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Comment by such12 | Hacker News Reader

This is a piece that argues in favor of government regulation of internet communications platforms.

I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires.

I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.

I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it.

He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.

Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps.

I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore.

I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.

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> I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be.

It's not as though the premise is without precedent. It's easy to port your phone number to a new telephone company and all your friends can still call you. That's thanks to government "control" (aka regulation.) Maybe it's even too easy from a security perspective, but it's not as though you have to navigate a byzantine and capricious government bureaucracy to get it done. For the common person it generally works very well, seamless and painless.

I think most people are in favor of government when it comes to utilities, phones and landlines being a classic example (although in the age of wireless, one could argue government regulation actually makes things worse).

But social media is not a utility, in the traditional sense.

What is the intrinsic sense in which telephony is a utility but social media isn't? The wires? Phone companies all share the wires now (thanks again to government regulation), and with VoIP it's becoming less relevant by the day.. but phone number porting still works fine. The physical infrastructure natural monopoly stuff isn't a necessary component of what makes government regulation of phone systems work out well.

The government regulation of the phone system works well because the government regulations are well designed, not because there's a limit to how many wires you can hang from a pole.

It doesn’t work well. Telephones haven’t changed for decades and are now practically a dead technology. The wires are used for data, and phone service is grandfathered in. You can reasonably say this is the result of a lack of innovation caused by government regulation.

Edit: I say this as someone who loved the dial telephone era. I really want one of these: https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html

I would have bought one, but then I realized that the phone is useless now.

> Telephones haven’t changed for decades

Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago? A few decades ago rotary dial phones were still common, cellphones were virtually unheard of, VoIP was a dream, nobody expected a resurgence of the telegraph (e.g. SMS), and switching was still done with in-band signaling.

Virtually everything about telephones has changed over the past few decades. It's easier to list the things which haven't changed: we still use phone numbers (kind of... because actually almost everybody uses the contacts app built into their phones.) We still pay phone companies for the service, except now there's tons of phone companies and you aren't stuck with one.

SMS isn’t the telephone. VoIP mostly isn’t done using phone numbers, and to the extent that it is, is a way to grandfather in a legacy technology.

The iPhone is not primarily a telephone. If you are going to argue that it is, you really aren’t being reasonable.

Also, if you look at the history, you’ll discover that these innovations were all held back by regulation and the fixed nature of the phone system.

> SMS isn’t the telephone.

Nonsensical distinction. The common person sends and receives SMS using their telephone, using the same phone numbers used to call people, with the same disregard for whether they and the recipient use the same phone company because, like telephone calls, SMS works across companies. When you port your phone number to a new phone company, you continue to receive SMS sent to your number just as you do phone calls.

How do you explain why landline phones can’t send and receive SMS?

Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain? SMS is something people pay their phone company for, use their phone number for, follows them when they port their phone number to a new phone company, and works when they send it to somebody using a different phone company. It's obviously part of the telephone system.

(And in actual fact, there are phone companies that do offer SMS service to landline phones.)

> Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain?

That your definition of ‘phone’ is meaningless. If phones can have any capability you like, then ‘phone’ doesn’t mean anything.

Once you are playing that game you may as well just declare that social networks can be regulated because they are a ‘capability some things that can also communicate with phones have’, and phones are already regulated.

Landline phones can often receive SMS messages, but I'm pretty sure this is a carrier feature that hasn't been standardised.

> I'm pretty sure this is a carrier feature that hasn't been standardised.

So not actually part of what it means to be a phone then.

Just enable text services on your landlines. With this said not every provider service.

> > Telephones haven’t changed for decades

> Now you're just being absurd. Do you think we had iphones decades ago?

An iphone is an implementation detail, it's not the phone system.

The great thing about phones is the longevity. My parents have had the same phone number since the late 60s. Anyone who's known them for the past ~50 years can still reach out via the same number. That's awesome.

No proprietay social network will ever match that because they come and go on the back of the controlling company revenue performance.

The only way to stay in touch for the long haul is open standards, in the case of internet that means: email

I've had the same email since the mid 90s and will have it for the rest of my life. If you've ever known me, you can still reach me on the same email now and into the future.

That’s exactly why email has persisted, without any need for regulation.

Right until Google decides to block you

Nobody is forced to use gmail as a provider. Remember it’s a free service with less commitment to you than a pay as you go mobile phone.

Anyone can buy their own domain and there are many providers who will provide email service.

Imagine having a phone number nobody can call because it's blocked from sending or receiving by your telephone company...

The vast majority of email is hosted by one of the large providers these days and if people can't reply to you the utility of your address is lessened.

> Imagine having a phone number nobody can call because it's blocked from sending or receiving by your telephone company...

Fortunately that's not at all what having a personal email is like.

