Over world history, we have seen a lot of things regulated. We can see patterns in these regulations, and we understand many of them – it isn’t all a mystery. As far as I can tell, these patterns suggest that recent tech like operating systems, search engines, social networks, and IM systems are likely to be substantially regulated. For example, these systems have large network effects and economies of scale and scope. Yet they are now almost entirely unregulated. Why?
I work in high tech and I recently wrote a piece that suggested (very gently) that maybe Google should be regulated in some fashion. I was pretty nervous about it, partly because I like Google as a company and have friends there (and have interviewed there), but also partly because they're powerful, you know?
The people who are most likely to have a window onto high tech works are usually also working in high tech. I do think there's a wave moving to regulate high tech more thoroughly, but a lot of us don't want to be the first person to say it.
(Here's the article, incidentally, over in the Futures Exchange vertical on Medium: https://medium.com/futures-... )
As far as I can tell, these patterns suggest that recent tech like operating systems, search engines, social networks, and IM systems are unlikely to be substantially regulated. For example, these systems have very low transaction costs, and very powerful mechanisms for voice and exit.
One recent thought I had related to this is regarding Windows XP: it's chock full of security holes, even Microsoft is soon ending support for it, and yet apparently 18% of world's computers still use it. Windows XP is the powerhorse behind many many botnets that criminals use for Spam, DDoS, etc., making the Internet worse for everyone ultimately. Should this be regulated, should it become illegal to connect a Windows XP system to the Internet unless it's fully patched and added with firewalls and antivirus software?
I'd say yes, except politicians are clueless in this area and will probably screw this up, and also this open up a dangerous can of worms which would definitely be abused - imagine a SOPA but not just for the Internet, for any software anywhere, may even extend to hardware. Until we get more enlightened and knowledgeable representatives, I'd hope regulations like this don't come forth - they give too little benefit compared to the damage they *will* end up doing.
The model of Uber is wrong. Regulation in these industries has primarily been captured by insiders as a way to prevent competition. Using the "Internet competitors are unregulated" premise is just a way of breaking into the market that regulators won't immediately slap down. As a new, hungry entrant, it's not too hard to be better than the established players, and most of these businesses are even innovating.
Once they too are insiders, regulations will block new entrants and make their investors more money, not less.
Thank you so much! Regulation is a political question. Al Gore did succeed in keeping a lot of the internet from getting regulated. It's also much harder to regulate something that can be hidden and moved around effortlessly, like an internet business.
Regulations are generally necessary when there is a tragedy of the commons, when the product lends naturally to a monopoly (e.g. electricity), or when there are trust and safety issues.
By large, none of that is the case for things like consumer operating systems, and whenever that is actually the case (the operating system on your airplane), it is very much regulated.
Frankly I don't see what the hell this has to do with status at all; if there is any correlation, it is other way around - writing airplane software is definitely higher status than consumer software, a nuclear reactor is higher status than coal power plant, and so on and so forth, mostly because the costlier is the potential screw-up, the more quality is required and the higher are the hiring requirements.
Tech changes too rapidly for regulation to make much sense and we are not any closer to that not being the case. Aging doesn't mean they change less; it means they disappear or morph into something else. Remember when IM was a thing? Regulations generally only codify case law and we have barely had any of that yet. We have a few laws on privacy, on bullying, and a few others but what rights and rules new tech should follow are still up for grabs. VCR/DVRs? This is not about utilities, it is about morphing into the next big thing before becoming obsolete.
The first two paragraphs are not particularly problematic (though I'd note that "poison" is a tricky one - many things we like are "poisons", such as alcohol; one might even suggest that simply marking things sold for ingestion with a label pointing out a level of toxicity would provide all the rational lawsuit-avoiding information; no need for a Central Regulatory Body, strictly).
However, that last one doesn't seem a good fit.
"X is legal" means "X does not violate any laws or X is explicitly condoned".
