AnthonyMouse

They have the inherent incentive to inhibit you from doing layoffs, and the same incentive to stop you from replacing existing workers with different ones since the existing ones get a vote and the prospective replacements don't.

> And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount?

The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem, because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep.

> If they were paying each employee 10x as much

They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?

> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.

That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing.

If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.

This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.

We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.

Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.

> After all socialism also (indirectly) gave us weekends, paid holidays, sick leave, social security, state pensions, and decent healthcare.

The history of these things is that something changes to allow them or everyone discovers that they're advantageous, e.g. the industrial revolution happens and for a few years employers try having workers put in 80 hour weeks but then discover that burn out increases errors and turnover and it's better to hire more people for fewer hours. Then politicians rush to take credit for the thing everyone was by then starting to do anyway by passing a law mandating it.

Also notice that the way these things are implemented in the law are asinine, e.g. if you work for more than 40 hours for one employer then you have to be paid overtime, but if you work 40 hours each for two employers then neither of them does. So then employers cap your hours even if you're willing or otherwise have a need to work more to make more money and those people still end up working 80 hours with no overtime, but now they have two jobs with two commutes and two bosses they have to convince to take vacation at the same time etc.

But the alternative mandates (e.g. individuals are effectively or entirely banned from working over 40 hours) are pretty obviously unreasonable to people who are trying to save up for something or start a side business or get out of debt. So instead you have a law which is essentially useless when it isn't actively counterproductive, but that sounds good and therefore allows politicians to pretend they're helping you.

See also employer-provided healthcare incentives, social security forcing everyone to de facto invest their retirement savings in low-yielding government bonds rather than diversified investments, healthcare corporations capturing regulators to limit competition through the law, etc.

> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.

You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.

Compare two alternatives.

One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.

Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.

The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.

> They could simply provide an API that allows websites to verify someone’s identity using a zero-trust approach without exposing the actual documents.

Because then that website would get compromised and lose the data on 350 million people instead of 153.

Worse, it would lower the friction to surveillance companies demanding government ID in order to use the internet.

People throw around terms like "zero trust" like that could actually do something here. If you create an API that banks or employers could use for extending credit or payroll taxes then it will inherently disclose your social security number to the corporation, since they need it to file their forms. But create that API and you'll have every ad network on the internet making calls to it so they can use your social security number as a tracking ID to correlate everything you do across different services. And, of course, recording all of that data to get breached when their security sucks.

Using government ID on the internet should simply be banned. 99% of things shouldn't require government ID to begin with and the 1% that do should always be done in person.

The trouble with controlling the government is that nobody actually does. Nobody will ever get it to do everything they want, or everything it "should", or anything like that. It's a giant uncoordinated bureaucracy full of inefficiency and perverse incentives. Relying only on the government is a time-honored way to die with regrets.

This is not the same as being unable to affect it at all. It can very easily go from being hot garbage to being flaming toxic waste in a tornado when the only people who show up are the ones trying to steal from everyone else.

> And they should still be banned from forcing apps to do it under their arbitrary judgements in order to participate on their platform. That isn't the same thing as preventing them from doing it.

If they do it and it's enabled by default then they still get to grief their competitors because by default anyone who tries to use the competitor gets a big scary red box that deters adoption and has to jump through a bunch of hoops to get past it. It also thwarts adoption of competing signing alternatives because >90% of people will use whatever the default is even if the alternatives are at least as good.

> some people honestly need walled gardens

"Walled garden" is an Orwellian term. It's meant to imply that someone is curating what's inside it and not letting in things you don't want, and that is indeed a useful thing. But then people use the same term to mean a "garden" that locks you inside of it rather than locking bad things out. The only people who need that are small children and adults with mental illnesses severe enough to justify them having a guardian assigned to make their decisions for them.

> I'm also not sure that attestation should be banned at the app store or platform level; it's a service.

It isn't a service at all. The device contains hardware to sign the state of the device using a protected private key. Solving the problem is very simple -- you ban the device from coming with any private key already installed that the user can't freely extract. Then the root of the chain of trust is the customer's public key, not the vendor's, and whether a device is authorized comes down to whether the user's public key is authorized rather than the vendor's, which in turn makes the system vendor-agnostic.

> That's just DNS. If your platforms service becomes hostile, there will be cheap/free competitors, just like DNS.

DNS is actually a pretty terrible model because the "competition" is a fraud. There are registrars and registries and the registrars compete with each other but the registry still sets the price the registrars pay and the registries have a monopoly over every name in that TLD, so the competition can't actually get you a lower price than the monopoly registry itself sets. And the registries only compete with each other to the extent that you think that example.dental is valid substitute for example.football (no, sorry, those are both the same registry anyway) and to the extent that example.co.uk is a domain you could get instead of example.com rather than needing both. Meanwhile ICANN charges an extortionate amount to anyone who wants to become a registry and the entire system is set up to encourage squatting, to the point that the registries are now doing it themselves rather than making any attempt to impede it.

In general if you want something to work well you need to make it a protocol rather than a service. As soon as you allow a central chokepoint to exist you'll have a troll jumping out from under the bridge and trying to collect tolls.

> It’s not considered a secret, it’s just something people don’t feel comfortable entering in forms online.

If you have someone's US bank routing information then you can forge checks against their account. This is an unforced error downstream of still using a system devised in the early years of the 20th century.

> That feels a bit too personal, and is simple to enter wrong.

It feels personal because they're trying to pretend it isn't a secret even though it structurally is one.

Entering it wrong seems like a fake problem. You copy and paste it from your bank's website.

