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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Big tech would be for this -- it would create a huge moat in terms of costly and complicated compliance overhead that would keep small challengers and startups out.

Complicated or costly regulation is a regressive tax -- it affects smaller companies a lot more than larger ones and tends to prevent new entrants to a market.

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That's exactly my point though. Google, AWS, Meta etc all stand to gain from this. But plenty of middle tier providers are entirely silent even if it poses a potentially existential threat. Some people are going to get rich from this of course, but many will be ruined.

And that's before even accounting for the lives to be destroyed by a blurry photo of a tree being classified as abuse material.

This is because they are one audit away from being off the market. This is how companies stay silent in authoritarian regimes. One wrong comms and company is toast.

Except that it creates a market for circumvention tech that would also cut Big Tech out from understanding what its users are saying to each other.

Age restriction laws don't stop underage folks from doing anything, they just increase the market demand for VPNs, and improve VPNs so they get less easily detected. The net result is that platforms can't use IP addresses to meaningfully infer anything about their users.

Same with this. This legislation will create a demand for private encryption tech that isn't part of the platform. Someone is going to provide that and make money, and in the process may remove the demand for the platform in the first place.

I get the logic you're talking about, and agree that they must be thinking this, but it's very short-sighted.

I hadn't thought of the regulatory capture implications. As if this could not get worse.

Add to this that law enforcement is human, and famously opposed to checking their members. Resulting in things like this:

https://www.heraldnet.com/news/investigation-seattle-cop-use...

https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...

If the lowest level of law enforcement can figure out how to use the system for this, imagine what a government ministry can do.

Big tech would be for this - because they already do it

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