> Facebook doesn't care about users, laws, and lacks any sense of moral or ethical standards.
its difficult to say with a straight face that a government that runs trillions of deficits, spies constantly on its population, and engages in so called defensive wars abroad, cares about its citizens. The lack of responsibility is rampant among government figures.
You are comparing badly functioning government with businesses functioning as intended.
At least there's ability to enforce governmental responsibility through elections and free press.
Facebook can be leveraged in no other way then through government regulation, even if you opt out from facebook it still watches you, and good luck even understanding of what's going on if you're not a technical person.
> At least there's ability to enforce governmental responsibility through elections and free press.
Yes, for example, voters in the U.S. elect presidential candidates who promise to scale back our military presence overseas, and then it happens! Voters also get what they want when they elect candidates promising to reform Wall Street, make government more transparent, or end the culture of graft & corruption in Washington.
Or take the issue of NSA surveillance, mentioned above. Since there were zero candidates on offer from either major party who promised even a sliver of reform, and no major media outlet even raised the issue, we can conclude that the voters have "opted in" to this program, and we should all learn to just live with it.
The problem of participatory democracy is that the people need to be informed and participate and vote for the issues, if no one cares about the surveillance then nothing is going to be done about it, and this is a major problem of the society; nothing is going to be done with facebook policy internally because there is no democratic process inside corporations.
The other issue is -- as I come to grips with it myself, is yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign, whereas facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
> The problem of participatory democracy is that the people need to be informed and participate and vote for the issues, if no one cares about the surveillance then nothing is going to be done about it
Incidentally this is also true of people patronizing large companies and exchanging their personal data for those companies' services. And I don't know why a constituency which accepts NSA surveillance from its government would be expected to pressure that same government to sanely regulate edge providers like Facebook. In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.
> yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign
"So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
> facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way. Had the Russians run a similar number of hilariously bad ads in favor of Clinton, occupying an equally infinitesimal sliver of Facebook ad traffic, it correctly would be dismissed as largely inconsequential to the electoral result.
I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian, I'm open to the idea that FB and its ilk need to be reined back from some forms of data sharing and overly broad applications of their terms of service. But it's hilarious that what finally got people up in arms about this issue was Russia putting up a handful of vaguely pro-Trump Jesus arm wrestling memes on Facebook.
> In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.
That's just false equivalency.
> "So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
So far we can only operate with the evidence we have. Ross Ulbricht was caught because he was trying to order a 'hit' on one of his accomplices who turned to authorities. It's strange that you used this example because he was arrested and charged by using good old police work, everything that he did to run his organization, besides tech skills, was really amateurish.
> Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way.
There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.
> I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian,
Try throwing Atlas Shrugged at Zuck and see if that does anything.
> There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.
It takes far more credulity to believe that Russian social media activity is swinging these elections than it does to be duped by the ads themselves.
No one is talking about a "Facebook-governed polity" in the sense of FB fielding police forces and standing armies, or holding elections to determine their leadership.
> Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct.
That only happens when there are regulations to run afoul of and/or a company is not a monopoly. Without government companies would be free to pollute the environment, cheat customers, and abuse workers to breaking point. The market wouldn't punish those companies if all the companies in the market were doing the same kinds of things, which is what would happen if said bad behavior was profitable.
"Oh you don't disagree with Exxon poisoning community water supplies and using a private army to seize land from indigenous people? Tough luck, Shell and BP are doing the same thing."
Yeah most governments leave a lot to desire in efficiency, fairness, effectiveness, etc. But a world where corporations are the only ones who set the rules would be far worse.
You’re not the Equifax customer. Equifax arguably behaved poorly with its security breaches that have long term implications for millions, and even more so with their disclosure.
What other corporation are you going to buy from, when you’re not the customer in the first place, but have been commoditised to be their product?
How do you protect the product, if the corporation and it’s customers have no incentive to do so themselves?
The only monopolies are government-granted, otherwise startups quickly eat their lunch. They use each misbehavior of another corporation as a competitive advantage. See Apple vs Facebook in privacy stance.
