Social media services are not anywhere close to being that powerful in actuality.
The network effect (how networks become scale in value with the number of connections they make) causes them to form natural monopolies.
I can understand being skeptical of government regulations, but all they need to do is create a tort where someone can sue for being denied service on services of a certain size (e.g. that serve more than x% of the country, or possibly that have more than X users for some large X).
That's not nearly as intractable or unenforceable as other regulation might be. That said, I know there are plenty of ways to do this wrong and that governments love to screw up things like this...
It is not that I am skeptical of gov regulations. They are very necessary in specific circumstances. They just won’t work here. Regulatory whack-a-mole would not change the core business model of the service, which is based on abusing the end user.
I’ve spent years gaming out the scenarios. The only real solution with lasting impact is tech consumer education.
We are in this mess because almost no one is making informed decisions. This sets the stage for abusive relationships to form.
A better educated consumer would read the TOS before signing up and say “no, I do not agree to grant the service a license to do whatever it wants with my content”. And that consumer would move on, and instead elect to use a different service that respected their needs.
See, I can't see this as a solution. People have, as you say, needs when they go to some service. There's something they want to do there. And so they click past the privacy-stealing gibberish because there's nothing they can do about it while still doing what they want.
To get people away from this, they need real alternatives. I think the "smaller internet" movement may help. The social graph needs to be private again, it's one of the worst tools for manipulation ever invented and it's being abused like hell. Also, people's communications need to belong to them again, they're being datamined for all kinds of bad things. Anyone who thinks that, e.g., Google is offering 8.8.8.8 out of the goodness of their heart is sadly mistaken. Google is one of the worst and most subtle manipulators out there.
The network effect (how networks become scale in value with the number of connections they make) causes them to form natural monopolies.
I can understand being skeptical of government regulations, but all they need to do is create a tort where someone can sue for being denied service on services of a certain size (e.g. that serve more than x% of the country, or possibly that have more than X users for some large X).
That's not nearly as intractable or unenforceable as other regulation might be. That said, I know there are plenty of ways to do this wrong and that governments love to screw up things like this...
It is not that I am skeptical of gov regulations. They are very necessary in specific circumstances. They just won’t work here. Regulatory whack-a-mole would not change the core business model of the service, which is based on abusing the end user.
I’ve spent years gaming out the scenarios. The only real solution with lasting impact is tech consumer education.
We are in this mess because almost no one is making informed decisions. This sets the stage for abusive relationships to form.
A better educated consumer would read the TOS before signing up and say “no, I do not agree to grant the service a license to do whatever it wants with my content”. And that consumer would move on, and instead elect to use a different service that respected their needs.
See, I can't see this as a solution. People have, as you say, needs when they go to some service. There's something they want to do there. And so they click past the privacy-stealing gibberish because there's nothing they can do about it while still doing what they want.
To get people away from this, they need real alternatives. I think the "smaller internet" movement may help. The social graph needs to be private again, it's one of the worst tools for manipulation ever invented and it's being abused like hell. Also, people's communications need to belong to them again, they're being datamined for all kinds of bad things. Anyone who thinks that, e.g., Google is offering 8.8.8.8 out of the goodness of their heart is sadly mistaken. Google is one of the worst and most subtle manipulators out there.