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Comment by throwaway_3850 | Hacker News Reader

Bizzare that democracies can't/won't regulate this.

Not sure how this is about democracy or otherwise. Regulation exists in various countries, for example regarding internet plan speeds. In Germany, ISPs can’t just slap on “up to 300 Mbit/s” on the plan and then say “oh it’s only 50 Mbit/s at your house, tough luck”. Performance sucks (conditions apply)? Pay less or cancel immediately (without notice period).

Ah, but they can slap “up to 300 Mbit/s” on the plan and then hope you won't notice, which most user's won't. If the worst that can happen to them is that you get out of long contracts (which shouldn't even be the norm to begin with) then that's hardly an argument that we have effective regulation.

There's nothing bizarre here: there are enough people in those democracies, who believe regulating this is either not a good idea or not high enough priority

I doubt think that's true at all. In most representative democracies (UK here) we just don't have the ability to vote on such fine-grained legislation. If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.

It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.

>If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.

This overestimates support because you're vague on what the policy actually is, so everyone thinks that it's going to be their preferred variant being implemented. See: the brexit vote which got a majority vote for "yes", but in reality the none of the individual proposals got majority approval.

If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.

Brexit was only a policy question if you combined two different questions. “Should we stay in the EU?” and “What kind of foreign policy should we have?” People answering Yes to the first question also had plenty of diversity in how they wanted to answer the second question.

> If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.

Yes, if you're only allowed to vote for a single option. If you're allowed to vote yes/no for each option, or rank them from best to worst, then this problem doesn't happen.

It’s very hard to make multiple choices representative. Yes/No is fine, the most popular option from 20 yes’s and 20 No’s isn’t meaningful.

> we just don't have the ability to vote

Well, you can ask your representative to represent you, right?

I live in a place with direct democracy and it's much less regulated than the UK. Therefore the link between having the ability and actually regulating more is not obvious to me.

> anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products

Is it though? I mean, it might be bad, but I don't see how it's necessarily anti-democratic, as it has little to do with the governance model.

They do, especially outside of the United States, but there’s also a ton of corporate money spent to promote libertarian ideology so a non-trivial number of voters believe that regulation is inherently harmful.

The market will regulate everything.

Except monopolies.

What you call democracies are really just capitalistic governments. Why would they do that? It's bad for next quarter's profit margin

Read the top comment about misleading or deceptive conduct in the EU. There is a similar regime in Australia and companies don’t do it lest they face steep fines and lawsuits with good payouts and very few defences available. Good democracies regard this kind of law as a necessary part of capitalism, because it harms not only the consumer but the entire system. Maybe yours hasn’t figured it out yet.

Correct, the US has not figured that out

A brick through the correct window does wonders for democracy

Probably, if by wonders you mean the wonders of a free labor in prison [0].

Otherwise, probably not wonders at all.

0 - https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...

The overton window?

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