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Comment by AinderS | Hacker News Reader

It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size to treat their customers and users "fairly", transparently, and without discrimination. Because giving a competitive advantage (from economies of scale) to actors willing to sell their independence to some giant corporation is rapidly leading us to where we are at the mercy of those corporations for even the smallest commercial activities, such as buying or selling a book.

Such a state is incompatible with a free society, unless you redefine restrictions on freedom as only what is done by the government. A definition that is little comfort to businesses bankrupted by unaccountable corporations.

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It makes perfect sense that as a firm’s market power grows, it’s regulatory burden scales appropriately.

Until it turns into regulatory capture, whereby the regulatory burden prevents others from growing their business beyond a certain point.

Bingo

"Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad actors, which needs to be taken into account when crafting any regulation.

I would probably try to start with just making fairer appeals processes and such (some sort of third party arbitration system, in this case, is probably better than just companies getting to set their own individual and opaque and hard-to-comply-with policies).

> "Transparently" has major issues for dealing with bad actors

So I've been told. What I haven't been told is how telling a spammer that they were banned for spamming (instead of the opaque "breaking terms of service") helps them evade detection in the future. They already know they were spamming, and can be 99% sure that's what they were banned for. It's only the innocent that don't know what they did wrong.

Because people want to know why they were considered to be spamming. Then next time they will make sure not to do it that way.

> Because people want to know why they were considered to be spamming.

You're arguing against a suggestion no-one has made. I'm proposing to tell them what they did wrong, not how they were caught.

I've dealt with moderation before. The immediate response is something like "I wasn't spamming." or "Prove it." Basically, just saying "you're banned for spamming" is the same as saying "you're banned" - both spammers and unfairly banned people will follow the same path from there.

Presumably the point is that the spammer operates many identities and can systematically determine details about the spam detection system by observing which of their identities get banned.

To really do anything, you'd need to know which specific emails/interactions broke the rules, which would give people trying to find the very edge of acceptability useful information.

"You're being TOS'd because your email titled 'Foo' on the 3rd of July breaks our spamming rules" tells you that your email titled 'Bar' on the 2nd didn't, and you know what you did differently between them and now you know how far you can push before being caught.

It's a bad situation - ideally good actors could get useful feedback to help avoid accidentally crossing a line, but bad actors will absolutely abuse any kind of margin thy can find.

And yet transparency is a major element when dealing with bad actors in the physical world in democratic countries. If a suspected murderer is brought to the courts, they have the right to be informed what charges are brought against them, and the right to request all relevant documents from the accusing party to defend themselves.

Why are Internet platforms unable to do that, other than it's too much of a hassle and makes our business unsustainable? Which may be a legitimate reasons for the platforms, but are not legitimate at all for society as a whole.

> It's time to legally compel platforms above a certain (modest) size

I personally don't agree with "modest" but having two (or more) classes of corporations to divide laws and regulations between seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Right now there seems to be "monopolies" and everything else. Obviously Amazon or Shopify are not the same as a family owned business; treating them as such should be the exception not the norm.

This isn't facebook. Shopify is B2B. I assume there are contracts involved. If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

> If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

The issue is that you can't use the standard, low cost venue for small b2b disputes (this one was over $7,000): the local small claims court. Most contracts will stipulate a convenient venue to the author of the contract (which may cost more than $7k to litigate if you are out of town). Federal court requires a bigger injury and won't hear your case. In many jurisdictions, business cannot self-represent in small claims, so even if it is available, it's expensive. You end up hiring outside counsel, even if you have lawyers as employees which raises costs a lot, and opens up the possibility of a suit where the awarded legal fees dwarf the amount in dispute.

don't most of these sites, like Shopify, require arbitration for disputes?

or do you worry about actually enforcing an arbitration decision?

Enforcing arbitration is usually pretty easy - most of the time the company will honor the decision. It's when they don't that is the problem, or where the situation is not a contractual dispute that can be arbitrated.

> I assume there are contracts involved. If shopify is not holding up its end, there are already legal avenues to compel them.

The answer to consistent bad behavior can't be "well, just sue!" because the US court systems are already underfunded and jam packed as is. It just doesn't work to (only) have breach of contract lawsuits in David v. Goliath (202X) suits.

If a platform is big enough, it will write one-sided contracts permitting their abuse.

I wish everyone could wrap their mind around one thing.

*THE SYSTEM WORKS AS INTENDED*

Anytime someone suggests a good idea like this or says "we should" you need to go back to the root of the problem. The system is designed to give all the breaks and funnel all $ to the top. That is the way corporations want it and they own the politicians.

This isn't government incompetence or some idea that you came up with. This idea will not be implemented because it would benefit the 99.5% to the detriment of the 0.5%

Doesn't scale :P

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