I want everyone to think about how increasing the difficulty in moderation will affect all your favorite forums/platforms, including HN.
And if you think these laws can be written so they easily apply only to “the big ones”, or that it will stop there, you are being naive. Government will always take a mile if you give them an inch.
And that reason is the immense amounts of liquidity that both the US Federal Reserve and the private banks who are allowed to do fractional reserve lending, pump into the US economy. Thanks to the US dollar not losing value when that happens because it is (or was) used as the exclusive reserve currency due to the Gulf countries exclusively selling their oil for dollars until recently.
When you have THAT much free money, its impossible to not invest and innovate. And now that the reserve currency status of the US is challenged and some of the dollars that were used to buy stuff in the international trade is flowing back to the US and causing inflation, we are seeing how the investment landscape totally changed. With SV firms trying to reach profitability, doing layoffs, Twitter and Facebook being questioned as to the profitability etc.
This is before the fact that there is immense innovation elsewhere but you just are not aware of that since the US media need to sell US stocks. Therefore they drum the US businesses up. All of them talk about Elon Musk or whatever hot investment unicorn is coming up incessantly instead of what anyone in any other tech ecosystem is doing.
Yes. Entire world except the US does. People elect parliaments, who make laws according to their voters' agendas. Then the laws are enforced. What's acceptable and what's not acceptable are decided in the same manner. Like how going out naked in any city in the civilized world constitutes an offense unless you have a mental disorder.
You already obey with a zillion of things in which 'the government' decides to be acceptable or not acceptable.