> why your fellow-citizens didn’t vote the right way.
I'm a little concerned by the implication that regulating tech should focus on making sure that people vote "the right way".
Regulating Technology
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Regulating Technology
#22Right now there are three huge risks in regulating tech:
1. Slowing innovation 2. Creating monopolies 3. Crippling entire segments of the tech industry
The last chart is the most important: the cost of compliance affects small businesses, including startups much more than large companies.
Re: Regulating Technology
#23Can I veer horribly into my favourite tangent - I love the presentation style, the look-and-feel. It's a blog version of what he did at A18Z - a sort of sophisticated corporate but with the look of something that could be knocked up from Markdown. I could steal the CSS, but that's is only 20% of the battle - getting graphs that match the snazz, getting everything just right, but with this off handed vibe. As I get ol…
Interesting but I found the opposite. Font a bit small, grey on grey hard to read and no links whatsoever! (Why not if you are writing for the web?) No strong personality comes across - and I like most of what Ben does. I find it actually visually less engaging than a lot of corporate blogs.
Re: Regulating Technology
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
So no regulation at all then? Just allow companies to use and abuse their "users" however they please? This is a return to the era of robber barons. We must try to ensure that companies have incentives to do better, otherwise we have seen time and time again that they will do anything they please as long as it is profitable. Consumers will not "just choose the ethical option" because they either cannot afford to, the…
I wouldn't say that. But doing _something_ isn't automatically better than doing nothing, particularly when the tools are blunt and those wielding them are inexpert in the domain to which they're being applied. There are no easy solutions here. But I agree strongly with your premise of "incentivizing companies to do better", and I suspect there are other means than regulation to achieve that goal.
Can you give some examples of the alternatives to regulation you refer to?
Re: Regulating Technology
#25> why your fellow-citizens didn’t vote the right way. I'm a little concerned by the implication that regulating tech should focus on making sure that people vote "the right way".
Whoa, I don’t see this in OP post. Perhaps a political motivation was edited out to make their argument appear technically grounded when it has ideological underpinnings?
Re: Regulating Technology
#26Have there been many regulatory success stories? I can't think of many
Re: Regulating Technology
#27The challenges for regulation are two-fold, in my opinion: 1. It just doesn't work. Legal and regulatory solutions are too slow and poorly designed to be effective, see for example the EU browser consent decree applied to Internet Explorer. IE didn't fail because Microsoft was forced to offer a choice of browser; it stumbled because of other nimbler competitors (particularly Chrome) that were able to innovate despite…
> 1. It just doesn't work.
* Unleaded gasoline
* Earthquake-proof building codes
* Air pollution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_of_1963#Effects)
These are just a few that I quickly came up with off the top of my head. Obviously, not all regulation works. But it is so incredibly false to say there doesn't exist effective regulation that has made our lives much better.
Re: Regulating Technology
#28Have there been many regulatory success stories? I can't think of many
Clean air, clean water, seatbelts, no wild economic swings from 1932 until 1986, meat packing plant sanitation, coal mine safety, nuclear power safety, OSHA, the National Park system, air traffic control, port authority - I could go on.
Re: Regulating Technology
#29The challenges for regulation are two-fold, in my opinion: 1. It just doesn't work. Legal and regulatory solutions are too slow and poorly designed to be effective, see for example the EU browser consent decree applied to Internet Explorer. IE didn't fail because Microsoft was forced to offer a choice of browser; it stumbled because of other nimbler competitors (particularly Chrome) that were able to innovate despite…
1. I don't think point this is self-evident. At a minimum you could tighten up the M&A rules so that the big guys can't just buy every potential competitor. Legislative solutions are probably too slow, but we could certainly form a regulatory agency that can deal with rule-making as new issues come to the front. 2. I don't think it's self-evident that regulation would disadvantage US and EU companies. Regulation that…
How exactly could M&A regulations be written to prohibit purchasing a potential competitor before it becomes a significant actual competitor? Like what legally enforceable language could you actually use? At some level every business has the potential to become a competitor of every other business.
Re: Regulating Technology
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say that. But doing _something_ isn't automatically better than doing nothing, particularly when the tools are blunt and those wielding them are inexpert in the domain to which they're being applied. There are no easy solutions here. But I agree strongly with your premise of "incentivizing companies to do better", and I suspect there are other means than regulation to achieve that goal.
Can you give some examples of the alternatives to regulation you refer to?
Historically, companies as well as individuals respond well to economic incentive (both positive and negative). As an example from a different industry, carbon credits have created a market that encourages and rewards green activity; taxation on products and services that are perceived as "negative" acts as a constraint on supply and demand.
Equally, the government itself is a huge purchaser of services and has undue influence in how companies behave. The desire for companies to win federal and military contracts allows governments significant leverage; perhaps not in the Facebook case, but certainly in areas like cloud.