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Senate Democrat Floats First Serious Proposals For Regulating Big Tech (gizmodo.com)
On Monday, Senator Mark Warner published 20 proposals on how to regulate big tech platforms. What's interesting is that none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms. Gizmodo reports: What may be more important than the individual proposals themselves is that the document is at least trying to organize a holistic way of thinking about the issues now on the table. It breaks down the areas that need addressing into the promotion of disinformation, privacy and consumer protection, and ensuring competition in the marketplace. Just to highlight a few of the good issues on the table, the white paper blessedly brings the conversation back to privacy and data ownership -- something that seems to have been lost as the conversation has turned to content moderation. The easiest recommendation is to implement what it calls "GDPR-like" data protection legislation that would give Americans similar data rights as EU citizens gained in May. The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms, but they require greater transparency and consent for a company's terms of service, along with many more tools for keeping track of what information a company collects on you.
On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used and how much its worth to an individual platform. One concern it addresses is that platforms expand how they monetize a person's data while the user is often unaware of how much they're actually giving up, value-wise, when they agree to hand over their data in exchange for a particular service. Another benefit would be that regulators would have a better idea of what they're evaluating in antitrust enforcement cases. The proposals relating to disinformation are a little more worrisome. A requirement that platforms "clearly and conspicuously label bots" wouldn't be so bad, but it's a daunting task and opens up the potential for false positives. Likewise, demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected. Axios was first to publish the list of 20 proposals compiled by Warner's staff. Is there a proposal that resonates with you? If not, how would you regulate the Big Tech platforms?
On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used and how much its worth to an individual platform. One concern it addresses is that platforms expand how they monetize a person's data while the user is often unaware of how much they're actually giving up, value-wise, when they agree to hand over their data in exchange for a particular service. Another benefit would be that regulators would have a better idea of what they're evaluating in antitrust enforcement cases. The proposals relating to disinformation are a little more worrisome. A requirement that platforms "clearly and conspicuously label bots" wouldn't be so bad, but it's a daunting task and opens up the potential for false positives. Likewise, demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected. Axios was first to publish the list of 20 proposals compiled by Warner's staff. Is there a proposal that resonates with you? If not, how would you regulate the Big Tech platforms?
"pseudo-monopolies."
What? Perhaps you mean oligopoly?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There needs to be some serious thought on how to best address data migration and pseudo vendor lock-in. Data migration is easy. I should have the ability to download all my data from facebook and upload it to google plus (or some other competitor) and vice versa.
Pseudo vendor lockin is a bit trickier. If all your friends are on facebook then you can't move to a new platform without convincing all your friends to move too.
I think the solution for this is to require companies to allow interoperability between sites. If I want to create a facebook clone, I should be able to allow my users to sync their account with facebook so that posts on my new site are crossposted on facebook, etc...
There are already some marketing tools that allow this to a limited extent but it should be explicitly allowed so that people can more easily hop from platform to platform.
Currently, trying to do a true sync of facebook with a facebook clone would be against facebook's TOS.
Am I the only one who thinks they should simply be required to have profit sharing or otherwise pay you for the data, rather than try to stop it?
It's kind of amazing how on the internet, where literally anything can be decentralized if you want it, and starting a competing website is cheap, all the power goes to one website (in each field). In Facebook you could say "it's because of network effects," but it's not really true with search engines. When freed, we just kind of......flock together.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Say hello to universal ID and Zero anonymity on the internet.
I hope you are the first person in court fighting for your life after someone steals your identity and does something illegal with it.
I hear nowadays just being accused of certain crimes destroys your future... no one will even wait until you go to trial to find out if you are innocent... you are automatically guilty... even if you eventually get a "not-guilty" verdict.
Identity theft is about to get a lot worse after someone like you gets a hold of the problem.
And no, data migration is NOT easy. Businesses spend ass loads of money on migrations all year round with many of them either resulting in failures or projects that did manage to finish but are only limping along.
