Actually most of the times, more government regulation is the right answer. There's a long history where limited government involvement and corresponding lack of regulations have impacted citizens (remember AT&T and phone rentals?)

The problem with regulations now is how the process has been subverted by capitalism to provide a benefit to one (or a small number of) business(es) which does not provide a level playing field.

I don't know how we would solve this problem, because of the nature of capitalism where the corporation with the deepest pockets wins.

I think even diehard libertarians would admit that "regulations work" in the sense that using the government's monopoly on violence to force companies to do something will cause them to do said thing. The debate is whether the upsides outweigh the downsides (eg. due to regulatory capture).

For a point of comparison, software security is largely unregulated. There's no law that says Google needs to deliver security patches for 5 years, or they need to implement security measures like verified boot, yet they do so anyways, presumably to compete with Apple which is doing something similar.

There's a huge gap between what we have today and perfect regulation. Would you consider what the US has today, with all the issues of regulatory capture and revolving doors, as close enough to perfect that its reasonable to impose the regulations on us and limit our freedoms along the way?

I'm not proposing the anarchist, wild west pipe dream. I'm simply saying that we shouldn't so easily assume that our regulations that are questionably successful today would be better if only we doubled down on them. We can go the route of more regulation, moving responsibility off of industry and onto the government, or we can go the opposite and remove regulations while also removing liability protections. Allow companies to feel the pain of bad decisions and allow customers to make informed decisions rather than asking people to blindly trust experts that say something is safe enough, good enough for the environment, etc.

If AI takes over the world, or others pump lots of GHG into the air and cause climate change, or someone sets off explosives and burns down my neighborhood, or my frozen chicken contains poisonous bacteria, or my bathroom sanitizer doesn't really sanitize - how do I opt out?

Plenty of regulations coexists with FOSS, obviously.

The arguments against all regulation are transparently weak, and the apparent dogmatism discredits everything else. Why be so dogmatically anti-regulation? Dogmatism isn't about finding truth but about serving someone's political interests. If I understand correctly what's happening, whose interests are you serving and why?

Because the societal costs of certain industries' unregulated activities do more harm than the economic cost of doing that regulation.

Despite what the Libertarian Party's pamphlet might say, regulation is invariably reactive rather than proactive; the saying is "safety-codes are written in blood", after-all.

Note that I'm not advocating we "regulate AI" now; instead I believe we're still in the "wait-and-see" phase (whereas we're definitely past that for social-media services like Facebook, but that's another story). There are hypothetical, but plausible, risks; but in the event they become real then we (society) need to be prepared to respond appropriately.

I'm not an expert in this area; I don't need to be: I trust people who do know better than me to come up with workable proposals. How about that?

I asked myself that and answered: Requiring companies to document their hardware for right-to-repair or right-to-utilize reasons has no effect on life, and some effect on property. It would give individuals more power over their own property - more power over their old school, physical possession, basic territoriality, property. The government protecting people's right to repair and utilize their physical possessions seems like a good thing.

At this point you seem, to me, to have reversed position. Are you now okay with requiring companies to document their APIs for the benefit of consumers (in some cases at least)?

Either way, this conversation is frustrating to me, and one I wont continue here (you're, of course, welcome to respond and debate with others). I'm frustrated because the "no regulation, no government" view hides a lot of nuance and shuts down conversations. It's so easy to throw out "no government" and so hard to talk past it, and I think this is one reason libertarian views like this often cause people to just roll their eyes on ignore. I'm sympathetic to a lot of libertarian ideas, but I wish people would give more acknowledgement to why people want regulation (in this case) before a drive-by "no government please" comment.

I used to work for government regulators and this is a such a bizarre view of regulation.

Trust me, people on my team weren't up at night scheming how we might put the squeeze on a companies, and what nice new regulations we might implement to make things harder on businesses.

We barely had the resources to enforce important regulations that everyone would agree should exist.

Please read up on the history of any regulatory body in the US. Nearly every governing body we have and every regulation on the books was create after there was abuse. Regulations in the Federal government are almost never proactive, and as a general rule the regulators I knew had no interest in expanding their purview.

In fact, it's quite uncommon for regulations of any kind to be enforced until you basically force yourself to get caught. Most regulatory agencies are underfunded and understaffed by design. It's a reason so many startups perform regulatory arbitrage for years without consequences, even when their actions are quite harmful to the society overall.

This is genuinely quite baffling to me. Ignoring the fact that de-regulation has been an explicit plank of the GOP for my entire life, the US deregulated a ton of stuff since the Reagan era. Airlines, trucking, labor, and the financial industry all saw significant cuts to their regulatory rules. Anti-trust laws have been re-interpreted to be less aggressive[0] leading to more mergers, and regulation of various services have been weakened[1]. Environmental regulations have been a bit of a back-and-forth with executive orders changing things often, but at the state level de-regulation and willful non-enforcement is the norm in some areas. Texas is generally the go-to here, with willful non-enforcement of EPA rules around fracking and the (disastrous) deregulation of the energy market. Trump in particular made industrial de-regulation a goal, and tried to de-regulate a ton of stuff and lock out his successors from changing the rules back.

https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracke...

The UK is now finally starting up their deregulatory processes again, now that they're no longer restrained by the EU. They've been greenlighting new pesticides for use, eliminating EU rules around used plastic exports, and allowing private water companies to dump their untreated sewage into the ocean. Personally I'd keep my eye on them the most for de-regulation, because their anti-regulation party has effectively no electable opposition, leaving them entirely without political restraint. Although given the current status of their import woes, I think they might end up not being sufficiently stable for your requirements.

