Totally agreed on the utopian fallacy angle, it's really hard to come up with effective regulation ideas that won't create unintended distortions at best, and new innovation-killing moats at worst.

But we have to try.

As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations. Existing regulation and agency structure is completely unsuitable for the world we live in today. So far tech has relied on creative destruction as compute power grew and form factors shrunk rapidly, leading to ever increasing waves of adoption, and "software eating the world". However at this point most people have a smartphone in their pocket and the attention economy is maxed out. A lot of future innovation will be capital (and data) intensive, and with adoption already saturated, the natural power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon will not be naturally disrupted the way PCs disrupted mainframes or the web disrupted Windows hegemony.

Of course there's nothing worse than bad regulation, and historically tech regulation has been a minefield due to the general cluelessness of congress. The good news is that this will improve with turnover and younger staffers helping build a broader understanding of the issues. Hopefully we can start to pivot away from distractions like section 230 and asking corporations to be arbiters of truth, and instead focus on anti-trust and data privacy angles, with specific focus on size and power.

> As imperfect as government is, it is the only power that we have over giant corporations.

I don't think this is exactly true. There have been many words written about the effectiveness of technological countermeasures vs. regulation, but I think the proof is in the pudding: Facebook wouldn't go nuclear against Unfollow Everything if it didn't work (i.e. tilt the balance of power back towards the end-user). Google wouldn't be trying the whole manifest v3 shenanigans if they weren't concerned about content blockers.

But here, as Doctorow points out, _regulation_ stands in the way of these effective technological countermeasures. I think that the apparent slowdown of technological disruption and creative destruction you reference has at least some grounding in the increasing use and chilling effect of applying IP law against adversarial interop, rather than some inherent limit of attention or hardware.

So, I agree with the parent in bring surprised by the combo of Doctorow's insightful analysis around the Unfollow Everything debacle and a call for additional regulation via existing agencies. I'm not as hopeful as you that younger staffers will bring some kind of renaissance of enlightened regulation - consider how popular the "let's make Facebook ban the nazis" take appears to be across generational divides.

To sum up, I'm afraid that anything we pass now is going to be a lot closer to the DMCA, in terms of how it protects corporate interests over individual rights, than the sort of utopian wishlist that is usually quoted as an ideal.

On a positive note: I've recently been interested by some of the electoral successes of the Czech Pirate Party (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Pirate_Party) and wonder if the way forward for internet rights is to tie the idea to a broader campaign for transparent, effective, and highly democratic governance.

Why do we have to regulate? It seems an alternate yet much more difficult path would be that we could grow a societal backbone and make certain destructive practices illegal instead of trying to figure out a central list of allowed practices and licenses and policies and permits and bureaucracy etc. For example, it’s pretty clear that internet scale data markets and user attention platforms harm the individual. Why is step one always to reach for a regulatory solution instead of a slightly more radical “outlaw such machines and then figure things out from there” approach? A naive example might be a law stating: “It is illegal to profit from the sale of advertisements to your own users.” In the same vein, why cant we outlaw DRM because it’s bad for users and tell movie studios we care more about users health and well being than we do about your “piracy” problem?

I'm not following your argument, what do you see as the difference between regulation and outlawing something?

The argument against regulation people often reach for is that it actually benefits incumbents and stifles innovation because it involves permits and checks and licenses etc generally just roadblocks to doing something in a domain. And that if you open the door to it in one spot then you can definitely expect it to crop up everywhere. I generally agree with this take and understand why people are not excited about working in, using products in, living with, heavily regulated industries.

What I’m saying is that form of regulating FB seems silly to me too and I think we could avoid the “fear of central government control raining on our disruptive tech utopia” problem and the “any regulation here would be a hand wavey slippery slope” problem by simply taking a more aggressive principled stance as a society and declaring bad things illegal instead of trying to compromise and regulate “tech” into submission. Punish the bad behavior seems like such a simple solution.

Outlaw what specifically though? You're falling into the same trap OP is calling out, that your extremely vague hand wavey proposed laws would only ban "the bad guys".

I list two examples (as does Doctorow) of things that are pretty clearly bad for users: 1. attention marketplaces, 2: DRM. I am falling for no such trap I really don’t understand your angle there. My suggested solution to 1 is rather than try to regulate Facebook, which I agree is hand wavey, just ban the business model altogether because it demonstrably breeds machines and software that harm users. The “good guy” user attention businesses are collateral, yes, but this is a move to protect us not our ad marketplaces and the hypothesis is that the incentives just aren't aligned for there to exist a “good guy” ad platform. (If one exists please show me so I can understand the extent of any collateral harm I might be advocating.) I like this solution because it’s principled and specifically not hand wavey. The collateral seems worth it IMO. Same with DRM.

what's an attention marketplace? facebook, twitter, reddit, ok, all gone. But then advertising is attention and a marketplace, so does that mean banning all online or app based advertising? Amazon has attention and it's a marketplace, so does Etsy.

No you don’t ban by name like that.

A start might be to say: it is illegal both run a content platform and also to profit from the sale of targeted ads on your platform.

Or simply but more radically: you cannot use user data collected in the operation of a software platform in order to target advertisements to your users.

The goal would be to ban the bad incentives by eliminating the ability to profit. Yes that kills the profit. That’s the point. I don't think anybody is at war with e.g. a news site that runs an integrated ad on their headline or landing page or even a search engine that inserts its own contextual ads. We’re talking about dismantling the user content advertising platforms where the incentive becomes maximizing the time users spend on the platform.