But governments, they are monopolistic by definition. And the answer to no one. Army? Seizing land? Pollution??? Well the people of Africa could tell you some stories about their governments...
Or maybe you remember the USA govt detonating countless nuclear weapons over the USA soil...
This is Hacker News, so this is somewhat relevant. How in the world was Microsoft's monopoly on the PC operating system market a decade ago, a government granted monopoly?
It wasn't. So they the competition quickly routed around them and made them irrelevant. Where's Microsoft "monopoly" today?
In a free market a monopolistic company is just an invitation for the competition to a rich easily accessible lunch. The (naturally occurring) monopoly is short-lived.
Unless there is regulation. Regulation raises the barrier of entry, discourages start-ups and thus protects the monopolistic company from the competition.
It was ruled in 2001 that Microsoft, indeed, had a monopoly on the PC operating system market which they used to overtake the browser market. They did this through private contracts with OEMs and distributors such that all PCs sold to customers were to include Windows and only Windows.
> Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others. [1]
> So they the competition quickly routed around them and made them irrelevant.
That's certainly true for some of their products, such as Internet Explorer, but certainly not for Windows on the desktop.
The PC operating system market is not the server or mobile OS market.
> Where's Microsoft "monopoly" today?
They own the PC operating system market.
> Unless there is regulation. Regulation raises the barrier of entry, discourages start-ups and thus protects the monopolistic company from the competition.
Microsoft created barriers of entry into both the PC operating system and browser markets through anti-competitive tactics. If by government regulation, you mean "court enforced contracts", I'd agree with your premise.
I meant it wasn't a governments mandated monopoly - I agree with you and that they built a monopoly through anti-competitive practices.
But my point is that didn't last as the market punished them for it and made them irrelevant. The market moved to mobiles and web and today they are a good player in the industry.
Even on desktop where they still enjoy a healthy margin, it's not monopoly: Windows is ~80% while Mac OS and others take the other 20%.
> But my point is that didn't last as the market punished them for it and made them irrelevant. The market moved to mobiles and web and today they are a good player in the industry.
This was your point and it's also what I addressed:
> The only monopolies are government-granted, otherwise startups quickly eat their lunch.
You claimed that monopolies are only possible through government regulation, because government regulation creates a barrier to entry that's easily surpassed by larger companies.
I provided proof illustrating that monopolies have been built through private agreements absent of government regulation.
This is a libertarian fantasy. Large companies can stay solvent by undercutting smaller companies and killing their business. This is what would happen if we were to remove regulations and restrictions. You wouldn't end up with a perfect competition utopia you end up with a dystopian garbage reality where the business elite control even more than they already do.
And yet we are having this conversation on a site dedicated to this "libertarian fantasy", with countless examples of startups disrupting large, existing companies.
> This is what would happen if we were to remove regulations and restrictions. You wouldn't end up with a perfect competition utopia you end up with a dystopian garbage reality where the business elite control even more than they already do.
Reality has a number of regulations and restrictions. The dystopia GP describes is a world without these regulations and restrictions, not the reality we inhabit today.
Funny enough, startups and competition thrive exactly in those pockets of reality with less restrictions and regulations, while large companies and monopolies rule the heavily regulated markets.
Large companies rule every market. Startups thrive in niches, not pockets with less restrictions and regulations. Once a market is established it becomes incredibly hard for new companies to enter and compete not matter the regulations as larger companies can take advantage of scale.
Perfect competition exists almost no where, and you should read up on the conditions when it is allowed to take place. Regulations are part of the equation, but not nearly all of it.
Large companies ARE startups who became successful. Until they are dethroned in turn by other startups.
Large companies are relatively easy to disrupt, since they usually respond slowly to market changes and they are much less efficient than a lean startup. The "advantages of scale" you are so fixated on are just a small part of the whole picture and what large corps gain at scale, they lose at management costs and through lack of innovation
It is a natural process, with countless examples all around us. A healthy process too, since it promotes competition and innovation.