0 - Anti-trust used to be about whether or not a company was "anti-competitive". The new rules determine whether or not a monopoly reduces consumer prices. Whether or not this is good or not, this is effectively a deregulation.

1 - I'm specifically thinking of the end of the fairness doctrine and the deregulation of ISPs.

The recent "regulate Facebook" furor (as seen near-daily at the NYT) seems to feed into a larger pattern of this. There are a lot of establishment-friendly, technocratic people who don't seem to have adjusted their worldviews to accommodate the last ~18 months.

These are people who argued over the last eight years that we need the trustworthy, knowledgeable parts of government (roughly defined as "executive branch bureaucracies") to rein in the excesses of productive-yet-reckless businesses.

And then Trump became president and appointed a string of regulatory heads who support entrenched businesses and oppose the existence of their own departments. And seemingly, no one noticed. Whether or not Tom Wheeler and Michelle Lee were qualified to regulate the tech sector, Ajit Pai and Andrei Iancu aren't.

My opinions on regulation are not strictly libertarian. But I'm absolutely baffled by watching left-leaning voices work their hardest to empower grossly incompetent regulators who disagree with all of their goals.

Neither "regulation" nor "government" are single dimensional quantities that can be compared with a simple "more" or "less".

Having regulatory agencies act in the public interest is probably going to require constant oversight and guidance. It's a hell of a lot harder to have conversations like that when more than half of the political influence in the US is able to dismiss any suggestions with reflexive "more regulation = bad" arguments.

Some regulations decrease competition. Some regulations increase competition. Some regulations provide incentives aligned with the public interest. Some regulations don't. They need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

To his point, you really do get the sense that, on balance, people are becoming more libertarian, and a lot of that has been catalyzed by technology disrupting entrenched business models that have benefitted from regulatory protectionism.

That is a politically naive, idealistic perspective that does not align with reality.

Regulation often exists to serve entrenched monopolies and to raise barriers to entry. Sometimes, regulation is a purely emotional knee-jerk reaction to a particular wave of passing news or events. It's often ill-considered over the long term. Long after a society or economy has changed or evolved to the point of rendering the regulation obsolete, the regulation continues to impose costs and burdens on the subjects of that regulation.

It turns out that laws are easier to enact than to roll back. There's a bias to keep existing laws, no matter the opportunity costs.

And that's without digging into my former point, which is that much regulation is the result of cronyism at the highest levels to serve special interest groups.

> Profit comes from people do anything they screw people over for is usually obscured in some way.

Profit comes from economic value creation or perceived economic value creation in the marketplace (as determined by the market). It is revenue minus expenses. It comes from any economic activity that is conducted between two parties in a mutually agreed upon transaction in which both parties trade one type of value for another.

This is an odd reading of the history, tbh. The US regulators were generally more active on competition in the industry in the 90s than today; see the Microsoft and Intel investigations, for instance.

Open calls for regulation are not productive. Regulation should be a last resort, not a knee-jerk response. What do you think needs regulation and more importantly, how would you effectively enforce these regulations. A law is policy + enforcement after all, and a poorly crafted AI regulation will achieve nothing except shifting the balance of power to entrenched groups.

I think that last sentence could only be honestly written by someone who's lived their whole life in a society protected by strong regulatory structures. The massive benefits of regulation are taken for granted and forgotten, but the problems of implementation that still exist are magnified out of proportion.

Government bureaucracy is certainly not perfect, but lets not kid ourselves that it's worse than the alternative.

And the answer to your question is: a functioning legislature that's accountable to its constituents, and competently exercises its oversight role.

> Regulatory capture is a real thing too.

But rather than a call for less regulation, it's really a call for better oversight of the regulators.

You must be new to HN. Let me introduce you to the two types of comments:

1) The problem I am responding to does not involve software. The people in that industry must not be competent. Therefore, the solution is more government regulation.

2) The problem I am responding to involves software. Everyone in my industry is highly competent and moral! Therefore, let the free markets operate and the problem will automatically disappear.

You take this as a fact, so do the billionare execs at Apple, but it just isn't true. You can define "best" in however way you want to make it true, but any reasonable definition won't let that happen. Best for whom? Best for the billionares? Maybe, but that's not best for the rest of us.

Regulation is important in a healthy capitalistic society. Regulation by government, which is theoretically run by elected representatives, is not a bad thing like you suggest it is. It is a steadying hand that helps a market and a society run stably, rather than run amok with fast-paced greed that outpaces ability to sustain itself.

The best regulation is not regulation that the hundreds of millions of people in the USA are not even allowed to know exists because it is a corporate secret. No, that is not the best regulation. The best regulation is carefully written, sustainable, fair, reasonable regulation written with unbiased industry experts, the population itself, the government itself.

Trusting the most elite, rich class of secretive billionaries in the world to self-regulate is not the "best regulation", not even for them. They will get more money if they just agreed and allowed normal government processes to continue without their lobbying and interference to create a no-regulation environment that wreaks havoc on the rest of society.

Please provide an example of an industry whose regulator has performed this task well (or a list of regulators if you can find more than one), as I am not familiar with any in North America (my area of residence and familiarity).

>"Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government."

Why is the former solution inferior to the latter? I believe that the first solution is the only solution because of problems such as the aformentioned regulatory capture, as well as public choice, and various resource allocation (market-related) reasons. Please explain why I am mistaken. If you would like clarification with respect to any of my reasoning, let me know, and I can show my work (but I don't want to bore you unnecessarily).

That premise is wrong. Government regulation has lately been mostly done on account of corporations which want to protect their monopolies and strengthen their position, but that doesn't make it inherently so.