Is it rediscovering them or pointing out the weaknesses of such laws?

And if I might say so, for a tech forum, there seems to be a remarkable number of luddites who sit mighty high on their horses as they sing the praises of Chesterton's fence while simultaneously baying over the stagnation of housing, transportation, and their flavor-of-the-week, dead-on-arrival revolution, etc.

Should we never have used GPS because a good map won't lead you into a desert? Should we stop using phones because a one-to-one conversation may end up as dead an art as Latin is a language? Not everything that was done before was done for the right reason. Not now or even then. They were done mainly because there was no other given choice or someone on a high chair said so and signed his name on a piece of paper declaring it as law.

I'd say it's beneficial that those regulations have been circumvented even if I don't necessarily cheer on the particular actors who do the circumventing or what they do afterwards. Innovation is about finding novel ways to get from A to B as speedily, efficiently, and effectively as possible. And if regulations create a roadblock to it, all the more reason to invent around them. After all, there wouldn't a modern desktop if it wasn't for Compaq engineers reverse-engineering and reimplementing IBM's BIOS.

As for the "luddites" part, you miss an important distinction. Technology itself, such as GPS, is ethically neutral. However, there are many greedy people who will abuse it for their own advantage not caring at all about the consequences. It is especially clear once you have built a large company with a large influence on people's lives, attitudes, economy, and mental health. When you listen to people like Zuckerberg, it is clear they want to push away the responsibility in order to have all the benefits without any costs. When you see Uber develop Greyball it's clear that what their motives are. Investors flock to another "disruption" startup but if it turns out successful after some time people realize the very regulations that were attacked did have their purpose. We are not luddites, we are just reasonable people - humans first, then techies.

What you are advocating for is undemocratic lawlessness. Which, ultimately, is what many arguments for crypto boil down to.

> undemocratic lawlessness

What is that supposed to be? It’s not a known concept. If you think it means something you should define it.

As a lawyer, it’s perfectly legal to circumvent a law by designing around it. Crypto does that perfectly. So does everybody else. Heck, the whole open source movement does it.

If you willfully ignore regulations you don’t like, ones that were established through democratic processes, and advocate for others doing the same … that’s undemocratic lawlessness.

If instead you are saying that it’s good to find loopholes in laws that violate the spirit of the law, but not the letter of the law … well, you just explained why smart contracts are stupid and will never work.

Edit: by your definition, this “hack” was just innovation designed around the “law” of the smart contracts ;)

You make a great point and I think it's hard to generalize. Nukes have made large scale devastating wars irrelevant but could potentially end civilization or be used to terrorists to evaporate a city. The single largest improvement in quality of life for humanity came from burning fossil fuels but now we face imminent and dire consequences from climate change and have already made humanity one of a handful of mass extinctions on Earth. Radio broadcasts brought music and news into every household but also brought propaganda and contributed significantly to the rise of Nazism (1). Our similar advances in communication technology seem to strike a similar chord. Even GPS, the internet, encryption, and TOR were only developed as military technologies later coopted for civilian use.

The theme appears to be that innovation brings many benefits and great risks. I would advise appreciation of nuance and thoughtfulness. As we become a Kardashev Type I civilization, we could carefully consider the way we organize our society and the existential risks we create for ourselves. For the first time in our history, we have the ability to pretty much completely annihilate ourselves and we're only creating more ways to do it. Maybe some caution is due.

(1) https://daily.jstor.org/an-affordable-radio-brought-nazi-pro....

> Social media is just advertising that avoided regulation by being on the internet. Now it's rediscovering why public broadcasting laws are necessary.

Weirdly, online advertising is in some cases more restricted than traditional broadcasting. I've never seen a movie pause half-way through so someone can go "By the way, Microsoft paid us $5,000,000 to feature this extremely close-up shot of a Surface with the branding visible", but that's a legal requirement for YouTube videos containing sponsored content.

Yeah, that's part of the new regulations / guidelines by the FTC. If FB/Youtube/IG/TikTok have to enforce that, it would be probably be a complicated and difficult system to build. This would increase the barriers to start a social network. This is part of the transition from innovation to regulatory capture. 10 years ago there weren't really any limits or regulatory clarifications and I expect to only see more.

It's not really about "innovation", it's about fooling investors, customers and employees/gig workers for as long as possible until economic, technological or legal reality catches up with you. See: WeWork, Uber, etc.

> Regulatory capture is an economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest. The result is that the agency instead acts in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be regulating.

I'm not sure if I am reading your comment correctly.

Regulatory capture doesn't sound like a desirable thing, and wouldn't do the desired regulating. What did/do you believe the definition is?

I'm sorry I wrote my comment quickly but I'll expand and I do think I used "regulatory capture" somewhat correctly. Once an innovative industry gets big enough, the public will want it regulated and the largest companies will regulate it in such a way to stifle competition. It's certainly not a good thing.

The stock market, oil/gas, telecommunications are all examples of industries that started as innovative with no regulation. Once established, they were regulated. The stock market got consumer protections. Oil/gas faced environment & safety regulations. Telecommunications face many regulations around zoning and providing rural and not always profitable access. In return, this regulation raised the startup costs so significantly that only the pre-existing large companies could adapt and new entrants effectively ceased to exist.

It's a bit of a tradeoff. As consumers, we get some benefits and the company gets their existence & rent guaranteed indefinitely. The same will happen with digital advertising and the gig economy. The public is already getting tired of the wild west and calling for regulation. This regulation will be twisted and controlled by the companies it impacts to secure their future.

> It's a bit of a tradeoff. As consumers, we get some benefits and the company gets their existence & rent guaranteed indefinitely.

You have misunderstood regulatory capture. Regulatory capture occurs when the regulator puts the interests of those in the industry ahead of consumers.

> In return, this regulation raised the startup costs so significantly that only the pre-existing large companies could adapt and new entrants effectively ceased to exist.

This isn't regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is things like making laws that it is only possible for incumbents to be licensed to do specific jobs.

I don't think the world is that simple. Corporations will usually use some consumer benefit that gives them an even greater benefit. I think I'm literally saying the same thing as you but with some nuance added. Companies don't just own the regulators and force them to do whatever they want. Companies justify extremely self interested regulations through the guise of some consumer benefit.

For industries emerging from the innovation stage to the regulatory capture state, usually the first regulations increase the startup cost to some extremely high level that only the incumbents can support. Only in the advanced stages to governments grant monopolies to specific companies.

This might be true, but it's not what regulatory capture I'd talking about.

That's a very specific term with a specific meaning.

>Regulatory capture doesn't sound like a desirable thing

It's not a desirable thing for the public - plenty desirable for industry...

It worked out pretty well with Ajit Patel and the FCC... Or the CRTC and it's board members and adhoc meetings in bars/pubs with the telecom industry.

Ajit Pai right? Mr. Reese's Pieces Cup.

Sigh - my GoogleFu failed me.

you're using regulatory capture wrong: first comes regulation (pro consumer, for example), then comes regulatory capture (pro industry)