I'm not suggesting by name, I just had no idea which platforms you think your law would target. Banning using user data to target adds is a lot more specific and actionable.

That would hurt facebook and Twitter's revenue quite badly, but it would do nothing at all to stop the toxic effects of facebook particularly. My main problem with facebook isn't targeted adds, yes I'm against their toxic attitude to privacy but it's not their most toxic behaviour. The main problem for me is the way they turn peoples feeds into firehoses of radicalising, enraging, adrenaline juicing hostility.

I guess the hypothesis is that they engage in that behavior exactly because their business depends on driving up engagement so they’ll go as far as to, as you say, show people content that pisses them off so they’ll spend an extra hour as a keyboard warrior and hopefully see an ad in there. I don’t think those incentives exist for e.g a paid phonebook.

That box is already open. Respectfully your comment kinda reads like you assume tech is some new untouched frontier unexploited and ripe for the picking. We’re way past that and we must decide as a society how we want to navigate a world of global software services and immense data collection.

Doctorow has always been against government central control of information. I suspect he’s against any overly large centralized information control regime because it has the same practical impact to people’s everyday lives. It’s not weird to see him (or anyone) call for “regulation” when the regulation being asked for pertains to enforcing we as a society retain certain rights with respect to how we interact with our world. That’s the whole point… don’t get distracted on some “govt control vs no control” axis. Nobody is asking the govt to tell you how to run your business, they’re just asking that we make it illegal to abuse users in the way Facebook has by permabanning the developer of a genuinely socially good tool that is obviously not spam for the insane “it automates user interactions” blanket reason. My password manager automates user interactions… GTFO FB.

Also laws aren’t regulation. You can make something illegal without imposing back-pressure on every new venture in the space it pertains to.

> Nobody is asking the govt to tell you how to run your business, they’re just asking that we make it illegal to abuse users in the way Facebook has by permabanning the developer of a genuinely socially good tool that is obviously not spam for the insane “it automates user interactions” blanket reason.

I don't know if it's cognitive dissonance, or some other phenomenon at play, but it seems to me like people in tech are unwilling to accept that the problems are systemic. Having a roster of mustache-twirling villains is convenient fiction, and having those companies punished/broken apart and calling it a day is doing something, but that doesn't prevent a different company from doing the same thing in a year.

There is a tension between wanting the government to do something - but not wanting it to do too much (lest it affects our stock options, or make our jobs harder? I don't know)

I mean I think the “I’m a private company I am not bound by tue constitution” is a little dated. Companies effectively run the world and practically have a lot of power over individuals. There is essentially zero difference between a large company impinging on shared liberties and the government. Maybe we should start by applying a broader set of protections to citizens in order to start addressing the systemic issues?

We're in agreement - and the protections have to be broad indeed to bar specific activities, regardless of which company partake in them (current, or future). Targeting individual companies will lead to an endless game of snail-paced whack-a-mole

Lately, it seems like our only remaining choice as a civilization is to decide if we want to be exploited or controlled.

All of us are controlled, all the time, by how reality happens to unfold.

With some practice, it’s possible to accept that this is just how the world is, and to no longer be bothered by it.

It's either/or?

Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations.

I think the real issue is that people live in black holes of misinformation on the internet because that is where they want to be. When I look at the many Herman Cain Award threads on reddit, it seems the predominate original source of most posts is groups that the user signed up for.

This isn't new, before Facebook, there were usenet and forums, AM Radio and even mailing lists and magazines.

> Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations.

Exactly this! Every time I see someone proposing some new expansion of government reach and power, it seems to be considered only from the angle of “just think of what the (people I think of as the) good guys could do with this increased authority!”

“Yeah, but what could the bad guys do with this increased authority? Because as sure as the sun rises in the East, whoever you think of as the bad guys will eventually come to power and have this authority…”

Why does it have to mean giving anyone power? We could for example enact privacy laws that make it illegal to share personal data. That gives no one power, and takes away power from corporations. We could enact laws that prevent targeted advertising, which would make it pointless to gather a lot of the data they gather in the first place. That doesn’t make the bad politician any more powerful. So on.

That is saying the misinformation comes from companies gaming the news feeds and not the people choosing friends, influencers or groups of the former that re-enforce their feelings of victimhood?

I mean are we upset at targeted ads, or the sea of misinformation and biases that are fostered by social media? The seeds of which are often political AM radio and TV news networks.

I estimate that laws to prevent all forms of targeting advertising serve to protect incumbents (both corporate and political incumbents). That makes incumbent politicians more powerful (in relative terms).

Specifically they serve to protect consumers. They might also protect incumbents, at least ones that don't have targetted advertising, but they're still in service of the consumer

You can 1) make something illegal without 2) requiring any sort of regulation.

Yes, there’s a technical legal distinction between a law (legislative) and a regulation (executive), but nothing in my comment above was intended to signify that I want one or the other to have broad authority to protect their incumbency or exercise power over the People to a greater extent than today.

I don't think the bad guys would respect the law's limit anyways.

The not-very-bad bad guy seems like a werid group to optimize for.

> Just imagine the politician of your nightmares being in control of the regulations.

Even the worst politician is (ostensibly) accountable to the people. Corporations are not.

Corporations don't have customers?