Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#31

Post by rollingdeep »

nradov wrote: post #20
rollingdeep wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are FB or Google or Amazon or you know... Microsoft... there are issues with how the government could ever effectively regulate such an industry with outsized funds (much larger than the fixed regulatory budgets) and power (influencing people and elections). The legal process was never designed to work effectively or efficiently at such a level. The legal process becomes such a war of attrition that you can…

Microsoft was forced to pay a large fine and significantly change their business practices. The goal was never to destroy Microsoft, and even if the government could have somehow done so that wouldn't have benefited consumers.

The outcome was a settlement as a slap on the wrist for a company that size and that arrogant (did you watch Gates’ testimony?). Really no significant business practices were forced to change either.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#32

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

nradov wrote: post #20
rollingdeep wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are FB or Google or Amazon or you know... Microsoft... there are issues with how the government could ever effectively regulate such an industry with outsized funds (much larger than the fixed regulatory budgets) and power (influencing people and elections). The legal process was never designed to work effectively or efficiently at such a level. The legal process becomes such a war of attrition that you can…

Microsoft was forced to pay a large fine and significantly change their business practices. The goal was never to destroy Microsoft, and even if the government could have somehow done so that wouldn't have benefited consumers.

Feh. It was a proverbial slap on the wrist. But you're absolutely right: it wasn't about destruction.

At the start of the trial, Microsoft "only" gave about $10K to political campaigns. By the end, they were giving $1M to BOTH parties each year. This was the real problem. The government extorted them for political cover. And it's not like they were picking on them; they just forced them to start paying into the system in proportion to their success, like everyone else is expected to at that level.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#33

Post by modeless »

nindalf wrote: post #21
chillacy wrote: post #6

The full transcript is on the verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-...

That was submitted yesterday, but failed to gain traction. It appears that the clickbait headline used by BBC got more attention from HN.

I'm sad about this. It appears to me that the original was buried, despite being interesting and extremely relevant for HN, because it doesn't fit the popular narrative of Zuckerberg being an uncaring evil robot. This BBC article appears to fit that narrative better, labeling him "combative" and "paranoid" despite his comments being perfectly reasonable IMO.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#34

Post by random42 »

mxscho wrote: post #29

> He repeatedly refused to attend meetings with politicians in the UK, sending other Facebook representatives in his place. "I did hearings in the US. I did hearings in the EU," he said. "It just doesn't really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up [...]" Not sure how Brexit supporters feel about that.

> Not sure how Brexit supporters feel about that.

Zuckerberg does not care.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#35

Post by dang »

rr-geil-j wrote: post #17
rollingdeep wrote: post #2

BBC coverage on this is a bit minimal and lazy. Posted already here with more coverage on Zuckerberg's comments about suing the government and election interference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244 It's already deleted.

It was flagged by users—correctly so, because this seems like just back-and-forth political ephemera, of the sort that the HN guidelines explain is off topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The test on HN for whether a new development in an ongoing story counts as on topic is whether the new article adds significant new information: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... When that happens, it will surely be fully discussed on HN.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#36

Post by PavlovsCat »

sekasi wrote: post #19

I have to say, as someone who's been somewhat critical of Facebook's dealings for the past years, I read the entire thing and I can't pick up on anything that doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to say to your team. Is anyone able to educate me on why there seem to be some air of hawks swooping on Zuckerberg because of this?

I read it as Zuckerberg considering democracy an existential threat to FB, more so than FB a threat to democracy, and thinking that might is right.

Sure, FB is nowhere near special in that, but just because it metastasized all over the place doesn't mean it's not cancer. It's reasonable, just like it was reasonable for Exxon to keep what they knew about fossil fuels and the climate on the down low, reasonable within what I would consider a pathological framework of values.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#37

Post by trhway »

i'm not sure what a breakup can accomplish beside populist political goals. I meant to avoid losing the great societal benefits of the large networks the resulting post-breakup components/parts would have to be interoperational. Then why not enforce interoperability upon the too big players right now? Why not enforce that any client can be used for Twitter, that any player can federate/aggregate Twitter, and that any user can firehose its own data and the data of any users who gave permission? Why not enforce Facebook to allow firehose the data in similar manner and to accept posts/updates/etc. from other social networks, like posting Snaps into IG feed? Or Lyft (or some small unknown operator) ride requests routed through Uber. Any "platform" should come with API gateway with legally enforced generous performance guarantees and providing read/write access to all the user data and user visible services of the "platform". That would increase competition, give small and innovative players a chance, decrease the "winner takes all" with associated excesses and distortions and provide even greater societal benefit of making those networks even larger without the networks controlled by any one "platform". Instead of costly and obsolete breakup approach, the enforcing of interoperability and data access must become the battle cry of progressives. That would be the infrastructure of the 21st century which would even allow to efficiently approach even the super-issues like healthcare.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#38

Post by scarejunba »

siscia wrote: post #22

> "It just doesn't really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up and, frankly, doesn't have jurisdiction to demand that." While this is technically true, I am not quite sure that it is the way to manage this kind of relationship. As European I am pretty pissed off just by this affirmation.

Why? He went to Europe. Obviously he's not going to Leichtenstein and Azerbaijan.

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#39

Post by siscia »

scarejunba wrote: post #38
siscia wrote: post #22

> "It just doesn't really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up and, frankly, doesn't have jurisdiction to demand that." While this is technically true, I am not quite sure that it is the way to manage this kind of relationship. As European I am pretty pissed off just by this affirmation.

Why? He went to Europe. Obviously he's not going to Leichtenstein and Azerbaijan.

Did he go to England?

> Azerbaijan

This is a very wide definition of Europe...

Re: Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight'

#40

Post by mrtksn »

sekasi wrote: post #19

I have to say, as someone who's been somewhat critical of Facebook's dealings for the past years, I read the entire thing and I can't pick up on anything that doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to say to your team. Is anyone able to educate me on why there seem to be some air of hawks swooping on Zuckerberg because of this?

I think it plays into "corporations control the government, there's no democracy" narrative.

Essentially means, it doesn't matter what's your position on immigration or gun laws or healthcare, what will determine the administration is the candidate's relationship with Facebook.

I think it feeds from the distrust towards the political system more than the distrust towards Zuckerberg.

If you think about it, the concerns are not entirely baseless. Facebook can analyze the public interest towards the candidates, analyze the candidates campaign and tweak Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp to boost the campaign of the friendly candidate when penalizing the other candidate's campaign. They can do this through tweaking colours, changing the mood of the public(they experimented with that), slowing down interactions that channels where the unfavoured candidates flourish, detect behaviour differences between the candidate supporters(maybe republican share more videos and democrats more written documents? facebook would know) and boost those, affecting the virality of the information flow. What are the users gonna do? Go use Friendster?

I mean, I don't say that FB does these but I can see how some people would want to sharpen their pitchforks when a corporation weights in a political debate.

Post reply on HN