First of all, you can always receive email no matter what. Nobody is blocking that.

Sending it to some larger providers requires configuring everything correctly, but it's not rocket science. Lots of people (including me) do it with minimal effort.

Finally, having your own email (domain) doesn't require self-hosting it if you don't want. You can always delegate that part to some provider. But you control the domain so you can switch providers (or switch to self-hosting) any moment. You can also do a hybrid option where you self-host receiving but farm out the sending, if you prefer. So many options, all of them work!

ISPs, domain name registration and DDoS protection should be classified as utilities though.

Why? They seem to work fine as they are.

They are increasingly being used as a tool to censor legal but unpopular websites. You can build your own website but if your domain name get canceled and tier 1 ISPs block you, you can’t do a lot.

I’m aware of Parler, but are there other examples?

KiwiFarms is the latest example. No one is claiming it was a wholesome site, but it was entirely legal in the US and yet the owner is having difficulties getting it hosted because even though they have VPS providers willing to host the site, tier 1 ISPs have blackholed the sites IP. There is no alternative to a tier 1 ISP. You can't run your own, the are the lowest level of internet infrastructure and if they are being weaponized for censorship than it's all over for a neutral internet.

There are 16 tier 1 ISPs which basically hold the entire internet in their control. Arguably these companies should be required to route any legal traffic.

I agree. I have no argument against this.

The phone system is a great counterexample.

The government effectively established monopolies in phone service. Telephone numbering was not even close to seamless and painless. When dialing was introduced there was pushback and plenty of need for education of consumers, not to mention concerns about the loss of jobs for telephone operators. Establishing international numbering and the ITU has been a costly and slow diplomatic process.

The result is a system which is now almost useless because of the lack of spam prevention that facilitates elder abuse at a large scale.

If it wasn’t a legacy technology, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the telephone to my mother as a product.

The reason we have alternatives now is that there was no regulation preventing us from developing VoIP and other communications services via the internet.

Frankly it’s weird that we would even consider the telephone as a model for current regulation. It’s an antiquated legacy stepping stone from the time before computers.

So all this was caused... because people were able to port their phone numbers easily?

That was the example that was brought up.

Yes, some government regulations are bad. But some are good.

And this example of being able to port your phone number... seems to be a pretty simple, uncontroversial, and good feature, that could possibly be applied to social media companies as well.

> that could possibly be applied to social media companies as well.

No, it can’t because social media isn’t based on phone numbers, and social networks aren’t telephone networks, and each one works differently.

It's really not. It's very hard to argue against a technological system that worked really well for as long as it did; only to be disrupted by the internet.

Honestly, it's hard to quantify how well it worked because we got so used to it; it stopped being "technology" and just became "part of life."

You can say the same thing about any technology that worked in the past but then failed. It doesn’t mean we should go back to it.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. The government regulated telephone system was a success, and the only thing that actually brought it down was technological disruption, which happens. I believe you were trying to suggest that the regulation was a bad thing?

Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.

The internet did grow out of telephony so perhaps it's not surprising that it shares many of the same qualities, however I think these government vs private debates often ignore that the failures and shortcomings of these systems are usually a result of both bad government intervention and bad private actors, not solely one or the other

> Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.

Yes, many similar problems have indeed arisen, but the point is that they are being solved by many private actors, and not by regulation.

Email spam is solved by spam filtering. To the extent that spam filtering isn’t adequate, communications simply move away from email to other messaging services that have better permission models. To the extent that messaging services are not private enough, communications shift to E2E encryption. To the extent that domains are confusing, people shift to search and apps. The list goes on.

Phone spam however, continues unabated.

Spam is not solely solved by technology, regulation also helps. Regulation also helps with phone and text spam, though there's more to do.

Anti-spam legislation doesn’t regulate the technology. It legislates the behavior of the spammers.

This is no different from say, assault, which doesn’t regulate hammers and baseball bats, but makes it illegal to hit people with them without their permission.

Your comment seemed to be claiming that, at least in the example of email spam, only technology (filtering) addresses it, that there is no role for regulation. I was disagreeing with that.

My understanding of phone spam regulation is there is some that legislates technology, namely forbidding completion of connections of spoofed phone numbers.

> The government effectively established monopolies in phone service.

When the phone service was a monopoly in the USA it had five nines of uptime and close to zero latency.

It's been downhill since then.

POTS had massive costs to achieve that low latency. And it's quality over long distances was suspect. It may have also held back innovation because of bad regulation and inertia.

Yes, and VoIP is saturated with spam and toll fraud. Lack of regulation has spurred innovation, but has also given bad actors free rein.

I agree that the telephone isn't a great example of where regulation has worked, but I think the specific example of phone number portability is a good one: something that no carrier would ever implement, but something that is great to help customers avoid being locked in to a single provider.

