A too-clear disclosure gives bad actors information on how to circumvent controls around safety, abuse, and fraud.
If the reason an account is deleted includes some sort of KYC/Money Laundering issue, OFAC style sanction or child porn, then there can be legal obligation, with severe penalty, to both report and not tip off the user.
Let me be very clear that any excuse made under the veil of security including the enshrining of such in our books of law is incompatible with a society that respects the dignity to live free. It is a vicious abuse of power by those with knowledge over those robbed of it.
This is trivially solvable if creating an account required an in-person verification, like when you go into a bank to open an account. Since it's not mandatory, anybody who does so is beaten by anyone who doesn't (worse is better). So we should make it mandatory.
Account deletion tips off the user so we're not talking about cases where there's a legal obligation to not tip off the user.
The only cases where I've seen service providers ordered to not tip off the user were actually associated with order of continuation of the service, to ... not tip off the user.
We have to get past putting people in boxes for arbitrary disagreement/animosity. Formalized politics must be made obsolete.
>There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group that the law binds but does not protect.
That is why conservatives are so prickly about being regulated: to be bound by the rules is "proof" that they are no longer the in-group.
Your very assertion that the law can be applied fairly (to the point group membership is irrelevant) is a denial of the fundamental thesis of conservatism.
I agree that we should aspire to fairness and equality-before-the-rules, but there are too many people who do deeply believe that fundamental theorem to just deny and ignore.
If it were left-wingers being banned, or centrist Biden supporters, I have absolutely no doubt in the world that there would be a slew of New York Times thinkpieces about 'the complexity of our political liberties in a world where the public square is digital', or whatever nauseating way they would invariably phrase it.
(You can see this from the other reply saying "conservatives hate morals and that's why we can ignore morals in dealing with them", the exact same thing conservatives say about liberals, and eventually they're both justified. But apparently none of us has the necessary higher-order thinking skills to avoid a moral slide into bedlam. This case is perfectly illustrative: no amount of political-tribalist tosh should be able to persuade you that the other side doesn't deserve to be treated morally.)
It is left wingers being banned. Essentially what happens is that conservatives will get banned for violence and bigotry, then companies will ban random rule abiding left wing groups just to appease angry conservatives.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/facebook-antifa...
Is Tinder a dating service or social media company? If Facebook starts offering a dating feature in app and becomes the biggest player in the dating space, which market is facebook in? Both? If both, does all of facebook's market cap/DAU/whatever metric we settle on to measure market share get fully applied to both markets or split in some way?
Basically, I think implementing "if $market_share > n" is not a trivial problem that will be litigated to death. The companies with the best lawyers will win.
Look, there is no such thing as a "natural market" that can keep the power of the actors in it in check. The internet was the closest thing to a perfect market that has ever existed and all it has produced is overpowered monopoly after overpowered monopoly.
If we want a free society, we don't get that by handing power over to the markets. We get that by building the most responsive democracy we can, and then using that to keep power (in all its forms, including business) in check.
So who decides which businesses are too powerful? People, elected and held accountable by citizenry at large.
There are lots of good examples of better functioning democracies and a fair amount of theory on reforms that could improve even those (things like ranked choice voting).
That's why I said "Build the most responsive democracy we can".
So your example is valid but maybe not for the point you're trying to make?
I'm all for good regulation and strong government. However, making good laws and regulations is not easy! The details of these things is incredibly important and can't be solved by some sort of generic market vs government debate.
And while I do think government has a role to play, most of our regulations are poorly designed and have been captured by corporate interests.
I don't see how the proposed rule could be implemented in a way that would have the desired outcome.
We don't avoid writing code just because it's inevitably buggy and has unintended side effects. Indeed, there's a whole mentality of "move fast and break things" - essentially damn the side effects and full speed ahead - because we, as a sector, recognize that you have to take risks to make the world a better place. Yet, we forget that when it comes to using government power (our collective power) to make laws that shape our world.
Now, I'm not a proponent of "move fast and break things" - more, move steadily and make the best decision you can in a reasonable time frame. But "move steadily" is still moving. We can take our time writing legislation and regulations and do our best to get it right, and still also work to build responsive systems so that when it's inevitably buggy we can fix the bugs.
As I said in the second sentence, the problem with the US right now is that it was intentionally constructed to be the opposite of a responsive democracy.
So, per all of my questions, how does this idea work? How is market share defined and measured?
> most of our regulations are poorly designed and have been captured by corporate interests
Isn't the second comment a generic statement? Do you have specific data? I agree that the details are incredibly important.
