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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

> It would be really nice to have some antitrust regulation so that the FCC doesn't have this power.

Antitrust regulation is to prevent an Apple+Google duopoly (or cartel) from having this power. This is nothing about the FCC.

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That's not the point

The point is, without antitrust regulation, the FCC only has to go through two giant corporations.

After trust busting Apple and Google, we would theoretically have many more competing stores. The FCC would have to then ask each individual store for a takedown, perhaps even across different legal jurisdictions (read: outside of the USA) and therefore be unable to take down TikTok in such a centralized fashion

But in this case, it's working in society's favor. Banning TikTock is a good thing. We should then turn around and ban all of the social media platforms regardless of nationality that does any sort of harvesting/manipulation of the data that their users are sharing in any other form than to display that information in the expected ways for the site to have purpose. Any social platform doing things in the shadows with user's info directly input by them or scraped,tracked,inferred,gathered,etc should be banned from existence.

That's why I'm conflicted. To quote my favorite college professor, "there is always a catch."

the FCC regulates every single electronic device in the US. I'm sure they can handle it.

You could argue the FCC has less power since both Apple and Google need to comply to make a meaningful difference. And the FCC can't just ban iphones tomorrow, given the impact to the populace - and that's the basis of the duopoly

I meant there would be a more diverse cast of characters and sources of software for mobile devices so that the FCCs power would be diluted. In theory.

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