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Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

adding more laws that will be universally ignored by anyone with a small amount of thought and effort feels like a stupid way to solve anything, but it is absolutely the Australian Way. to quote[0] a noted philosopher:

> weird how a foundational myth of australia is that we’re a nation of subversive larrikins, when in actuality everyone here is an ultracop

0: https://nitter.net/tfswebb/status/976299234491121665?lang=en

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The only entities that can possibly control Facebook and Google are nation-states. If there is to be any regulation of them (or the content they push) at all, that's where it has to happen. These giant tech companies have demonstrated that they don't care to do it themselves. Of course individuals can decide to use these platforms or not, but if that was good enough to achieve the society most of us want to live in, we wouldn't need 90% of the laws we currently have.

Sadly nation states, or at least the ones acting currently, seem to think the only thing available is a banned or not binary. There’s no nuance to laws because nuance is hard to get into a 1 paragraph sound bite for the media.

We’re seeing the same thing in the UK currently with fuzzy definitions of what does and doesn’t need age verification, and even what verification means, and that’s leading to completely harmless communities shutting down to avoid having to risk being in the wrong while the megacorps just hoover up some more metadata about users.

Banning inappropriate things, whether media, alcohol, smoking, driving, etc. for young people is pretty much the long-established way of regulating what they do.

Where does this myth come from? It's quite the opposite. For example, around 30 years ago hundreds of thousands of Australians willingly handed in their guns. And they accepted new laws that mostly prevented them from owning guns, and by that using them for self-defense.

I think that was a buyout. Government offered money for the guns.

That's irrelevant to the argument that was being made. Confiscation for payment is still confiscation; see also "eminent domain."

About that time my then boss handed in his guns, 'willingly' only in that he wasn't daft enough to think he could beat the police in a firefight.

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