this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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I feel like trying to make the big fish act in our interest and not theirs is fighting windmills.
Better kill the big fish.
Not directly on topic - note how all the socialist revolutionaries always start with killing the smallest fish and hate it the most. The big ones they try to convert.
Genuine question: how do we actually "kill the big fish" though? Majority are going to continue to use big tech out of convenience and because they dont care much.
No quick way. There are too many regulations which are enforced badly and abused to actually support that "big fish". Make them fewer and make the punishment swift and unavoidable and hard. And split a few of the worst offenders into parts each in one specific area - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta are all good candidates.
I think in the end it all comes down to putting power back into the hands of regulators — power that corporate America has been slowly and steadily eroding for the last 40 years.
A more powerful regulatory state could start enforcing the anti-trust laws we already have on the books by breaking up the massive tech monopolies. Once that's done, new regulations and new legislation against anti-consumer practices are needed, but those will only work if the punishments scale high enough to work as an actual deterrent against the multi-billion dollar tech giants.
Of course, we'd also need massive, MASSIVE campaign finance and lobbying reforms so that monied interested aren't able to sabotage the system all over again.
Or we could just bring back the guillotine... that would probably do the trick too.
You forgot to say that regulatory apparatus should have much fewer points of failure. That is, it should be made stronger and more efficient, but it should be radically contracted. It's bigger than needs be.
By points of failure I mean opportunities for strong entities to make regulations work for monopolies\oligopolies.
US is doing that with TikTok already. The government can snap their fingers and ban / break up companies at the drop of a hat if they want.
That's a sentiment that quite a few others online feel too:
https://www.techdirt.com/2019/03/13/do-people-want-better-facebook-dead-facebook/
I do get the argument though that if no improvement will ever be good enough for some people, then what incentive do they have to change for the better if it won't make a difference to those people either way?