Just talk to a few systems admins and engineers... they will be happy to tell you how broken a lot of shit is.
... none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms.
Let's not propose a solution, let's not propose a method of making a *plan* for a solution, let's propose several plans for how to approach a solution, and have a debate!
Bureaucracy at its finest.
(Futurama quote: "Don't quote me the regulation! I chaired the committee that reviewed the proposal to change the color of the book that regulation is in." --Bureaucrat 1.0)
just think about the problem and it should come to you. But like most other voters, thinking about anything but the next reality TV show is verboten. You just want to hear some smooth sounding politician to say "we go this" right?
Here is just a small reason why it is a bad idea. Once the government can force a business to be interoperable... then all businesses will have to become interoperable. Big businesses with money will quickly increase the complexity of this interoperability so that it will not be easy or cheap for competitors to be interoperable making it easy to squash them and simultaneously raise the barrier of entry. Not only that, but you will become universally tracked by default. Everything about the interoperability will most definitely be used to track everything you do and fed to the government... in case you are a terrorist, or a malcontent that needs to be monitored, or someone that did something bad that can be used against you in a court of law next time you need to fight a custody battle with your spouse or fight off a litigious business or individual.
It might even become bad enough that only certain businesses will be allow even have websites on the internet because before you can be allowed to register, you have to prove that you are "interoperable" before getting a domain.
so Yea, very bad idea...
Fuck off ivan? He has a very valid point. Fuck all this regulation. The best way for a democracy to work is to have a free market of ideas. The day you decide someone has the right to declare info as good or bad on behalf of you, the citizen, is the day you trade your freedoms for the tyrant of a king you just made. Why undo the revolutionary war? Don't you want the freedom to decide who you want to believe rather than have someone make the choice for you? Isn't that your right?
Nonsense. "Free markets" don't exist, first of all, and unencumbered commercial behavior is anathema to democracy.
Um, no. The only thing that encumbers commercial behavior is regulation by the state (bad), and competition (good). It is always better to have options, rather than instructions.
The revolutionary war was not about democracy, it was about exchanging one aristocracy for another. The Founding Fathers were very careful to limit the democratic impulses of Americans and make sure that the wealthy elite, who they believed know better than everyone else, could rule without being encumbered by democracy.
Um, no. They established a democracy, rather than an aristocracy specifically for this reason. Go read Thomas Jefferson. It took almost 100 years for everyone to get the right to vote, but they laid the bedrock of this great civilization. We have the free'est people because we are allowed to express ourselves. There are going to be bad ideas and bad opinions, like the Westborough Baptist Church. That's the price you pay for freedom. It is a price many have and will fight for, and die for.
Did you grow up somewhere that history is not taught?
I was taught history. What does that have to do with anything? Besides, history is taught by the victors. Decide for yourself. Unless you need this Democratic Senator to decide for you. I will be deciding for myself, thanks.
A free exchange of ideas sounds good. But it stops at lies. Journalists and advertisers are not allowed to propagate lies. (Exceptions may apply. And lies by ommission seem to be acceptable.) Now that even news agencies get their info off Twitbook, it is easier than ever to spread lies with impunity.
But there are reasons why lies are not welcome in this marketplace of ideas. We cannot hold everyone publishing on a public forum to the same standard as professional journalists and advertisers, for purely practical reasons.
But do we want this "free marketplace of of ideas" to become an arena about whose lies are less implausible? Then we may just as well forego journalism altogether and go back to church. Or succumb to the brainwashing of "scripted reality" and of "entertainment" shows emulating the presentation styles of news shows.
I read the first 4 pages and then skimmed the rest. It reads like a 2nd year college student wrote it.
"The hope is that the ideas enclosed here stir the pot and spark a wider discussion..." These colloquialisms are scattered throughout.the paper. Hard to believe that this is supposed to convince legislators.