But this process is interrupted by regulation. Regulation protects the incumbents, that is why large companies love it. They'd rather regulate than innovate. Indeed, when startups aren’t allowed to compete (by governments) large companies dominate and the market stagnates.
Yes but the point is that what is 'misbehaving' is defined by market norms. 'Misbehaving' is engaging in behavior which decreases profit but it can never help us to escape the question of profit altogether. That's what government is for - when what is good for society and what is good for profit conflict government steps in to correct. The point of markets is that they rely on only individual decisions and what may seem like a rational individual decision to every member of society may lead to an overall outcome that no member of society supports. In those instances we have democratic government to allow us to reach out of the realm of individual and act in a collective self-interest. That in recent years our government has been malfunctioning in a way that suppresses our ability to act this way is not an argument to get rid of democratic governance altogether, it's an argument to bring it back and strengthen it.
A well functioning government, does, ideally, what you describe. But most governments in the world (maybe except a few western ones) are, as I was saying, incredibly disfunctional.
And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc.
Forgive me if I’ll prefer businesses over governments every day.
> And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc.
You're comparing a giant to a nest of angry ants. The giant sometimes tramples houses; the ants don't. One might conclude the ants are therefore gentler, and wonder much better life would be under giant ants instead of the giant, neglecting that if the ants had the giant's power, they would be far more deadly than it.
Even if the power of individual vote seems very small, It can be used to instigate change. One can argue that in order to increase the power of people, one has to reduce the power of corporation lobbying etc.
Corporations are vast entities of unaccountable power when they are unregulated by a government.
Just recent elections show "the power of the individual vote" used to support things like Brexit in UK, Orban in Hungary, Xi in China, Putin in Russia, Maduro in Venezuela or, why not, Trump.
While the evil corporations give us, what, surveillance?!
We've never lived under corporations, but we’d always fear them. I for one, fear more the evil I know and I see ruining our world: politicians and their instruments of power, governments.
> While the evil corporations give us, what, surveillance?!
They've given us genocide, environmental destruction, the company town, the risk of being killed for striking, financial collapse, the funding of drug lords and terrorism[1].
All those given to us also by governments but a thousand times worse, along with wars, dictators, mass genocides, race purges, and so on and so forth.
I look around me and every single object I use and makes my life better was made by a corporation. From my PC to my phone to my house and my card.
While every single thing that makes me fear tomorrow and sucks in my life is controlled by governments: health care, roads, bureaucrats, borders, international conflicts, corruption, etc.
I don't fear Facebook knowing everything about me and selling that info to third parties, but I do fear my government buying that info from FB and using it restrict my freedoms in the name of my own good or simply to steal more money from me.
> I look around me and every single object I use and makes my life better was made by a corporation.
Markets work well for most commodities.
On the other hand, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ensure that people don't die so they can hopefully go on to enjoy a better life.
> I don't fear Facebook knowing everything about me and selling that info to third parties
A KGB, but for advertising, still collects and centralizes private info that can be abused by any party, governmental or private. A recent example of that exact dataset being abused by a private entity: the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Also, insurers and repo-men love accurate location tracking etc. Your insurers most likely aren't using that information to give you better rates.
Corporations have ruined most of asian nations. East India Company British exploited India, looting it from a country having top wealth in world to the bottom, Dutch East India Company destroyed indigenous asian trade.
Fruit companies and other monopolies of USA have routinely looted and exploited people and wealth of Latin American.
I can go on, recent history is rife with corporations exploiting nations for natural resource and wealth.
Businesses get punished by markets when they operate inefficiently. They do not get punished by markets when they poison, cheat, rob, or kill people - especially when those people aren't their customers.
This is mainly true in competitive markets. Markets aren’t always competitive. We could argue we live in an oligarchy which isn’t as competitive as we are taught.
its difficult to say with a straight face that a government that runs trillions of deficits, spies constantly on its population, and engages in so called defensive wars abroad, cares about its citizens. The lack of responsibility is rampant among government figures.