This is exactly it, and happens in every other industry.

The big players will push for regulations, licencing, and standard, ensuring that their next competitor can't come from a few smart people tinkering in their garage or their dorm room.

A good example is the toy industry, where requirements for chemical and safety tests which cost tens of thousands of dollars per SKU, keep mom and pop shops making wooden toys from their garage. (Well, they do anyway, but can be stopped at any time if they get too big.)

I was thinking it was that + some "I got mine with no rules, now nobody else should."

Can you suggest a better strategy at policing data misuse by social media companies, other than regulating social media explicitly (as this post calls for)? I agree that Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook is unshakably biased and shouldn't be writing the regulations themselves -- but nothing in the linked article seems to me to be written in bad faith. In fact, I see the same talking points (ex: bringing GDPR to the US, adopting a common standard for social media communication) all over HN.

The idea that small competitors should be able to launch with minimal capital, and the idea that social media vendors should protect users' data, are fundamentally in tension. It costs money to protect user privacy, full stop. Yeah, it's possible for a Facebook/Microsoft/Google/whoever to bend the regulations to widen their moat, but it's the job of the regulatory bodies to ensure that the regulations are fair.

The question shouldn't be "should we regulate social media?" The answer, IMO, is a resounding YES. The real question should be "who should be in charge of building those regulations?"

FINRA is a non-government, industry driven (self-regulatory) organization for the US stock market. It exists to discourage fraud and bad practices without requiring a heavy hand of government. The SEC mostly focuses on lawbreakers. Internet companies would do well to create a similar, open structure before government steps in to over-regulate.

Hmm, if you directly translated FINRA to internet companies, new startups would have to be licensed with the internet SRO (self-regulatory organization) before they could offer services to the public.

That's an interesting idea, is it actually what you are suggesting?

I don't have a concrete proposal. I was just trying to illustrate that there may be a model inbetween total and zero regulation.

The line of demarcation could be storing personally identifying information, interfacing with advertising networks, or maybe even ownership of certain patent/intellectual property rights.

I don’t think it is. First, lawmakers in several countries around the world were the first to propose these types of regulations, not Facebook. Second, Mark already acknowledged in the senate hearing that such regulations can hurt small businesses, so lawmakers need to be careful.

Hard problems require complex solutions. It’s not easy for small companies to get “a foot in the door” in the space or auto industries either. Content moderation is a hard and unsolved problem — so yes, companies with more resources will have a better chance of succeeding.

Do we solve it for books? No. Very little if the content lawmakers are worried about is content we would censor books for.

Not all hard problems require complex solutions, unless the definition of a hard problem is one which requires a complex solution.

Lobbyists are a thing. Before lawmakers come out publicly, there are already backroom talks and legal bribes being made.

When outside observers say something, they are the guardians of the people. When zuckerberg says the same thing (or even a stronger pro-regulation stance) he's the devil.

this should come as no surprise since he has established himself as the devil prior to saying anything