Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 days ago
Not only that, "corruption" is pretty squishy. Let's apply Hanlon's Razor for once.
Google et al go to the government and say they've got this attestation thing that can something something security. No one is taking a bribe but also no one they're hearing from is telling them that doing this is going to cement the incumbents. "Security" is good, right? So it makes it into the law.
That doesn't meet most formal definitions of corruption. It's more like incompetence than malice. But the outcome is indistinguishable from corruption. The bad thing gets into the law.
The difference is, if the politicians are taking bribes and you get mad at them, they fob you off because they're more interested in lining their pockets. But if the politicians are just misinformed bureaucrats and you get mad at them, they might actually fix it.
And attributing everything to "corruption" discourages people from doing the latter even in cases where it would be effective.
> Google et al go to the government and say
The money that goes into lobbying in order to have that say is, depending on who you ask, corruption. I, as a random citizen, don't get the same say that a multi billion dollar international corporation does.
That seems like a pretty useless definition of corruption. It implies that retirees writing letters to Congress is "corruption" because working people don't have the same amount of free time to do that.
It's also kind of weird to propose it as an asymmetry. Google's parent company spends around $4M on lobbying in the US:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
That's around $0.01 per capita. Your per capita contribution for individuals to out-spend Google on lobbying is two cents.
The day a low income retiree can have meetings with politicians to lobby for their favorite policies is the day this comparison will be useful.
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Money or equivalents (watches, golf tee times) changing hands would be the difference.
Anything involving trust cements the incumbents or at least creates a force to an outcome of few players. It is what it is.
It's not a given that it's incompetence.
> Anything involving trust cements the incumbents or at least creates a force to an outcome of few players.
I don't think that's even true, unless you're using "trust" as a synonym for centralization.
Suppose you had actual competing app stores. Google doesn't control which ones you use; you can use Google Play or F-Droid or Amazon or all three at once and anyone can make a new one. You could get Android apps through Apple's store and vice versa. And then you choose who you trust; maybe you only trust F-Droid and Apple and you think Google and Amazon stink. Maybe you install 90% of your apps through F-Droid but are willing to install your bank app on GrapheneOS from Google Play because you trust your bank and you also trust Google enough to at least verify that the bank app is actually from your bank.
This is the thing that doesn't help the incumbents, right? The bank and the customer both trust Google to distribute the bank app but Google isn't allowed to prevent the user from trusting F-Droid for other apps as a condition for getting the bank app from Google Play. You can have trust without centralization.
You have given a situation where there are a 3 players - a very concentrated market. Give an example with 30 players and think through all the implications for all the actors. You'll quickly realize it's a total disaster. Building broad trust requires scale on some dimension.
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