The list headings:
Duty to clearly and conspicuously label bots
Duty to determine origin of posts and/or accounts
Duty to identify inauthentic accounts
Make platforms liable for state-law torts (defamation, false light, public disclosure of
private facts) for failure to take down deep fake or other manipulated audio/video content
Public Interest Data Access Bill
Require lnteragency Task Force for Countering Asymmetric Threats to Democratic
Institutions
Disclosure Requirements for Online Political Advertisements —
Public Initiative for Media Literacy
Increasing Deterrence Against Foreign Manipulation —
Information fiduciary
Privacy rulemaking authority at FTC
Comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation
1*‘ Party Consent for Data Collection
Statutory determination that so-called ‘dark patterns’ are unfair and deceptive trade
practices
Algorithmic auditability fairness
Data Transparency Bill
Data Portability Bill
Interoperability
Opening federal datasets to university researchers and qualified small businesses/startups
Essential Facilities Determinations
There is no reliable way to "clearly and conspicuously label bots". Even if you require all registered users to prove a human identity, they could still let a bot use their account. A smart bot implementor could even pay users to utilize their identity and to install a VPN host so that the bot can make its posts from their IP.
But, you can be assured that proving identities would still be the first thing they jump to if this is required. It moves the blame. Kaspersky would get the internet where all users have to prove their identities that they have pushed all of these years.
They may also criminalize it. Criminalizing anything that has value usually increases its value. We should know well by now how well that works.
Are bots really the problem? Or is it the way we are making decisions?
I know people who will debate me with statements like "well, so and so had xyz happen, so it happens". First of all, they don't know that so and so told them the truth or even really knows the truth. People rarely remember even their own experiences in a accurate fashion. Second, anecdotal evidence doesn't rise to a level of any statistical relevance in trying to understand any truth about the massive society or complex world we live in. Basing your beliefs or fears on miniscule samples from your personal life or news stories you've seen without tempering it with large sample sets is the path to a very twisted and often unreasonably panicked view of the world.
The problem is that people aren't being taught why we have the scientific method. They aren't being taught just how horribly flawed their reasoning without it is and why our society started exploding in success when we started using it. You can't protect people from that lack of knowledge. If they don't have it, others will always find a way to use their ignorance.
Um, no. The only thing that encumbers commercial behavior is regulation by the state (bad), and competition (good). It is always better to have options, rather than instructions.
I think you'd best have a look around. Any society and/or economy would do. And even a brief look should suffice. Then you would see that regulation by the state is absolutely essential. The alternative is all the power coalescing in a few commercial interests (bad).
The end point of unrestrained capitalism is a slave class of underlings (if there's even any point in having them alive at all) and a ruling class of capital owners. Regulation is essential to keep capitalism as a useful economic engine for the benefit of everyone.
One obvious example is our shared environment. Without regulation to prevent it, commercial interests would destroy all environmental amenity. "Externalities", they call them.
Sure, leave it to Democrats to further entrench the Fascism.
That's a kind of bullshit definition of fascism, though in fairnes, the link you posted points out how it's a much a Republican thing as democrat. Though given your blind, hyper-partisan zeal it's not really surprising you pick out th eother tribe.
Anyone interested in a better description of facism (not you, since youre impervious to anything that you don't believe is "rah rah republicans") should go here:
https://www.nybooks.com/articl...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Good point. If freed of speech is still controversial 200 years later, then the framers were wise to keep it in the Constitution.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fake news is the same as yelling fire in a crowded theater. You don't have a right to do that.
Pizzagate caused a shootout in a restaurant with children present. People could have died.
The UK supreme court has agreed that the police can tell a potential employer about a case where the accused was found not guilty. https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
"You don't know me."
Then why do you think that a criminals should not be consulted on punishment? Sure individually they are going to be biased, but collectively they are likely not because at that point, they are no longer evaluating themselves, they are evaluating others that have performed the same crime and you may find that they will be far more insightful than you would be about the problem.
"We do indeed treat white collar crime very differently from lower-class crime,"
I agree
", even though white collar crime is more often motivated by greed rather than (say) desperation."
