Comment by such12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by such12 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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