The incoming California legislature is over 3/4ths Democratic so while the Federal gridlock may not make any progress, there could be some movement closer to home that at least gets the industry to prepare for the inevitable.

Yes, state action on this is likely to occur first, and it should definitely be done sooner rather than later. State law commonly templates federal law, as it has historically done with mileage standards, the ACA, etc. Get this done in CA, NY, and MA, where it's politically viable.

I'm not so sure - I don't necessarily think it'll be federal straight away, but I think there's real possibility of state-by-state rules, which will eventually give way to federal.

This is the best way anyways. 50 experiments will lead to a better outcome.

50? That would be nice. For any given forward-thinking issue, I consider us lucky to have a handful of innovators at the state level. Now, when a crisis of some sort comes around, lawmakers from others states will start to pay attention. Ideally, at that point, they will evaluate and adapt other state experiments. In practice, it depends on the timing, committees, etc. Sorry to sound a bit cynical, but really my take-away message is this: if you care about an issue, get involved one way or the other in lobbying for your cause (I'm assuming here that HN people are well-informed, even if we have different policy prescriptions).

Could you elaborate on the privacy regulation that is gaining traction in Canada?

Hey sorry I didn't check for follow-up comments. Hopefully you still see this.

On Nov 27th, I watched the International Joint Hearing with Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice-president of policy solutions. It was a couple hours long and of much higher tech literacy than the one the US held with Zuckerberg. Questions came from seven countries. Questions were mostly honest and the answers were informative. There were still a number of people who chose to just ask angry questions for sound bites. (Canada's rep was unfortunately one of the ones who asked bad questions.)

Overall though, it was a really good discussion. Here's a link to the transcript and video ("watch the meeting" link).

http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence....

A joint-declaration was made after the hearing. It speaks to an international alliance for regulation. This is really where I see traction forming.

Here's the declaration, it's only a page long: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...

Hope this throws you a notification or something. Cheers.

Only 3 Republican senators need to support it, and there's a ton of them that don't care so much for Trump.

If enough industry people are on the side of it and/or there no populist fight over it, Trump would have no reason to veto it.

I don't think Trump really cares that much about these things, it'll only be a thing if it turns into a pop-culture war in which he may choose sides.

But if MS and a bunch of other heavyweights are in favour of it, he just might even go for it.

It's possible. But more likely in a few years.

> I don't think Trump really cares that much about these things, it'll only be a thing if it turns into a pop-culture war in which he may choose sides.

> But if MS and a bunch of other heavyweights are in favour of it, he just might even go for it.

I remember the first time I heard about Net Neutrality as an issue, in what, 2011 or something? I couldn't have imagined it becoming politicized at all. Plus, Wikipedia, Google, basically any tech company who isn't an ISP should clearly be on the same side. And yet, it became a political issue. People who couldn't explain the first thing about what Net Neutrality is, have opinions about it. Trump's administration is against it.

Maybe it'll be different for Facial Recognition, since people can better intuit about it, but honestly, that probably just makes it easier to fear-monger about, rightly or wrongly.

Net Neutrality will definitely become politicized because it's a war between layers of the value chain: carriers vs. Google.

Carriers are enormously powerful and influential so there will be a war.

If it's MS vs. Amazon ... well it's not one industry vs. the other.

But I agree it could turn into a pop culture war.

red tape ... legislation will be passed if regulation can be made.

Amazon or tech in general wont be stopped , but it will have to pay the toll. This is something dems and repubs agree on. Im guessing MS is not looking to be the leader so why not just get some good press at the same time.