Comment by eldavido
5 years ago
No!
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
"Regulation" also gave us things like a rapid reduction of deaths in cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...) and airliners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...), and it's hardly illegal to start a Google competitor.
"Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.
And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years. They haven't started testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused us to get better safety in some ways.
Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.
>And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years
Exactly.
Modern cars are optimized for "the tests" occasionally to the point of absurdity. As in certain systems get de-tuned (so to speak) so they are completely and totally used up at whatever the max test speed is because that's what makes the car look best in the benchmarks.
If we modernized the tests high speed crashes would be more survivable and low speed crashes would be less costly.
It's not all government's fault though. Society has a very unhealthy relationship with risk. If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
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Is "survive a 60mph crash" really the best goal?
We've made cars quite safe in this regard; I suspect there's more wiggle room to drop deaths with crash avoidance at this point. Backup cameras (now mandated by regulation), pedestrian detection, automatic breaking, lane change warnings, etc.
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"Regulation" gave us the end of Slavery.
"Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.
"Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
"Regulation" gave you slavery. In the more natural state of affairs, you can't just go about enslaving someone without the risk of them running away or outright murdering you while you're looking away. It is the power of the state that captures the fugitive slave or punishes them for defending themselves.
With the arguable exception of slavery, social change gave us all those things. Regulation was just the part where we coerced the hold-outs to do as we wanted under threat of violence. Regulation in a democracy always lags social change.
> "Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
Wasn't it Henry Ford who gave us 5 day work week? 5 days to work, 1 day for church and 1 day to get out and buy the cars he was making.
Not everyone works for Ford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19... is what extended something similar (a 40 hour work week) nationwide.
Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the same reasons.
> What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?
There's a lot of policy to encourage competition that isn't regulation. The USPS helped with early airplane development by contracting out mail delivery to civilian pilots, and grants provided by NASA et. al are partially done to help with competition in the aerospace field (can't find a source for this one but the people I know in the space all agree this is by design).
Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple platforms in a period of time so short that it looked coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.
> It looked that way because it was.
Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things, especially when reporters are calling for comment on a specific act.
If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick, even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide it.
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Regulation gave us Google (and chrome).
If the US and the EU hadn't threatened Microsoft with anti-trust they clearly would have embedded browser and search into their (then) dominant OS.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
This is obviously not true in a majority of industries
Regulatory capture makes it hard for new companies to enter a field.
It's one of the main reasons there's so much hype about SpaceX.
What seems to happen is that an oligopoly makes the written and unwritten rules so complex that they injure themselves, creating a power vacuum for deregulation or just someone saying "fuck your (unwritten) rules" and either staying exactly within the confines of the letter of the laws, or leveraging their popularity into getting away with infractions. "Oops, didn't mean it!"
That we root for the underdog is in part an expression of our shared pain in the stunted progress that was made up until that point.
Like the diamond industry, the oil industry, the telephone industry, the Silicon Valley software development talent industry…
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There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
You're probably right.
More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
> I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "competition" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
See how that works? Competition can also mean races to the bottom, price dumping, plus it works best with commodities. In every non commodity market competition is diminished and sometimes disappears naturally.
Good regulation can be a great answer to problems (and not just anti-trust). Bad regulation is... well, not a good solution of course.
For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook and other online services that I don't want to lose. I wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)
You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest; "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good regulation.
I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
Great comment. They probably are closer than I originally said.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
I agree with you about the potential that we're at the end of usefulness for our current system of professionalization. It's easy to forget how recently we've developed technology to cheaply distribute information about the past performance of individuals.
I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the organizations is have some strong form of identification that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar association (or whoever) can check that you are who you claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having people get public / private key pairs from the government (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a system.
P.s. thank you for the compliment!
For there to be competition, there needs to be regulation to help new players enter the market.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
Always worth adding - snake oil was a legitimate thing based on traditional medicine in both Europe and China, imported to America. But then some folks found it more profitable to pass off mineral oil rather than bothering with the snakes.