> It’s also nice to be able to change banks or have multiple accounts without having to care about online payments details

A reasonable payments system does the same thing without a middle man taking a vig. For example, Zelle uses email addresses or phone numbers. If you change banks then you register your email address or phone number with the new bank and from then the money goes there instead. There is no reason a system couldn't work the same way for recurring payments.

> For example I had an account frozen for an incorrect inkasso (that was eventually retracted), I was glad I could just ask a friend to send me something to PayPal as a way to do online payments.

This is just a desire for it to be easy to open a new account at a different bank and start using that.

Nobody needs these middle men and the only reason they exist is that the incumbents and regulatory apparatus make the default system unnecessarily difficult.

Of the last 10 Presidential terms spanning 40 years, Republicans have held the office for 5 and Democrats for 5. Each party has likewise held around half the seats in the House and Senate. This has nothing to do with the voters, it's the structural outcome of a FPTP voting system. You get two parties and they each get around half the votes/seats.

The US federal government has also played a major role in causing this by passing laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which incumbents use to threaten competitors who attempt adversarial interoperability.

Moreover, the DoJ budget is ~$33B whereas e.g. the military budget is ~$1T, so arguing that the only way to allocate more resources to antitrust enforcement or similar is to raise taxes would imply that all of the existing spending is critically necessary and Congress never e.g. buys tanks the Army doesn't want or otherwise poorly allocates existing funds.

The US Government spends a preposterous amount of money, and the number only ever goes up. It doesn't need to be bigger, it needs to be less inefficient.

"It's not a monopoly" is exactly the framing. Antitrust isn't inherently concerned with monopolies, it's concerned with market power. It's just that a monopolist has no room to move in claiming that they don't have market power.

They also play this trick where they pretend the only market is "phones" and ignore all of the complementary markets they're tying together with their phones, like app distribution and browser engines etc., since the market definitions for those shouldn't be the same as it is for "phones" when an app store that can be used on Google and Samsung phones can't be used (and therefore doesn't compete) on Apple phones and vice versa.

Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.

Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.

If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.

Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.

But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.

The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?

That's because they are the same thing. Integrating the complementary goods into a single offering is obviously vertical integration. Not integrating them would make the acquisition pointless -- or even more nakedly anti-competitive, when the purpose is to inhibit integration with competitors rather than improve integration with the company's own products.

Do you expect Hugging Face to remain a neutral platform with no preference for any given GPU vendor's technology?

The banking system in some countries (including the US) does regard that information as secret. This is, of course, fully insane and the only reason it persists is that the regulatory institutions in those countries are too intransigent to switch from their >100 year old technology to some merely 50 year old technology like public key cryptography.

Or even backward-compatible changes like requiring banks to give customers virtual account numbers that they can give to different merchants/people and turn on and off.

> I don't think there's a name for "buying makers of complementary goods".

That's still vertical integration, you're just looking down the tube from the wrong end.

Suppose a company that sells PCs also makes CPUs. That's obviously vertical integration, right? CPUs are part of the supply chain for PCs. Likewise if they make SSDs.

But CPUs and SSDs are also complementary goods. They're both sold to PC OEMs in order to produce the downstream product, or end customers when they build their own PC or want to upgrade a component or two.

Entering both of the complementary markets is vertical integration because the obvious reason for a company to do it is to integrate the separate goods into a single offering:

> then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.

But then they have a perverse incentive. You get a bag with five servings of chips and one serving of medication -- the first hit is free. And you shouldn't need the drug to begin with.

The common components are irrelevant. Even Apple still has components manufactured by Foxconn, buys RAM and flash from the same vendors as anyone else, uses ARM's ISA, etc. The phones made by Xiaomi et al are perfectly capable of running the same apps as Apple's from a hardware perspective.

The difference is that now if someone wants to make a competing store for iOS apps, or a competing client app for Reddit or Twitter, the incumbents use the DMCA and remote attestation and similar anti-competitive levers to lock those competitors out of the market and governments have been letting them get away with it.

Context: Liz Lemon has been buying two products together because one of them creates a need for the other.

    Jack Donaghy: The only thing I will be discussing with the House Subcommittee on Baseball, Quiz Shows, Terrorism, and Media is vertical integration.
    Liz Lemon: What's vertical integration?
    Jack Donaghy: Imagine that your favorite corn chip manufacturer also owned the number one diarrhea medication.
    Liz Lemon: That'd be great, 'cause then they could put a little sample of the medicine in each bag.
    Jack Donaghy: Keep thinking.
    Liz Lemon: [beat] Except then they might be tempted to make the corn chips give you...
    Jack Donaghy: Vertical integration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ7oht6TD9c

> the PC revolution only happened due IBM's mistake, everyone else was vertically integrated

IBM was extremely vertically integrated. What actually happened was that Compaq reverse engineered their BIOS and made a compatible system and the courts said it was okay.

The thing destroying the modern world is DMCA 1201. Adversarial interoperability is fundamental.

That's just conceding that you don't actually want to have laws and really only want to punish people when you don't like them.

> This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes.

"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.

> That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).

Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.

> The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.

Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?

It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.

> It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.

Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.

It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion.

Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.

The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.

And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.

The prosecution can say whatever they want, but the worst of the existing laws are the one that are pretty easy to prove, and it's the court rather than the prosecution who makes the decision.

You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.

Isn't that the other way around? The law already can't be enforced against the TBTF corporation, so what do they care if it stays on the books? But now you can't enforce it against someone else or they can point to you not enforcing it against them.

Except that's the point. The government would now have to do that or they lose the law. If it's a good law then they don't want to lose it, but if it's a good law then they should be enforcing it against them.

And, of course, the correct way to deal with this is to break the TBTF corporations into many smaller pieces so that stops being a problem.

You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out.

And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.

> The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.

That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.

The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late.

In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.

Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer.

Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.