Comment by Aurornis
10 days ago
> Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them
If anything, I’m seeing more calls for internet regulation on HN and other tech places than in the past.
Every time something is shared about topics like kids spending too much time on phones or LLMs producing incorrect output, the comments attract a lot of demands for government regulation as the solution. Regulation is viewed as the way to push back on technological and social problems.
The closer regulations come to reality, the less popular they are. Regulation seems most attractive in the abstract, before people have to consider the unintended consequences.
The most common example I can think of is age verification: Every thread about smartphone addiction come with calls for strict age-based regulation all over the place.
Yet the calls for strict age-based internet regulation generally fail to realize that you can’t only do age verifications on kids and you can’t do it anonymously. The only way to do age verification is to verify everyone, and the only way to verify that the age verification matches the user is to remove the possibility of anonymity.
The calls for regulation always imagine it happening to other people and other companies. Few people demanding internet age verification for things like social media seem to realize that it would also apply to sites like HN. Nobody likes the idea of having to prove your identity for an age check to sign up for HN, they just want to imagine Facebook users going through that trouble because they don’t use Facebook and therefore it’s not a problem.
Engineers want some kind of regulation because they feel like computer systems, which they nominally control, are out of control, because of the business people's demands. They want the right to say no without having to have the consequences of saying no. But then when regulations come in, they're not about regulating business, they're about regulated interactions between people and business. And whereas the idealist sees a regulation as a chance to change things for the better, a regulator sees a regulation as a chance to preserve things as they were just before they became bad. (It takes a politician, not a regulator, to change things.)