But about the issue at hand, I've been specific in my critique: market share is an amorphous concept and thus ill-suited to legislation and a prime opportunity for regulatory capture.
Nah, I’ll pass. Markets are made up of people, they’re not just some abstraction. Governments have good uses, but determining who is participating in what market and how much market share they have or are allowed to have isn’t one of them.
Some of these are just, useful, bad, abhorrent, unnecessary, necessary, or outmoded.
None of that falls into commanding the economy. We’re not even strangers to command economies: the wartime powers of the Federal government are vast, and were most powerfully executed in World War II.
I would argue that exactly what the parent suggested, in respond to the GP falls exactly into that bucket of ideas for commanding the economy. It’s not a just nor good use of Government, no matter how Democratic.
...what would you say the Fed and FTC do?
1. The parent is advocating for a powerful form of command over the economy.
2. I am not advocating for lawless markets.
Proving a monopoly exists or are forming could be another way to do so, but so far they have recently made lackluster arguments in Courts of Law on that front.
If you then prove a monopoly, can you also then prove that it’s activities are harmful to the people in the marketplace by denying them choices they would otherwise have? Maybe, but probably not very often and certainly not easily.
Monopolies are generally not granted, except in exceptional circumstances. The US government didn't grant Microsoft a monopoly in PC operating systems.
> Proving a monopoly exists or are forming could be another way to do so, but so far they have recently made lackluster arguments in Courts of Law on that front.
What are you referring to?
> What are you referring to?
Most recently (that I can think of): the suit the Feds filed against Facebook that was tossed out of court.
And despite all of that, they’re probably still not a monopoly for anything (haven’t heard a convincing argument on this one yet!), at least anywhere the DoJ and FTC have jurisdiction.
There’s only one Facebook. Without that, you also don’t have Facebook’s network effect tying it all together.
Meta retains the exclusive right to do business using the Facebook mark and they’ll continue to enforce it. It’s the same story for any other company, and it’s a form of monopoly that the government grants, not something that would be enforceable otherwise.
Measuring the size of a company is a lot easier: you pick some metric (employees, revenue, profit, customers, etc...) and apply it to all companies.
Measuring market share requires that you categorize all companies into "markets," which think is pretty subjective. Is Jet Brains an IDE company? A software company? How about Apple? If multiple, are metrics split?
Whatever rules you pick, they're going to be biased towards some companies (including some big ones not popular on HN) and against other companies (including some companies HN loves).
How exactly will it work?
Eh? Subsidiaries aren't usually what people mean when they speak of breaking up companies. Subsidiaries are aligned with the parent company in terms of incentives, so it doesn't really change the landscape at all, besides worsening the user experience if you require the subsidiary to maintain its own isolated silo of users and data.
not saying there isn't a problem, but maybe trying to shoehorn 19th century solutions onto 21st century problems isn't the answer.
Oh no! Then they can't fake growth.
By believing in some sort of mythical distinction between private and public business you've created the worst world of all, in which a government can superficially claim its hands are clean, buy unlimited surveillance data from unregulated private firms, without any democratic accountability. You now have the privilege of filling up Peter Thiel's bank account, while Palantir runs a precrime division that your city council has never even heard of[2]
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/22/22244848/us-intelligence-...
[2]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?
... which may, indeed, be the right solution.
... not to imply it's a bad idea; there's no golden rule that says an ecosystem of millions of competing companies is always a superior alternative to a few well-regulated players. It's just important to note the hidden costs.
If you have humans doing the bans manually, then you already have a human in the loop.
You can't provide an online service while refraining from providing an online service.
So supporting this would require a company to take all manner of new precautions that companies currently don't (circuit-breaker on the new account creation system? But then your growth stalls and your potential customers go to a competitor instead, and you don't blow up into a YouTube or a Twitter like YouTube and Twitter did).
In law, a grace period is a time period during which a particular rule exceptionally does not apply, or only partially applies.
How many more years of recurring "got randomly blocked from the App Store/Play Store/Facebook Ads/whatever other mission-critical service" posts on Hacker News do we need before the market corrects itself?
Sometimes regulation is needed
Plastic in the ocean is definitely a huge problem, but it's not a market problem - not yet. When consumers are willing to pay to get plastics out of the ocean, hundreds of companies will appear eager to solve the problem.
There's a comment above (@pdpi: "At what timescale?") that identifies the issue at hand. In this case (and in a lot of cases) we need regulation because market demand to solve this isn't fast enough (or may never exist)
How, if there is no competition?