Having no regulations on X means X is already legal, assuming it violates no non-regulation laws - and further, "following the regulations" does not exactly always provide immunity from lawsuits now - nor should it.
A maze of regulations can, as I understand it, both impose a huge dead-weight cost and still leave one in legal uncertainty; too many regulations make compliance difficult or even impossible.
Cab regulations and many if not most or all hotel regulations are dead weight rent-seeking by established concerns.
(Who wants "more regulation" of, say, Uber? Only taxi companies and their political money-recipients, as far as I can tell.
Apart from that, occasionally people in moral panics over Whatever New Thing - and I certainly see no reason to encourage them in the idea that their hyperventilation justifies any actual intervention.
Subvert the entire paradigm of "everything must be regulated".)
I think it's very useful to have a institution that uses scientific data to decide with substances are poison instead of letting every case by decided by a jury of people without relevant scientific expertise.
Regulation of medical matters is a much better policy than handling issues through malpractice law suits.
If you are a business you have an interest of having regulations with whom you can simply comply instead of having to go frequently through expensive legal trials to find out whether the thing you want to do is legal.
Regulation is a political question. Al Gore did succeed in keeping a lot of the internet from getting regulated. There much money invested into lobbying to keep things lowly regulated.
In principle, in most U.S. states, if you order something from Amazon.com or even a mail-order catalog, you're supposed to pay the sales tax yourself on your tax return - they call it a "use tax". In practice, nobody does this because 1) it's too difficult and 2) nobody ever gets caught when they don't. So Internet retailers only have a tax advantage because the taxes that are supposed to be paid on e-commerce are unenforceable.
Since when is the Internet not regulated? You have to say you're over 13 to sign up for most internet forums because of a U.S. regulation that says you can't collect personal data from children under 13 without the permission of their parents. And privacy-related regulation in Europe is much stricter.
I don't think environmental regulations have "failed to benefit anybody". For example, the air in New York is a lot less polluted than the air in Beijing.
This is the simplest answer that passes the Occam's razor test. The network effect does create a natural monopoly, but we are a generation away from understanding and modeling it enough to regulate.Besides, we are past the limit of complexity that centralized representative democracy is able to deal with.
I work in high tech and I recently wrote a piece that suggested (very gently) that maybe Google should be regulated in some fashion. I was pretty nervous about it, partly because I like Google as a company and have friends there (and have interviewed there), but also partly because they're powerful, you know?
The people who are most likely to have a window onto high tech works are usually also working in high tech. I do think there's a wave moving to regulate high tech more thoroughly, but a lot of us don't want to be the first person to say it.
(Here's the article, incidentally, over in the Futures Exchange vertical on Medium: https://medium.com/futures-... )
As far as I can tell, these patterns suggest that recent tech like operating systems, search engines, social networks, and IM systems are unlikely to be substantially regulated. For example, these systems have very low transaction costs, and very powerful mechanisms for voice and exit.
One recent thought I had related to this is regarding Windows XP: it's chock full of security holes, even Microsoft is soon ending support for it, and yet apparently 18% of world's computers still use it. Windows XP is the powerhorse behind many many botnets that criminals use for Spam, DDoS, etc., making the Internet worse for everyone ultimately. Should this be regulated, should it become illegal to connect a Windows XP system to the Internet unless it's fully patched and added with firewalls and antivirus software?
I'd say yes, except politicians are clueless in this area and will probably screw this up, and also this open up a dangerous can of worms which would definitely be abused - imagine a SOPA but not just for the Internet, for any software anywhere, may even extend to hardware. Until we get more enlightened and knowledgeable representatives, I'd hope regulations like this don't come forth - they give too little benefit compared to the damage they *will* end up doing.
The model of Uber is wrong. Regulation in these industries has primarily been captured by insiders as a way to prevent competition. Using the "Internet competitors are unregulated" premise is just a way of breaking into the market that regulators won't immediately slap down. As a new, hungry entrant, it's not too hard to be better than the established players, and most of these businesses are even innovating.
Once they too are insiders, regulations will block new entrants and make their investors more money, not less.