The phone system doesn’t lack regulation. Phone spam is already illegal. The reason for phone/VoIP spam is because the system is too inflexible to make it easy to prevent, and the reason the system is inflexible is that it is regulated.

We already have portability. When you sign up to a new network, you provide your phone number and email address, and your friends can find you.

What if you don’t want to provide your email or phone number to a network?

What if your friends only know you online, and do not know your phone number or email address?

He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind.

a friend of mine lost his phone and was not able to recover his phonenumber. as a result he lost contact with hundreds of people and was not able to restore that contact to most of them.

and that's not the first time i heard about that happening. in china supposedly relationships have been destroyed because someone lost their wechat access, and definitely friendships have been lost.

this is my nightmare scenario. there are so many people i am in contact with through only one mode of communication, and if i were to lose that i would have no chance to ever get back to them.

i don't even know how many people i lost when my email addresses stopped working. because i didn't just want to blast out a global notice to all my contacts. of course there the important ones i could inform about the new address but the less important ones are gone snd they have no way to find me.

i am struggling to establish alternate contacts (like get the email addresses) of people to avoid that nightmare scenario for myself.

so no, i don't think he is wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind. maintaining connections across multiple modes of communication is extremely hard.

I really hate spending any time or effort building connections on proprietary platforms since it is so inevitable all that effort will decay to nothing as the platform dies, as it eventually must because it is controller by a single corporation that isn't interested in interoperability nor maintaining it once it's no longer profitable.

To the extent possible I prefer to keep in touch with everyone via email since it is a decentralized open standard, so it will never go away.

I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces. If this isn’t the case for you, then allow me to speak for myself then. I think the very thought that the author is sharing is an overreaction, but it it’s a sign of the times that it even generates a conversation or that some people can even liken it to government intervention in the telephone business. I’m indifferent to the concept itself, but I find the idea in the context of the modern world and the dominant global culture…dramatic.

> I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces.

Not at all. I just think it’s obvious that the sentiment has been waning for some time now. Who is going around saying how great big tech is?

> Who is going around saying how great big tech is?

I think that that’s the thing. They don’t have to say that. The attention that their products get, good or bad, speaks loudly enough.

This is a piece that mentions briefly that regulations promoting federation have been proposed. Otherwise, I don’t see much of an “argument” one way or another.

As inequality has grown, so has the deficit.

But for decades, government programs ran surpluses.

It’s not hard to explain it away in memorized economics terms. The thing is those terms are merely one set of reasonable, generic language. Not immutable laws of reality.

Technology is moving faster than that because of government investment; IBM refused to invest in solid state fearing it would undermine sales of old tube computers. Government invested in and gifted them solid state patents.

What do you think the cheap money flowing to tech corps was about the last decade? Government subsidy of technology, which is verifiable in that now that rates are down tech genius CEOs are not innovating but pushing traditions of austerity. These companies are middlemen dependent on government subsidies.

How is this relevant?

You think he’s wrong about how great government control would be, but the government is in control.

Don’t be silly. The government doesn’t regulate how these services operate.

If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.

The government regulates their existence, their ability to grow, hire, develop services.

Section 230 regulates what is allowed. DMCA, etc etc

You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it? You are not really selling a strong argument here, just wishy washy opinions decoupled from the negotiated terms of society documented openly.

Society, the rest of us, do not have an obligation to your head canon.

With the money printer off, tech corp are going where the money is; government welfare, not a free market: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/google-and-...

The government does not “own assets” on paper but it has a whole lot of influence over agency

> You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it?

They aren’t mutually exclusive.

> The government does not “own assets” on paper but it has a whole lot of influence over agency

Feel free to believe that your agency is under government control.

The Fed prints fiat which goes into the banking system to VCs & other investment vehicles. Fiat is based on the credibility & debt of the issuer. When the issuer looses credibility & when the issuer issues more fiat in relation to assets & production, then the fiat loses value. Large tech companies have received much of this credit & debt based fiat. When the value of the fiat falls, then the large tech companies' value is increasingly based on fundamentals which is based on underlying assets & production.

Again, a macroeconomic analysis with no explanation of how this is relevant.

I think the macro trends support your comment. Economic credibility & social credibility are related. Let's say a regime that controls the monetary system consists of pathological liars that uses the monetary system to their advantage & a certain critical mass knows it...they will want as little participation with that system as possible...explicitly or tacitly.

If the large tech companies are the vehicle of the monetary regime, then aware people will want to maximize their interests...One way to improve their interests is to use alternatives or to somehow influence the large platforms. If the large platforms do not change in peoples' favor, then it becomes clear that the more effective use of time/energy to use alternative solutions

Even if the large platform does change one's favor, the awareness that those who control it are not creditable leads to distrust & an understanding that participating with the creditable is a better mid & long term strategy.

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