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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

When my sister and I would play monopoly as kids, we had lost the manual so whenever we didn’t like the outcome of whatever happened, we would make up rules about what was right. Technically then, it was very easy stay compliant while still being able to do well because we could rewrite the rules.

Also, since I was older I feel like I was able to get away with those redefinitions a lot more often…

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The word "lawful" always seems to get dragged out when people in power are doing some especially heinous rulemaking, like throwing a hissy fit over a single company trying to voluntarily draw a line at domestic surveillance and fully automated killchains.

A private corporation can choose not to sell to the government. A lot of them do exactly this. A lot of hoops to jump through.

However, if they do sell to the government, they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products. We're a country of laws, and for better or for worse, these laws are made by elected officials and those appointed by elected officials.

Why an American company wouldn't want American defense to have the most capable tools at their disposal is a different matter all together, but here we are.

> they shouldn't have some sneaky way to exert control over decision making using their products.

why not, many companies have all sorts of rules you agree to when using their products, including many legal ("lawful") things. Are you saying that the government as a client should be unbound by contractual obligations that apply to other clients?

Governments negotiate their own contracts with their own terms of service. That’s one of the hoops government contractors jump through.

Not only that, but some of the contractual terms are defined by federal acquisition law, et al.

I want to be clear, I agree. I have no objection to unique government contracts. I'm specifically curious about GPs position that a government contractor should be (ethically?) bound from putting contractual obligations on government use of their service.

Like the various ai providers limit lawful use like creating AI pornography. I think it would be reasonable to keep a contractual restriction against that even when working with the government.

That's fine as long as the company can choose they don't like those terms and refuse to do business. But in this case the government threatened, and carried out the threat, of classifying Anthropic as a "supply chain threat" if they didn't agree to the government's terms.

This administration has made it very clear that they will do what they can to change laws whenever convenient, without congressional oversight, whether or not they are "allowed" to.

Trump implemented tariffs he wasn't allowed to immediately, he started a war he probably wasn't allowed to in order to (allegedly) distract from associating with a pedophile, he wrote an executive order trying to undo the fourteenth amendment, he has actively been abducting and imprisoning lawful residents (and even citizens!) and actively pushed for racial profiling to do so.

If a company feels like the government will simply rewrite the laws in order to advance any kind of political whim (including to be weaponized against that very company!), it's not wrong or even weird for them to want to add safeguards to their product.

To be clear, this isn't weird or uncommon. Lots the stuff you sign in the EULA isn't preventing you from doing things that are "illegal".

Your court system wasn't designed for the Executive branch acting with actual bad intent.

You're a country of laws, but if enforcing them takes months if not years... Then during that time, you're the wild wild west

The system also wasn't designed for presidential immunity. Combining that with unlimited federal pardons, we're the wild west permanently, or at least until that decision is overturned.

I suspect cynically that as soon as someone not a republican takes power the presidential immunity will magically evaporate in a burst of bad faith jurisprudence.

This comment is hilariously incorrect. Courts stop the Executive branch all the time. You do not know what you're talking about.

I believe they’re speaking of a defiant executive, as in "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!"

As opposed to a compliant executive that voluntarily does what the courts tell them to.

We have not seen a non-compliant executive in this country since FDR. People need to actually read the output from the Court and the associated response from the Executive branch, and not the news. I realize we a swimming in a soup of chaos about this current administration, but there has been no Andrew Jackson moment. This White House does something, and there is an injunction, and they back off. They have a pretty good batting average at the appeals level and at SCOTUS, but there is no instance I can reference where they deliberately ignore an order from the courts.

Broad strokes, probably mostly accurate. In the margins, some of the deportation flights were in malicious violation of direct court orders.

Courts don’t have the authority to do that.

There's nothing sneaky about terms & conditions. If the gov wants a service they legally need to abide by its terms, same as us, if they don't like it they should choose another product.

Anthropic doesn't want their AI used for misaligned mass surveillance scanners and killbots, there are obvious reasons they might not want that.

