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U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#381

Post by mindslight »

zepto wrote: post #326
mindslight wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like calling a bike shed "civil engineering". I don't know what point you're making with the term "software architecture" other than trying to make it sound burdensome.

My point is that once you mandate that, then forever all stores must be architected around providing this web API, based on technology assumptions frozen in law. Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a central website, just as an example, would be illegal. This is just one example of how the future would be encumbered forever based on a 90’s software architecture becoming enshrined in law. The web as it i…

A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.

That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that. There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.

Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#382

Post by NationalPark »

bobthepanda wrote: post #252
pyrophane wrote: post #251

> Despite their ire, most Republicans have not backed the report's proposed changes in antitrust law but instead discussed stripping social media companies of legal protections they are accorded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law gives companies immunity over content posted on their sites by users. Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-Conservative bias" in social…

Depending on what happens the net outcome of repealing 230 might actually hurt conservatism on online platforms, since right now Twitter, Youtube, Facebook et al are not party to things like the billion dollar Dominion lawsuit against Fox News and Newsmax. Those news networks have deplatformed Mike Lindell because him actively spewing conspiracy theories on the Dominion voting machines undermines their defense in tha…

Of course it would hurt "conservatism on online platforms", repealing section 230 would effectively cause social media companies to shut their business down over night to avoid liability. Hackernews would certainly shut down. Nobody with any familiarity with the law actually supports repealing it, but for some reason it became a cause celebre of the far right. Maybe, "fuck the mods!!!" just doesn't have the same ring it used to?

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#383

Post by NationalPark »

undefined1 wrote: post #277
shockeychap wrote: post #102

Given the volume and profitably of tech trading by members of Congress (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821601 ) I have ZERO confidence that any useful legislation will come of it. It will just be a bunch of earnest and disingenuous theatre by the very people profiting from a bunch of companies who make Microsoft circa 1995 look like a kitten. For my part, I think the fundamental business model of profitin…

wow, you're not kidding. what are the chances they are going to bite their main investments and key donor class? "About 98% of political contributions from internet companies this cycle went to Democrats" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-electi... https://observer.com/2020/11/big-tech-2020-presidential-elec... https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/30/21540616/silicon-valle...

It's a little misleading to quote that without the context. The "98%" number is referring specifically to personal donations by the CEOs of tech companies (out of those who donated politically to someone at all) in the 2020 presidential election, not to political contributions from the companies they run.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#384

Post by darawk »

Tarsul wrote: post #372
Nasrudith wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when are we banning human judgements? They are the ultimate black box.

at least humans are held accountable.

Algorithm designers are human. You can hold them accountable.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#385

Post by ben_w »

darawk wrote: post #384
Tarsul wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least humans are held accountable.

Algorithm designers are human. You can hold them accountable.

This can be done by requiring them to be open about the algorithm, hence “don’t allow black box algorithms”.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#386

Post by Cullinet »

kortilla wrote: post #288
capableweb wrote: post #5

> potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents. How is Apple allowed t…

> The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here. Because this is a Gish Gallop of weak individual reasons batched together to make it seem like a stronger obvious argument when it’s not. > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads. You need to be more specific. >…

this paper is more specific

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3500919

I first seriously discussed how Google is a systematic internaliser with my cofounder in 2003. The next year Google together with a consortium of major publishers abandoned and wrote off a $350MM initiative to enable trading in traditional and print media and the Advertising Age piece even reported specifics why they were disbanding which read close enough to what we began doing since 1996. The reasons involve a lot of micro market theory and since there's a involved corporate history that's about as much as I can say other than it looked very clear to us that Google merely found that the traditional media had managed to stitch up their markets in similar ways without any theoretical appreciation for their actions.

definition :

https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/financial-regulation/mifid/si

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#387

Post by ben_w »

kortilla wrote: post #332
ben_w wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re going to have a really hard time defining what’s “fair” for a black box algorithm to do. To which the two biggest counter-arguments are: 1. “So don’t allow black box algorithms” 2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company which owns all the other products”

People use Google because the algorithm is a black box that is constantly updated to keep away black hat SEO crap. An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment. There is no current signal that can’t be trivially gained that doesn’t effectively require mass user surveillance (to see “what’s really popular”). > 2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company…

> An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment.

We here know that, politicians don’t seem to and they set the rules.

Regardless: the fear here is that Google itself is gaming its own algorithm — or just directly bypassing it because they can. I make no claim about the validity of this fear.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#388

Post by zepto »

mindslight wrote: post #381
zepto wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that once you mandate that, then forever all stores must be architected around providing this web API, based on technology assumptions frozen in law. Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a central website, just as an example, would be illegal. This is just one example of how the future would be encumbered forever based on a 90’s software architecture becoming enshrined in law. The web as it i…

A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that. That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that. There's n…

> A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.

There would have to be a lot more than that. Who would govern API quality, what about service levels, how about authentication and sign up? Data formats, etc. Would these all be up to the vendor? What happens when there is a bug in the API?

> That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that.

No, see above. It just isn’t that simple.

> There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.

Well this isn’t what you said before.

> Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.

Not at all. There is no reason at all for distributed store network would need to have an open API. It could operate in terms of user facing pages for people to interact with - or be like a network of chat bots.

You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#389

Post by Jochim »

zffr wrote: post #70
capableweb wrote: post #5

> potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents. How is Apple allowed t…

WebKit on iOS has special sandbox privileges not available to other user frameworks. I think it allows it to spawn other processes, and do special stuff to increase its performance and decrease energy consumption. It seems like an engineering challenge to expose these features to arbitrary 3rd party frameworks in a way that doesn’t allow these features to be abused. Not sure of Apple’s full motives, but I think this…

That's precisely the problem though. Apple have been allowed to extend privileges to their own applications that that their competition are explicitly prohibited from using.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#390

Post by warkdarrior »

darawk wrote: post #345
echelon wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? > They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads. Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to put people into their ad funnel. They control 50% of the mobile OS, 70%+ of the browser monocu…

> Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to put people into their ad funnel. You can call any company as a monopoly if you define its market narrowly enough. The hard question is making a good argument for your choice of market. Google is absolutely a monopoly in search advertising.…

Starbucks has a monopoly on coffee at Starbucks locations.
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