And it would if the existing regulatory bodies did their jobs. But apparently they can be dodged with a truckload of political contributions.
As would any future regulatory body that legislators come up with. Ask people who live downwind of a chemical plant if the EPA works.
I like your rage. I think it's mis-targetted though. In the Reagan era, Supreme Court nominee & Nixon criminal Robert Bork got put in charge of the FTC, and re-defined Anti-Trust to only apply when consumer prices went up. Any other kind of monopoly was ok. Because of this, the FTC hasn't has a regulatory basis to manage jack nor shit for 40 years. This isn't just the typical dump-truck-loads full of money problem: this is a 4 decade old crisis of the government being unable and unwilling to govern.
Cory Doctorow has many great threads on this all, but here's two:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork
America needs to unwind the damage of Borkism, & start trying to regulate itself. Right now, we cannot.
I'm inclined to believe that Paul Graham understands the startup economy well, and therefore that this isn't a problem unique to regulating Facebook, this is a problem that will keep happening, in many ways, if regulators / lawmakers leave the startup economy as it is.
"You have many people. One of these people gains more power than the rest. They can abuse that power, so there needs to be someone to monitor that power, but _that_ person can abuse power. How do you effectively hold everyone accountable about abuses of power without requiring that absolutely everyone become a regulator to create a loop?"
Ultimately can you drive engagement with reasonable articles?
Lots to think about there
All a whistleblower needs to do is… blow the whistle. We have existing mechanisms to address the problem or we can create new ones.
I certainly hope nobody is waiting to blow the whistle until they have a solution.
That’s not Facebook’s fault.
They deliberately bought or squashed anything that could compete in their space over the years.
This is anti-competitive behavior and it should have been stopped years ago.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2019/08/29/business...
I think this article misses the main way we got here today. The reason we are here today is because Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are 1 company. This should never have happened. It was totally anti-competitive. Social media will innevitably have network effects, so it kind of makes sense that you'll end up with giants. What doesn't make sense is that you then allow that giant to go around stamping on all its competitors. What is the best competition for Instagram today? Tiktok. Why is Tiktok the best competition? Because it's the one company facebook can't buy. Facebook has extended its life by acquiring any competitive threats or copying those that it couldn't. Simple traditional governance around mergers could have avoiding this situation. Social media companies will grow big through network effects, but until recently, they didn't stay big - because the natural ebb and flow of users meant interests change and different demographics want to differentiate themselves.
You wouldn't need to regulate facebook if it had real competition, because its influence would be smaller and it would face real competitive pressure to improve its platform.