I do not subscribe to this logic. I have seen desperate rich people still screw people over and greedy poor assholes steal in a mixture to call this into question. Imagine a rich klepto, some people do it because they have a problem. Some people do it because they are just desperate, and not just for reasons of economic destitution, though I will say that nearly universally, greed is a majority driving factor. Again, I am not talking about exceptions disproving the rule here... I am talking about greed, in general, being the driving force no matter the economic situation.
If someone broke into my house to steal a loaf of bread because they were hungry and had no money, I would forgive them.
If someone kept breaking into my house to steal bread because they were too greedy with their money to buy their own, I would press charges.
If someone broke into my house to steal a loaf of bread because they thought I owed it to them, I would consider them a deadly threat and shoot to kill because they are clearly "hostile" in their intent.
Greed fits 2 of those scenarios and desperation only 1.
Because bots help Republicans.
The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms.
Which jury? Where? Not around here (Europe) is it.
The long term consequences are known. Questions about the GDPR that everyone is waiting for include
Certainly the GDPR has made additional work for people, including me. It has not brought out the orchestrated hostility I see from the USA. I have not seen anything in the press here against it. Perhaps our government and its tabloid press controllers don't want us to think too much about it so that they can water it down in a couple of years. That sort of thing is less succesful than it used to be. Corporate foulups with security will keep people aware of it.
What sort of changes might be needed? They may need to raise the maximum fines. What is $5 billion to the likes of Google? They may need to use more effort in getting top executives to actually turn up and not just send some underling. I'm not complaining though. So far, so good.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
RE: the word "NEWS". I appreciate the hope behind your words, but unfortunately it won't help.
Why?
99.9% of the population doesn't even pay attention to.. anything. Except for the screaming headlines.
I'm the curious sort, and I speak to random people .. people in elevators, on planes, public transport, etc. How else can you find people you'd never normally find, outside of all contact with your social / economic circle?
Do you know how many people don't even know that the government spies on people? That aren't aware of equifax? Of fake news? Of anything you'd read -- anywhere? Or, even know what means?
The vast majority of people are incredibly ignorant of the world around them. The internet hasn't helped, not really, because they only absorb "fun", like links to cat pictures, and people falling down. Nothing wrong with "fun", but if that's all you do.. all you read?
The internet isn't really helping expand intellectual horizons.
Back in the day, a surprising number of people used to think the "National Enquirer" was "news". It was however fake news, left right and centre.
And lastly -- how to do regulate 'news' versus 'fake news' anyhow? How do you ensure that news is 100% scrubbed of political opinion (you can't), and how do you prevent people from showing stories to put pressure on the government or industry?
For example.. let's say you have the government covering something up. OK, you run a news story. You have a little proof, but not really much. Now what? It's fake news, right? Innocent until proven guilty, right?
How do you run stories about tobacco? The industry had tonnes of studies they funded, showing it wasn't harmful. There was no consensus, because decades ago, there wasn't as much collected, studies evidence. So, fake news!
Where's the bar?
You could take pictures/video, and just display them without any comment. Just pictures/video or direct copies of text. That's mostly free of political bias.. or, is it? You have a city in a tornado, and then you find the most unharmed, undevastated portion -- and then just show pictures from here.
See! The tornado wasn't bad at all.. I guess those people don't need help, I won't vote to help them! I won't donate to help them, it's a scam.. there's no damage at ALL!
News is really, really, really, really hard to regulate, if you want to ensure that news can also be used to protect "the people" from political malfeasance and so forth. It needs to be 'unfettered'.
And yes, I agree that current issues with the news are a massive problem.
The oligarchs are the victors. They're the ones teaching you that "free markets" and "less regulation" are a good thing. You have been lied to."