Anthropic wanted the ability to verify compliance whereas OAI and Google are fine with "trust us". Which is how it always is, and always has been.

For better or worse, the government is the one who audits, and has it's own internal systems for self audits. So no one except them tells them what they can or cannot do. The government would never put itself in a position where civilians died because Amodei didn't like the vibe of the case being worked.

In a way it's wild that people are upset that the government didn't put a billionaire megacorp CEO in the drivers seat of intelligence.

>So no one except them tells them what they can or cannot do.

you're missing "laundering the responsibility" approach - find a lawyer who writes that the thing is legal in his opinion, and voila.

It's incredible if you honestly believe that.

The only reason this blew up at all was because of the insane overreach by the DoW after anthropic voiced their concern.

It was well within anthropic right to do so, as it was part of their contract.

And it would've been very understandable that the DoW balked at that, though the real issue would be the incompetence how the contract was able to get through with that in it. But with that contact in place, the only sensible action would've been to terminate the contract and move on. Frankly, nobody would've cared.

But the DoW felt it just had to go further... And their chosen action was just an insane overreach - hence the controversy.

Anthropic wanted the ability to verify compliance whereas OAI and Google went "OK no verification but then we won't give you the weights".

I'd prefer our elected officials own the manual, accepting the fact that [person I don't like] could be in power and they can re-write the rules, then a private billion dollar corporation. Especially when it comes to defense.

Ha! If the Congress did diddly squat about eavesdropping on them by organizations that aren’t supposed to spy on citizens back in the Obama days (we also spied on allies’s governments but that’s kinda what all of them do) there is no hope in them reining things back at all… for mere hoi polloi.

I guess we have to appoint Amodei and Altman as our benevolent dictators to keep Congress in check!

They're allowed to say no. The ability I have to say no to you doesn't mean I rule over you.

I was going to post about whether there were still "laws" in the US, but this post gets the point across much better

The pentagon is part of the executive, not the legislative, and as such they can not write the 'rules' (law)

The executive also can’t declare war, yet we are in Iran. Executive orders have stood in for legislation; even though it shouldn’t.

What is considered lawful is up to the whims of the pentagon and the other two branches have shown little interest in providing sufficient checks and balances. Maybe 5 years after the pentagon makes an illegitimate legal justification will a judge strike it down: that is if we are lucky.

We need to encourage kids to play and make mistakes more so they can prepare themselves for the real world.

Which is really just a bunch of big children with bank accounts, drugs, and weapons.

The big reason it's "obvious" when tech megacorps do it is because big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running and legitimized like medical, civil engineering, energy, agriculture, chemical, etc, do.

If this were 3M making nasty stuff for Northrop to put in bombs and drop on brown people or Exxon scheming up something bad in Alaska or bulldozing a national park for solar panels or some other legacy BigCo doing slimy things that are in the interests of them and the government but against the interest of the public they'd have 40yr of preexisting trade group publications, bought and paid for academic and media chatter, etc, etc, that they could point to and say "look, this is fine because the stuff we paid into in advance to legitimize these sorts of things as they come up says it is" though obviously they'd use very different words.

> If this were 3M making nasty stuff for Northrop to put in bombs and drop on brown people or Exxon scheming up something bad in Alaska or bulldozing a national park for solar panels or some other legacy BigCo doing slimy things that are in the interests of them and the government but against the interest of the public they'd have 40yr of preexisting trade group publications, bought and paid for academic and media chatter, etc, etc, they could point to and say "look, this is fine because the stuff we paid into in advance to legitimize these sorts of things as they come up says it is" though obviously they'd use very different words.

My friend, this paragraph needed some periods. I could not follow what you were trying to say - but it seemed interesting enough to consider retyping.

Good comment, and I agree lol

I read it twice (admittedly quickly) but couldn't grasp the point even though I felt like it was there.

It's not really hard to read.

