
A Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet - viburnum
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/tech-companies-antitrust-monopolies-socialist
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cmdshiftf4
To not even begin to poke at the obvious holes in this proposal, in this
supposed utopia the government fully owns and runs the entire backbone, ISPs
via municipalities, and any service that scales to serve a certain number,
including hosting platforms such as AWS?

There's people out there who believe this would be a good thing? Really?

If we accept this as naive, then we accept the proposer as modernly blinkered
and historically blind and can likely be dismissed as such. However, if we
accept the proposal as being made with full knowledge of the eventual
consequences and outcomes in mind, then we can only label those making such
proposals as a danger.

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nyxtom
> In this case, a state entity takes responsibility for operating a service.

This absolutely terrifies me that someone thinks this is a good idea.

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mc32
They have to gaze no further than to Havana to see how it pans out. If further
interested they can go to Beijing and figure out how it's used to promote
values and such. I'm sure it's can be a satisfying view to some.

While FB and Google do have some problems due to their monopolies, the answer
is not in state control.

~~~
claudiawerner
>While FB and Google do have some problems due to their monopolies, the answer
is not in state control.

Although I am _not_ a proponent of state control of the net, I'm curious as to
why not. If it's that the state can't be trusted, this doesn't seem to match
our existing institutions; we regularly place our lives in control of the
state every day, from food regulation rules to the social safety net, to
defence of the country, etc. - why should something the net, which seems to
hold much less in stakes than the things I listed, be an exception?

~~~
beatgammit
Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is
reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has
serious issues), and defense (our military seems to be used more for offense,
not defense).

In general, I find public institutions to be worse than their private
alternatives. I prefer UPS/FedEx to the Postal Service and I send my child to
a charter school rather than the local public school. Public institutions have
shown that they don't need to be good, just good enough.

The key is making sure the incentives are right. Google and Facebook are bad
because they profit from violating people's privacy, and they've developed a
business model based around trading personal information for services. I don't
know what the answer is necessarily, but nationalising it just turns them into
surveillance networks, which is arguably worse than advertising networks.

I think we need to decide what the end goal is and define the incentives
needed to get us there, and ideally we'd avoid too much use of government to
get there. For Google/Facebook, I doubt advertising will go away, so we need
to find a way to make privacy-preserving ads a thing while still allowing
advertisers to show relevant ads to customers. Perhaps the Brave model is
better than Google's model, or perhaps Google's model is acceptable with
transparency and oversight. But having government deeply involved in
personally identifiable activity is a bit too Orwellian for me.

~~~
claudiawerner
> Personally, I don't trust the government to do food regulation (FDA is
> reactionary and IMO corruptible), social safety net (Social Security has
> serious issues), and defense (our military seems to be used more for
> offense, not defense).

I accept your argument, but most people against net regulation generally have
good opinions on food regulation agencies and the social safety net, so while
you seem consistent, I have a feeling a lot of people aren't in this matter. I
suspect the case is even greater for European countries, which do food
regulation and social safety better than the US in many ways.

Either way, it would follow that a government which does those things right
could, in principle, regulate the net. I think the case is stronger when one
considers that everyone _except_ anarchists accepts the rule of law, and the
democratic decision process to arrive to the law. I think it's very reasonable
to say that there are government institutions that are run well, and those
institutions have greater consequences than the regulation of the net.

The real target of my criticism was the fact that people tend to engage in
special pleading when it comes to regulating the net, or regulating speech,
without much reason for it. Brison has argued that there is no meaningful
metaphysical difference between what we class as "speech" and "action".

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nyxtom
Regulating a market is entirely different than regulating a right that
preordains the existence of a nation state at all. We have the right to speech
coded in law because it is meant to keep the state at bay - it isn’t given to
us by the state, it exists apriori.

~~~
claudiawerner
>We have the right to speech coded in law because it is meant to keep the
state at bay - it isn’t given to us by the state, it exists apriori.

That's certainly true, but it's worth asking what the justification is for the
1st amendment, i.e. what makes speech so special (after all, we have lively
debate on most other amendments, such as the 2nd and in the past the 18th),
and to say that freedom of speech exists a priori is just as true of speech as
it is any other action, including actions we would count as murder, or theft,
etc.

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nyxtom
The problem with this formulation is that all other laws, all other rights,
only exist as a result of the first a-priori assumption: that you are allowed
to engage in discussion of any idea. Without that, people self censor and
can’t feel free to think.

That isn’t to say that there are _no regulations_ on content. Plenty of media
has standards and regulations about how it produces content, rating systems
for media, and a system of classifying content that is acceptable for
different degrees. For instance, I could see better regulation around a rating
system for YouTube content to prevent children from stumbling upon poor
content. This is still different than banning speech.

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buboard
Great story. Next they should describe how to privatize the government

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throwawaysea
It’s hard to trust the intent behind this Jacobin piece, especially because
the article is unclear on what problems it is trying to solve and therefore
comes off as purely ideologically motivated. It seems like this is walking
exactly the path of past socialist authoritarian regimes, where eventual total
public control (AKA party or ideological control) comes into being in the name
of empowering the common man and “Democratizing”. But how long before public
control starts limiting the freedom of the internet by imposing rules on
what’s allowed and not allowed in even more heavy-handed ways? Given that the
far left (like Jacobin) have been rallying _against_ free speech and mocking
it online with “freeze peach” memes, I am terrified at the possibility of them
eventually ceasing control of speech platforms. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of
the current state either, with a few companies controlling everything. But we
have tools for that - namely anti-trust law. So let’s take incremental steps
for change rather than entertaining dangerously radical changes.

~~~
claudiawerner
>Given that the far left (like Jacobin) have been rallying _against_ free
speech and mocking it online with “freeze peach” memes, I am terrified at the
possibility of them eventually ceasing control of speech platforms.

Two points on this thought: there are a variety of viewpoints on the value of
freedom of speech within "the left" \- needless to say, opinions range from
libertarian to unlibertarian. You shouldn't get your views of leftist
philosophy from Internet memes. The second point is that you should consider
reading the arguments on freedom of speech, those for and against it. Most
people only seem to know of the arguments _for_ it. On that point I'd
recommend checking out Susan Brison's work for starters.

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wilsonrocks
It's good to see this perspective.

