Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dist1ll | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dist1ll

> obeying the law would not scale

I don't know why, but that sentence terrifies me. It's like the silicon valley version of a dystopia.

View on HN

> I don't know why, but that sentence terrifies me. It's like the silicon valley version of a dystopia.

because it is true.

We have seen the same pattern in copyright infringement handling, spam or fake news control, user support...

It may be true, but why a judge or jury would accept it as justification is beyond me. "My business model requires me to break the law." is a condemnation of the business model, not a justification.

The problem is that the legal system is flawed in such a way that the wronged parties rarely have the time & resources needed to actually put the issue in front of a judge. If it actually does get in front of a judge (in reality it would get settled out of court if it actually gets anywhere close) I would indeed expect their argument to fall apart.

This is something that ideally the government (its consumer protection branches like the FTC) should be policing proactively, filing suits preemptively against systems that are trivially exploitable.

Definitely agreed. I think it also stems from laws that define explicit and measurable harm as the only types of harm. For false advertising and fraud, it usually requires proving that they was financial harm done as the result of the false statements. Because creating an environment in which fraud is cheap and easy doesn't count as "harm". Because false advertising doesn't count as "harm" in itself, even as imposes the burden of scrutinizing all claims from previously trustworthy sources.

Agreed -- there's also little recourse for many forms of online fraud, as there's no capacity for law-enforcement to investigate at scale.

Because if you tried to actually police this then everything in life would grind to a halt. It would be like expecting the government to deal with every single crime.

It's particularly problematic when a business is providing a platform for other entities to post a message. We don't hold the post office liable for transferring copyrighted/trademarked content, do we?

This case is more akin to a TV network, since the ad is publicly broadcasted based on what people are watching/reading. It’s not private correspondence.

It is the reason for the existence of the dmca.

Now I take a rather dim view of the dmca. But the general concept is to move enforcement of the law out of the normal slow bureaucratic channels. Now enforcement is handled directly by the injured party. Much more efficient.

If you immediately see how ripe for abuse this system is. congratulations. you are now more far sighted than the originators of this system.

Now to it's credit, the dmca limits the enforcement(I think, I have never read the law) to a formalized version of "if you stop doing it we won't press charges" however this is still widely abused.

Some laws were put into place before the current internet scale was imagined and would probably not be made today

Internet scale companies like Google happily embrace intellectual property laws when it's their IP on the line, they just don't care about anyone else's. And it's not an issue of "can't scale": Google's ad revenue is bigger than the entire GDP of Kentucky--they could literally hire 1% of the US population to work in fraud management and still turn a profit.

How would you manage a fraud department of 3 million people?

So it’s a valid defense to say complying with the law is hard, that’s why I didn’t?

Shouldn’t the right course be to change the law before taking such actions?

It's absolute BS. If a citizen were to come into a court and were to express the quantity of state and federal laws, those which compete with each other, and beg the court forgiveness based on, "There's so many laws I can't possibly be made to keep track of them not to mention the laws that are no longer actively exercised in courts" they'd laugh at you.

A corporation like Google does it and the court agrees. Corporations are not people in the worst way possible.

Which is also weird, because it is a far better reason for an individual than for a corporation. An individual is limited to their own time and expertise, whereas a corporation is only limited by their willingness to hire additional workers and expertise.

it depends on your lawyer and on your face/outfit really

Indeed. Saying: “Obeying the law doesn’t scale.” is an admission of guilt with pre-meditated intent to break the law. I keep hoping the courts will drive that point home at some point.

If you lead with the big ask, you frame the entire conversation around it. One should always start one's argument with question-begging, and disqualify people who don't accept the question begging as not serious about having a discussion.

"The laws are impossible to follow at scale. How do we fix that."

Or as a thinktank feeds it to a speechwriter to a politician: "Our antiquated laws have failed to keep up with the speed of technological development, and are now becoming an active handicap on progress. We need a set of laws that are as forward-thinking as our best selves hope to be, and a set of legislators that are responsive to the energy and creativity of the young while respecting the intelligence and hard-earned wisdom of the old."

If you tried to buy ads claiming to be Google.com but pointing to shadyweb.xyzjsiebsk.net you'd find out real quick that Google's legal ability scales just fine

I think politicians might even be willing to try to do that, but I doubt that regular people would be on board with that. This would most likely involve permitting a lot of things in society that we consider immoral right now (or at least objectionable to some extent).

Waiting for the law to change doesn't scale. Gotta be an asynchronous call. Just epoll the legislators.

I don't think "move fast, break things" meant the law, did it?

It's not uncommon to evaluate the value of enforcing the law. DAs do it all the time.

Of course that's not a valid defense.

Your business doesn't have an inherent right to scale

That's still the exact same dystopian take: complying with the law is too hard for Google so the law should change to the detriment of smaller entities.

Then your business is not actually scalable.

There is a whole genre related to this kind of dystopias, cyberpunk. Its predictions from 1980s and 1990s turn out to be increasingly true, sometimes in the grim parts, too.

We are already living in a dystopia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com