Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead

Re:Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need com... by slg on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @01:35PM (#21455229)

I am familiar with regulatory capture. I am not familiar with any well-respected economist who has argued that regulatory capture is a forgone conclusion of regulation. But either way, regulatory capture is not a symptom of bad regulation. It is a symptom of a corrupted political system. Putting stronger restrictions on lobbying and reforming campaign finance law would be a much better step to fix regulatory capture than widespread dumping of regulations.

I also want to point out that regulatory capture is completely counter to the example that nemo44x mentioned above in which they stated that regulation forced banks to make loans they wouldn't have ordinarily made. The idea that the banks didn't want to make those loans and only did it to meet regulatory standards is incompatible with the belief that the regulation was co-oped for the benefit of the banks.

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Re:Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need com... by BurningFrog on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @02:13PM (#21455606)

> Putting stronger restrictions on lobbying and reforming campaign finance law would be a much better step to fix regulatory capture than widespread dumping of regulations

To me that's a naive view of how fundamental the problem is. Consenting adults who stand to gain a lot at the expense of a third party will always find a way to help each other out.

Just my personal feeling, of course. I have no proof to offer.

Besides, I think the main mechanism for Regulatory Capture is influencing the regulator directly, not the legislators. At least in the US, the law behind the regulation mostly just says that the new TLA agency is to issue rules that it deems are in the interest of some lofty vague goals.

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Re:Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need com... by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @02:35PM (#21455825)

> The idea that the banks didn't want to make those loans and only did it to meet regulatory standards is incompatible with the belief that the regulation was co-oped for the benefit of the banks.

Keep in mind that there is more than one lobby group. A big force behind "give more loans, everybody should own a home" is the National Association of Realtors.

So the banks don't want to give the loans (because they know there will be defaults) but the Realtors want them to; the "compromise" is to move the risk away from the banks.

The law was a moral hazard -- move the risk from doing something stupid risky onto somebody else and of course the banks are going to do it then. It was what we "wanted" them to do, which is apparently why the people enacting it didn't think too hard about why they didn't want to do it on their own.

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