If this were a traditionally evil company, the work to legalize the evil things would have started forty years ago.

Ya I roughly understand that the OP wanted to convey this message, but it was absolutely a hard read the way they conveyed it.

> big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running

The career officials in the Obama FTC started proceedings for an antitrust lawsuit against Google over a decade ago.

The political appointees (of both parties) shut it down.

It seems to me that regulatory capture has been working for Google for some time now.

I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.

Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again.

There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through.

Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.

>they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.

There are very real concerns when you break up a company though. Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. That could easily make a politician that's "politician out to get the big companies" into "politician making billionaires richer."

Tough to say for sure, but I think it's probably still better to have more billionaires if there's more competition.

I wasn't around during the breakup, but my parents told me that phone service got considerably better and cheaper after the AT&T breakup, which makes enough sense to me: if a consumer can drop you for someone else, you have a reason to try and compete on service and/or price.

> Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up.

Most owners (weighted by share) do NOT seem to want their big monopolies broken up, despite the track record of Standard Oil.

> Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems.

I read a good Google adjacent example of this in yesterday's NYTimes:

> Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk. Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax... Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it.

https://archive.ph/LTkix

Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service.

It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.

I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!).

For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies.

People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated.

I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG.

This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers).

We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet.

We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.

The harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity.

1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around).

Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion.

>it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out

It's generally not possible to have an honest conversation about something when one side sees the other's honest response as "going absolutely insane" :-)

Do we need more than 1% conversion though? As long as the company is sustainable then that's sufficient to justify the company's existence. I think it says more about a lot of these services in that they're so shitty that they people will only use them if they're "free"; if Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok aren't good enough services to justify people paying for it, then maybe they shouldn't exist?

You can't use Kagi or Nebula without paying, so I don't really see how they're suffering from the free riders you keep insisting are some horrible epidemic. Almost by definition, if you're using Kagi or Nebula, you're already a conversion...are you saying a 1% conversion from advertising?

I have a collection of four hundred blu-rays and thousands of CDs. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime, I pay for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, and I don't use an ad blocker. I don't know if that falls into your criteria of "someone who can discuss this honestly", and of course I don't really have a means of "proving" this to you, but if you can assume I'm being truthful I don't think I'm speaking out of my ass here.

Then accept the equilibrium of Google being the god of the internet.

If people refuse to pay, refuse to view ads, and are happy to let the suckers like you (and me) carry the cost, then no one should be complaining about the impenetrable giants who reign over us. The internet can reap what it sowed. I'm burning 3GB a month loading ads on my phone so others can view ad free? Maybe I should petition the IRS to let me write it off as a charitable donation.

The story of Vid.me is excellent here, because they were actually on track to dethrone youtube. The hype was real and they genuinely were getting positive traction. Did youtube fight back? Did google sound the alarm? Was there any effort to keep creators on yt? No, no, and no. Why?

Because Google knew Vid.me would run out of runway, and that at heart, the users were just there for the free lunch. Vid.me went bankrupt and never made even a dollar from their "fans".

But there are companies that charge money and manage to be successful, as I stated.

Even before the internet most businesses failed. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for dumb reasons. Before people expected everything to be free. Pointing to a company that you liked failing doesn't really prove anything; there's always a billion variables that can contribute to corporate failures and saying "LOL PEOPLE WON'T PAY FOR THINGS AD BLOCK BAD I HAVE TO PAY BANDWIDTH" doesn't really say anything.

Just because you can find some companies that charged money and failed doesn't change my point at all. Netflix has become successful enough to be in the running to buy Warner Bros. Netflix is an internet-first company that doesn't do anything for free and yet it's getting to a point where it's able to buy a very large legacy media company. It has been competing with free YouTube content and ThePirateBay.

I don't see at all how this proves that I need to "accept the equilibrium of Google".

No, Google had significant power over "who gets to buy and at what price" long before ad blocking caught on. Don't blame ad blockers for sabotaging your plan to get rich.

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