Unfortunately, both sides have been lied to. First of all, I'll absolutely agree that regulation is necessary for public safety, and to limit corruption. But also, and we do a very bad job of this, limit monopolistic behavior, including local monopolies (cable for example). That said, anyone trying to run a small business these days is going to see a huge chunk of margin eaten away by unnecessary regulatory overreach. I grew up watching my dad run a small business that sold specialty containers to the auto industry. Shortly before he passed he'd told me that he couldn't even start up that company in the current environment due to the time and expense required to simply follow the regulations.
Just another day in Paradise
Without regulation, competition will inevitably turn into a monopoly, or at best an oligopoly with 2-3 players colluding not to compete, as stronger companies gobble up weaker or smaller ones. Once this happens you have no price pressure nor incentive to innovate or expand services.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Peer review is great at this
It would be if peer review was actually done as much as it should be. There are plenty of articles on what's going on with peer review that you can easily google, but the short story is that there's no money/fame/promotions in reviewing papers done by others.
Just another day in Paradise
The Founding Fathers were very careful to limit the democratic impulses of Americans and make sure that the wealthy elite, who they believed know better than everyone else, could rule without being encumbered by democracy.
That's a popular revisionist concept. If it were true, we wouldn't have the bill of rights, the press would be run by the government, no right to bear arms (allow the peasants firearms?!?) certainly no right to trial by jury, and absolutely no fourth amendment protections.
The issue is, because the system doesn't work perfectly, people assume it must be skewed towards the rich. It does allow for rich people to become rich, however, it doesn't enable them to stay rich, which is why you don't see a lot of Vanderbilts, Astors or Carnegies as senators and governors these days.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Once the government can force a business to be interoperable... then all businesses will have to become interoperable. Big businesses with money will quickly increase the complexity of this interoperability so that it will not be easy or cheap for competitors to be interoperable making it easy to squash them and simultaneously raise the barrier of entry.
Requiring them to allow and not inhibit interoperable is not the same as requiring them to have a specific interface. Although it would be nice to have a standard like email or ftp, it would be enough for them to not outright ban or block it. Facebook does already have an api so it's already possible if they would allow it but it would be easy enough for a company to reverse engineer and/or scrape a website for the needed information for an end user. If anyone tried it though they would get sued. It would be enough for the government to say that the end user owns their own data so if they want to give their credentials to a third party so that third party can download or post on their behalf then that end user is allowed to do that.
In Facebook you could say "it's because of network effects," but it's not really true with search engines. When freed, we just kind of......flock together.
With search engines I think it is likely enonomy of scale and probably some patents thrown in there. Because google is so huge, they can afford to index more of the web, they can afford to hire thousands of PHDs to analyse their results. They also have some of the network effect that allows billions of clicks to give them realtime feedback about how good of job they are doing. They now have billions of dollars of R&D most of it behind closed doors that runs their search engine and they are receiving billions of dollars in advertising revenue each month that allows them to continue to improve it. They also have inertia. In order for a company to compete with google they would have to be significantly better so people actually want to switch and that's going to be really hard for any company without very very deep pockets.
Shortly before he passed he'd told me that he couldn't even start up that company in the current environment due to the time and expense required to simply follow the regulations.
Genuine question: what kind of regulations are these? When I hear regulations on business, I tend to thing about health and safety, proper accounting rules, worker's rights ... things that seem like they would protect the worker from the potential greed of the company, which was historically a big deal. What other kinds of hoops are companies jumping through that are unnecessarily burdensome, and that aren't providing benefits? Most of the anti-regulation folks just say "regulations" and leave it at that, as if it's obvious and universal, but it isn't to me.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
So you're a new startup and you're just putting together a new social network. Not only do you have to pile on interoperability onto that limited budget, but if you're actually innovating you have to come up with a way for people to clone your innovative idea and give the big companies a way to steal all your users.
The U.S. is not, and has never ever been a democracy. We are a republic. We do not want to ever be a democracy; and none of the founders ever declared us a democracy; so stop calling the U.S. a democracy. WE ARE NOT!!!
"To the REPUBLIC for which it stands", not "To the DEMOCRACY for which it stands."
I take it they don't teach that sort of thing in school any more?
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