Thank you so much! Regulation is a political question. Al Gore did succeed in keeping a lot of the internet from getting regulated. It's also much harder to regulate something that can be hidden and moved around effortlessly, like an internet business.
Regulations are generally necessary when there is a tragedy of the commons, when the product lends naturally to a monopoly (e.g. electricity), or when there are trust and safety issues.
By large, none of that is the case for things like consumer operating systems, and whenever that is actually the case (the operating system on your airplane), it is very much regulated.
Frankly I don't see what the hell this has to do with status at all; if there is any correlation, it is other way around - writing airplane software is definitely higher status than consumer software, a nuclear reactor is higher status than coal power plant, and so on and so forth, mostly because the costlier is the potential screw-up, the more quality is required and the higher are the hiring requirements.
Tech changes too rapidly for regulation to make much sense and we are not any closer to that not being the case. Aging doesn't mean they change less; it means they disappear or morph into something else. Remember when IM was a thing? Regulations generally only codify case law and we have barely had any of that yet. We have a few laws on privacy, on bullying, and a few others but what rights and rules new tech should follow are still up for grabs. VCR/DVRs? This is not about utilities, it is about morphing into the next big thing before becoming obsolete.
The first two paragraphs are not particularly problematic (though I'd note that "poison" is a tricky one - many things we like are "poisons", such as alcohol; one might even suggest that simply marking things sold for ingestion with a label pointing out a level of toxicity would provide all the rational lawsuit-avoiding information; no need for a Central Regulatory Body, strictly).
However, that last one doesn't seem a good fit.
"X is legal" means "X does not violate any laws or X is explicitly condoned".
Having no regulations on X means X is already legal, assuming it violates no non-regulation laws - and further, "following the regulations" does not exactly always provide immunity from lawsuits now - nor should it.
A maze of regulations can, as I understand it, both impose a huge dead-weight cost and still leave one in legal uncertainty; too many regulations make compliance difficult or even impossible.
I'd argue for "don't regulate them at all".
Cab regulations and many if not most or all hotel regulations are dead weight rent-seeking by established concerns.
(Who wants "more regulation" of, say, Uber? Only taxi companies and their political money-recipients, as far as I can tell.
Apart from that, occasionally people in moral panics over Whatever New Thing - and I certainly see no reason to encourage them in the idea that their hyperventilation justifies any actual intervention.
Subvert the entire paradigm of "everything must be regulated".)
Now the new era, everything will be expanded and no longer constrained as before. Maybe it's cause
I think it's very useful to have a institution that uses scientific data to decide with substances are poison instead of letting every case by decided by a jury of people without relevant scientific expertise.
Regulation of medical matters is a much better policy than handling issues through malpractice law suits.
If you are a business you have an interest of having regulations with whom you can simply comply instead of having to go frequently through expensive legal trials to find out whether the thing you want to do is legal.
Regulation is a political question. Al Gore did succeed in keeping a lot of the internet from getting regulated. There much money invested into lobbying to keep things lowly regulated.
In principle, in most U.S. states, if you order something from Amazon.com or even a mail-order catalog, you're supposed to pay the sales tax yourself on your tax return - they call it a "use tax". In practice, nobody does this because 1) it's too difficult and 2) nobody ever gets caught when they don't. So Internet retailers only have a tax advantage because the taxes that are supposed to be paid on e-commerce are unenforceable.
Since when is the Internet not regulated? You have to say you're over 13 to sign up for most internet forums because of a U.S. regulation that says you can't collect personal data from children under 13 without the permission of their parents. And privacy-related regulation in Europe is much stricter.
I don't think environmental regulations have "failed to benefit anybody". For example, the air in New York is a lot less polluted than the air in Beijing.
This is the simplest answer that passes the Occam's razor test. The network effect does create a natural monopoly, but we are a generation away from understanding and modeling it enough to regulate.Besides, we are past the limit of complexity that centralized representative democracy is able to deal with.