In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.
It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.
Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.
On this issue, I am in the libertarian camp. It is not just that government regulation will be incompetent. In the end, it will lead to concentration of power that is tighter and more dangerous than what we have now. The more power we cede to government over the Internet, the less open and free it is going to be.
Rooting for government to regulate tech is like rooting for Putin to kill off Russian oligarchs. The oligarchs may be no-goodniks, but Putin is not going to make Russia a better place by killing them.
I am also wary of the government taking the initiative to stop robocalls. It seems almost certain that any government solution is going to involve enhanced technology for tracking individuals on the Internet and for censorship. Eventually, it is going to be used for those purposes.
All I want are spam filters on my phone. Imagine an app that sent into voicemail a call from any phone number that is not in my contacts. How hard is that to do?
UPDATE: not hard at all, according to this article. On an iPhone, just deploy do not disturb, but with exceptions for you contacts.
Open Settings > Do Not Disturb.
Tap Allow Calls From.
You have several options, but one is All Contacts.
Thanks to a commenter on this post for the pointer.
Regarding your request at the end, you can do this on Android and I believe Apple has baked it into the new version of iOS coming out this fall.
“Imagine an app that sent into voicemail a call from any phone number that is not in my contacts. How hard is that to do?”
You can already do this. https://www.macworld.com/article/3214636/how-to-block-all-calls-except-those-from-your-contacts.html
But the government solution of the day for stopping robocalls doesn’t look anything like enhanced tracking. It just involves the originating telco swearing that you own the telephone number you’re calling from.
I don’t believe government regulation will do any real good, but the current situation is very worrisome and tech is heading in the wrong direction.
We have to reconcile issues of identity and anonymity, and it won’t be easy. The only thing that makes sense is for all parties to route internet activity through large third party networks that provide defense and guarantees for transactions. A global, unsecured peer to peer network is indefensible. Current systems verifying financial identity directly between parties is a failure. Direct, anonymous access to social platforms are a failure.
I don’t know how to encourage the markets to move in that direction without a series of security disasters, but I do know the current system cannot work in the long run.
Too little, too late.
One of the founder’s worst conjectures was that free speech and a free press would promote political accountability.
It didn’t work during the age of newspapers and it is not working in the age of social media.
Meanwhile the electoral process becomes ever more corrupt. With no effective oversight of state electoral systems, and increasing numbers of state secretaries, attorneys general, and prosecutors on the Soros payroll, domestic terror groups like antifa are increasingly free to violently intimidate voters and suppress dissent.
And a sufficient number of the states have now turned their presidential electors over to California to ensure that in the next six years the US will become a one-party dictatorship. California voter rolls are not subject to any oversight, meaning that using vote harvesting techniques refined in 2018, California will be able to supply whatever number of votes are necessary to have the Democrat candidate elected in 2020.
The USA is over.
Nothing can be done to avert it.
I highly recommend Liao Yiwu’s “Bullets and Opium” to get a taste for what dissenters are in for. Undoubtedly the best book of the year and deserves the Nobel in literature this year.
While imposing a “common carrier” requirement of non-discrimination for certain companies holding themselves out as providing services to the public for all persons indifferently is technically ‘government regulation’, it is a bridge most libertarians have crossed in the other contexts, often with deploying arguments about ‘social power’ and insisting that the cost in freedom of this requirement is more than made up for in the benefit of the freedom of individuals in the society to procure goods and services and associate, behave, speak, and interact with each other as they wish.
As for privacy and personal-data-use regulation, one alternative and interesting approach would be to let companies do whatever they wanted, but to be required to provide a complete record to any individual of all the data the company has on them, and to actively disclose and notify the individual every time they were tracked, and every time the data was accessed by, shared with, or sold to third parties.
You can already block robocalls on voip landlines for free: https://www.nomorobo.com
We’ve already seen the concentrating power of well-meaning regulation with GDPR. The compliance burden on a 200-person firm is collosal. The burden on a tech giant is rounding error. Google and FB may not like the content of GDPR and may end up suffering greatly because of it, but the short term effect has been to further cement their dominance.
It used to be trivial for someone with technical knowledge to bypass all the evil stuff these Web tyrants do. It’s still possible – I do it – but it takes more effort.
Behind every technical problem hides a people problem. Attempt to implement the technical solution and you will discover the people problem. For me, when I tried to explain the real technical issues about online privacy to laymen, they just couldn’t grasp the basic concepts. It was all too technical, too complicated, too geeky.
I concluded: in the 21st Century, rights are for computer geeks. Even if, in the goodness of your heart, you try to protect those poor laysheeple, you’ll find they just won’t cooperate. We need to look out for ourselves.
It’s very similar to the problem with legal code. By its sheer complexity it becomes inaccessible to the layman, thus putting all the real power in the hands of the lawyer class. But the technocrats can easily pay those lawyer fees and still come out ahead.
All of our society is a cofusopoly and has been for quite a while now.