprised to see authors like Cory Doctorow advocating for more government control and regulation of popular internet communication sites. Once we open that Pandora’s box of government control, it’s hard to imagine future politicians won’t be teaching for it as a way to push their agenda.