If by lately, you mean "basically always", then I'd agree. I'd be hard pressed to think of any regulation that was successfully enacted and led to actual distress and disruption in the big corporations.
> that doesn't make it inherently so
Why would it be different this time? Can you think of any kind of policy that has any slim chance of passing and would get us rid of Big Tech? And by "Big Tech", I mean all of it, not just the ones that you don't like.
Yes, I do. The FSF does. The IndieWeb does.
> Just reign it in.
To think that this is possible without any type of damaging side-effect is a huge delusion.
Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech is like saying "Look at all the destruction that Godzilla is making, we need to unleash King Kong to fight it".
The only stable solution to avoid global systemic catastrophe is by removing centralized power and redistributing it to local communities.
GDPR does not help, quite the opposite. It gave people some illusion of control but did nothing but scare smaller players into compliance.
Messaging standardization might actually turn out to be good, but only because none of the dominant companies are from Europe.
What are their options for search? I know DDG is an option, but even it seems to rely on Big Tech.
> Trusting more power to Big Government to try to control Big Tech
But it's definitely worked in the past. Government successfully reigned in a ton of industry. Sure, it hasn't reigned in Big Tech, but so much other stuff.
They're however doing whatever they can get away with, which is arguably way too much
The point is not about what the regulation stopped them from doing locally, the point is that no regulation that came into existence ever broke the power structure. It was never a threat to the ones connected to the elites.
Any regulation that does get approve ends up weaponized in favor of the big companies.
To illustrate: look at Dieselgate. If the regulations were actually meant to be serious, any scrappy company from Poland, Portugal or Bulgaria would have been absolutely dismantled out of existence. But VW got what? A symbolic fine, some Casablanca-style reprimands, perhaps a expiatory goat... but they will continue to have the support from the government.
What about tech? What real benefit has GDPR brought to the people? Nothing! It made only the small business owners scared of violations, got them out of running their own sites and into siloed Facebook/Amazon pages, and with their "social Media presence" on Twitter/Instagram. Tell me with a clean face how that "regulation" was in your favor and not of the status quo?
A lot of government interference was to the betterment of society, which you initially claimed to be impossible or at least to have never happened.
With that in mind, please tell me which part of "haven't we learned already that any government regulation always ends up favoring the status quo?" or "regulations only get to be enacted when they don't threaten the status quo" is goalpost-moving...
While you are at it, take your time to think about the question I asked you in the first response. What kind of policy do you believe could have any chance of being enacted and offer a serious change for Big Tech?
That premise is wrong. Government regulation has lately been mostly done on account of corporations which want to protect their monopolies and strengthen their position, but that doesn't make it inherently so.