Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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It causes me some dismay when the IETF lurches into politics. It's with the best of intentions and I know and like most of the authors. I just think it's both naive and counter-productive.

From time to time I have thought ISOC was shilling for FAANG lobby ideas in discussions about European legislation.

So I guess my take is: inevitable, usually unfortunate.

The lack of a clearly left wing tech bro billionaire stance is obvious, but you could imagine one being more like Warren Buffet or MacKenzie-Gates, or even Bill Gates: more nuanced than Theil, Musk, Bezos. Not anti union, not oppositional to social agenda like women's reproductive rights, housing, regulation of their industry.

Here in Austria any new organization entering politics needs to collect support signatures first before it can register as a political party. Depending if it's a local or federal election they will get a certain amount of money by the government for campaigning. They are not allowed to be paid by companies for campaigning.

I think such a framework could work as a model to other democracies too.

Yes. I think this could work too. But at the pan-national level, multi-stakeholder-ism has carved out a distinct niche for tech bodies, groupings, alongside civil society and government.

This view that technocrats should decide governance matters alongside other groups sometimes concerns me. This dreadful naivete that "apply more technology" fixes social problems while we seem to ignore it causes as many as it fixes.

When it comes to regulation, tech sector voices universally decry it. Industry self-regulation is worrisome in every other sector, so why do we think not in ours?

Not that government regulation (cryptography, anonymity) is ideal either.

So far we have been able to defend cryptography on EU level because the argument is simple: > If the own government is capable to decrypt everything, it's only a matter of time that a bad adversary will be able to do the same.

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