I'd call it skepticism or pessism at worst.
Doesn't mean that we shouldn't be very careful about what comes out of this whole discussion and maybe make our voices heard if we deem it unfair or ineffective but we're not there yet.
Can you name a piece of US federal legislation regulating a major industry passed in the last, say, 30 years, where this was not the case?
Well actually...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...
Notice the number created before vs. after 1967, when the feds started passing vehicle safety regulations.
Also notice how many of those created after 1967 (e.g. Geo, Saturn, Hummer) aren't actually independent, they're just retired marks of the existing incumbents.
Because the safety regulations are designed for huge companies. The companies literally provide cars to the government to be crashed for testing purposes, because destroying a few cars is nothing to Ford or GM.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/17/ralph-nade...
Regulation can be awful or insignificant.
My state requires strippers to fill out a license and pay 50$. Changed nothing.
However, my state also requires you to put down 1M to start a bank. Thats definitely regulatory capture.
Its too soon to know whats going to be required of data. Databases might become significantly worse to program and require teams to maintain at government standards.
No benefits at all, really?
Remember pre-regulation leaded gasoline and cars without seat belts?
I dont know the history of leaded gasoline, but I worked in safety, and car companies were definitely moving toward safe vehicles.
"Auto makers, who have been fighting the introduction of air bags for nearly a decade as too costly and only marginally effective, have gone a long way toward their goal of bypassing the federal regulations. "
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-19/news/mn-546_1_seat-be...
From 1990:
"But the history of catalytic converters reveals another side of Detroit. The industry refined the technology only after Congress imposed strict limits and deadlines and foreign car makers threatened to develop cleaner engines."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/03/26/a...
From 1985:
"The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, said that the refining industry had been making efforts in anticipation of today's rules to ''insure against future supply disruptions.
'But the announced lead-reduction schedule will create a substantial problem for the refining industry in providing motorists with adequate quantities of high-quality gasoline at reasonable costs,'' the institute's statement said."
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/05/us/epa-orders-90-percent-...
What is the ask here? A ZIP with all your information? A JSON file with your friendship graph? How would that be readable to most people? I doubt that Facebook's data structures are so portable that they could just be placed into another social network? Even assuming you have the data, Facebook's value is in the IP and ML algorithms. Facebook sure as hell isn't giving those up.
Even assuming all that, how does it take us further forward than what we have now?
There's a lot of arguments to the effect of 'something needs to be done' but not much detail on what an alternative looks like.
Making scraping of your personal data a statutory right, including the building and distributing of tools for it.
No need to force FB to publish anything, just prevent them from blocking anyone who uses a tool to scrape their own data through the regular UI. This should draw the boundaries of responsibility in the right place.
This would allow e.g. a “messaging” bridge which automatically interfaces with the messages part of the site, and bridges it to any tool (or API) you want. At least per user per account. This would force de facto federation without putting a burden on FB.
The disingenuous loophole the government is so fond of whereby you sharing information with a third party suddenly negates ALL expectation of privacy and 4th Amendment protections is a farce. Signing up for Facebook should not be a "first sale" of your personal information or right to privacy.
Of course, no tech company that has ridden the free ride of harvesting personal data would be on board with ANYTHING like that.
They can keep their IP and algorithms if they want, but if I don't consent to the fruits of my existence being fed through them, then that is where it needs to stop.
No company should feel safe with involuntarily increasing a user's digital footprint. Period.
That covers not asking to and being explicitly told not to. A person has an inalienable right to maintain final authority over their digital presence. The only exception that makes sense to me is for the press. Though I haven't thought that implication through completely yet.
If something needs to be done let's at least give one chance to the people who seem to be trying to do something.
Sounds like a libertarian conspiracy theory to me, especially when we still don't know what these hypothetical regulations would look like. For instance if they make it easier to access your data, download and delete it they might somewhat weaken the lock-in effect of Facebook and level the playing field somewhat.
Beyond that and even if they make it slightly harder to build a social network in the future it doesn't mean that a reasonable amount of regulation is not worthwhile. If you want to start a bridge-building company you'll have to abide by a massive amount of rules, yet I'm not really sure I want to let the "completely free market" decide what a safe bridge looks like.