Yes but I think what the person you're responding to was pointing out was the high risk of regulatory capture.
We tend to have this false dichotomy of the government vs private companies. When in reality most regulation that's passed is most heavily influenced by lobbyists and special (corporate) interests that don't represent the majority. OP is pointing out that government regulation will only work as long as the public stays engaged. In the long term it would actually lead to even more power concentrated to "the few whose only incentive is to make more money."
It feels really unfair that all anti-gov / taxation arguments are just fatalistic "this will fail" and we're okay with that as if entropy isn't the default state of the universe.
No use building this bridge it'll just rust.
Why eat! you're gonna die anyways.
Why bother with a wealth tax, they'll out smart you anyways.
This has nothing to do with defeatism, OP points out the flaw with idealising regulations willy nilly without having a mechanism to make sure it doesn't get exploited (that mechanism often being the people understanding the issue and thus having a stake in it).
A good example is direct democracy in Switzerland, the key reason to why it works is that people are 2 things, Switzerland big focus on education and the vast information of the for, against, status quo option the citizens are presented with.
Without these things the Swiss would be very vulnerable to demagoguery.
I would make that argument, but I didn't today. There is a real chance in the next decade that the public will be voting on how to respond to Russia with consequences that may doom us all. That may not even be the biggest issue, depending on how these famines and supply issues resolve.
That same election will also be deciding how to handle potential corruption in some Board of the Internet.
Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available? Do you want to encourage others to do the same? That would be beyond reckless in my humble opinion. Internet regulation isn't going to make top 5 for me personally for a long while yet.
It isn't reasonable to talk about a public internet putting control into the hands of the Many. The Many don't have that many hands, their hands are already full. They cannot grapple with this issue as well. This will just result in some random committee of people, probably paid off by corporate interests, who will be even fewer than the theoretical few that the article complains of. They will not listen to you either.
And that isn't defeatism, it is pointing out that this solution takes a reasonably good thing and makes it worse by applying woolly thinking to a real situation. The complaint is that power is too centralised, then it is proposing to centralise power further.
> Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war for another day and vote with the #1 issue being whether you feel your internet is too expensive and/or suitably available?
You could make this same argument with literally anything though, as if the only priority of the government is nuclear war.
Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on food and drug regulation? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on voting rights? Are you going to put aside the threat of nuclear war and vote on tax reform? This argument reduces the government to a worst-case scenario committee.
Enumerating the implications is a bit different from a counterargument. I do argue that food & drug regulation has done a lot of damage by centralising power into the hands of the few. You can't really look at the healthcare system after government gets involved and argue that power has been pushed into the hands of the many, it is very centralised and best-case controlled by a small number of technocrats, worst case blatant corruption by big corporations.
The lesson in COVID times was that individuals have basically no control over their health choices when the technocrats make a decision. That was hardly "the many" in action.
I think voting & taxes are ultimately inseparable from government, but yeah - I would prioritise foreign policy above those two issues right now and encourage others to do the same. If a big war breaks out there may not be much left to tax.
culi was not engaging in vague doom-and-gloom, he was referring to the specific phenomenon where highly committed minority interests tend to win out over apathetic majorities. If you want to avoid this outcome, you need to come up with a solution specifically designed to combat this tendency.
I'm decidedly not interested in choosing between control by a handful of bureaucrats vs a handful of profiteers. Neither is an acceptable lesser evil. If Paris Marx or any other leftist intellectual du jour wants a greater public role in Internet governance, they need to first admit that there's a permanent bureaucracy in Washington which is largely immune to elections and unaccountable to the people, then get rid of it.
We already know what the outcome in the US will be if they don't. You can introduce as many rules as you want. They'll still be written by Eric Schmidt, he'll just have a different job title.
Not just “Disinformation Bureau”, but also “Rumor Control Program”. It’s all in the released documents — though, shockingly, missing from the DHS Secretary testimony to the Congress. She must have just forgotten to mention it, surely nothing sinister going on in there.
I suggest to look up the other definition of the word. Because you may meet people who see privatization as handing control over to members of the public.
Interestingly this is exactly the line of reasoning arch-privatiser Margaret Thatcher gave in her speeches on the subject, she claimed privatisation put nationalised industries in the hands of the public because anyone could buy shares in these industries which were hitherto limited to an out-of-touch government elite, while her ideological opponents (retroactively known as 'Old Labour') made the argument that nationalisation was putting those industries in the hands of the people because they were run by the democratically elected state rather than an out-of-touch corporate elite.
Personally I lean towards Thatcher having done more harm than good, while the British government absolutely did have nationalised industries that were inefficient and needed to be wound down or at least heavily reformed (coal mining and the nationalised car company British Leyland being the prime examples) the way her government just cut down whole communities at the knees was wanton and unreasonable. Rail privatisation in the UK has been a failure too, our system is much more expensive and less reliable than nationalised Continental equivalents to the point it's cheaper to fly from London to Newcastle via Barcelona than it is to take the train, which is fairly likely to be cancelled without reason five minutes before it's due anyway. Even without the economics, the negative environmental effects of this situation are too obvious to mention!
I don't know why so many people insist on absolutism for either position though, the position that natural monopolies and strategic national assets (like nuclear power stations for example) should be nationalised and other industries should be privatised isn't unreasonable.
The useful distinction being "members of" vs "elected representatives."
I live in an European country. I cannot for the life of me figure out in which way would (a consortium of) private companies come up with something like the GDPR law and the enforcement structures around it. What would be their incentive, as private entities?
