Yes because the minute that someone from the “other” (whichever side you don’t like) party gets in control do you think they are going to do things that you want?
Desantis just tried to push through a law that said you have to register with the state if you report on politicians. Do you like that proposed law?
Do you want the government to have access to all communications between you and your coworkers? Do you want to be questioned every time that you tell a coworker over Slack “maybe we should talk about this at lunch?”
It amazes me that people want the only organization that has a “monopoly on violence” to have more power.
Does that amaze you? Because you should look at the unanswerable moneyed interests that got DeSantis elected in the first place.
There's currently an investigation going on about how one particular former President may have broken the reporting law. But for that law, his "catch-and-bury" agreement to keep unpalatable stories about him out of the public eye was perfectly legal.
So yes, I do want the organization with a monopoly on violence to have more power of oversight of people with power through money. Especially as long as who has control of those levers changes with the frequency it does.
And we see what the people with “over site” do in Florida. Do you also believe that it was right that the government in Florida went after Disney because the company spoke out against the “Don’t Say Gay” law? Do you think the government has any right to try to have “over site” because the (Democratic) VPs wife got in a tizzy in the 80s because her little ears couldn’t handle NWA releasing a song called “Fuck the Police”?
Are you one of those people in power? Because the scenario that someone said was that I financial firms that are highly regulated was that if any employee said on chat to a friend at work, “hey give me call on my cellphone and let’s talk about where we are going after work”, you could be talked to by legal.
You are saying that you want an increase by the surveillance state. Have people learned nothing about how the government abuses power from the “War on $x”?
> Do you think the government has any right to try to have “over site” because the (Democratic) VPs wife got in a tizzy in the 80s because her little ears couldn’t handle NWA releasing a song called “Fuck the Police”?
Sure. I was there; I remember. I think it was a waste of time but ultimately harmless; it resulted in a few (private, moneyed) corporations deciding not to sell some music that the government had mandated be labeled (which, to be clear, is a wide power the government has; perhaps overused here, but it's no a violation of anyone's rights that they make companies put the ingredient lists on food). Then the Internet happened and that whole thing became irrelevant.
Florida is a great example to study these money-power-vs-political-power effects, because were the tables reversed people currently supporting Disney would be horrified. Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an ultra-right-white-national enclave utterly immune to legal oversight, and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in. Much as I like the result of Disney;s pushback, the means are deeply disquieting and speak to a completely-dysfunctional corporate-power-vs-state-power relationship that is ripe for abuse. And the wheels of corporate power turn glacially relative to government power; DeSantis, barring a state constitutional amendment, is gone in 2024 as a state governor, but Rupert Murdoch was CEO of News Corp / Fox for 36 years.
I'm not 100% for corporate power or 100% for government power. I'm for balancing and pitting the two against each other because they're both effective tools for checking the worst abuses of the other. And make no mistake: when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in. Requirements for auditing and oversight can be overdone, but in practice, in 2023, the tech sector has been allowed to run with a laissez-faire attitude for decades and has become a vital piece of the modern societal fabric; as a general principle, anything that vital to daily human experience for most citizens needs government oversight to ensure its legal compliance before it becomes Standard Oil or Bell Telephone or Microsoft or Fox Media or, indeed, Disney... Something unanswerable to all but itself.
This era of existence is marked by humanity trying to forge a path between a 1984 future and a Brave New World future. There are no simple answers for power allocation.
> it resulted in a few (private, moneyed) corporations deciding not to sell some music that the government had mandated be labeled (which, to be clear, is a wide power the
So you think it is okay that the government trampled on the free speech rights of rappers who were talking about police corruption and there experience years before the internet became ubiquitous where anyone could get it out?
> Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an armor, always taste no and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in
And the government only tried to “rein them in” by punishing them after they spoke out.
> when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in.
Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong. Nor does it have qualified immunity to get away with doing almost anything. I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation - especially a search engine. I don’t have that power under the government. There is no balance on government power except not to give it anymore than absolutely necessary.
I’ve never had to worry about my son being harassed by any corporation just for driving down the street.
And do you think the government is just going to be happy with surveiling employees?
> So you think it is okay that the government trampled on the free speech rights of rappers
Did they though? I mean, to be clear, I'm sure they tried. But both back then and now, the songs were easy to get and is still easy to get. If anything, the whole affair Streisand Effected the hell out of them.
I think the story's a good example of a failed attempt at abuse of power because the system of checks and balances worked (it would have failed harder but for a single, powerful, monolithic corporation agreeing with the goal and de-stocking the product from its shelves).
> Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong
No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval. Google's within their rights to cut an account, but there's no arguing there's a difference in kind of the experience someone online has if they have a Google account vs. being banned from having one. It's not nearly as bad as government abuse of power; it's really quite bad, and only government has the authority to make it better because the corporations are otherwise unaccountable.
> Nor does it have qualified immunity
Who backstops the terms of service violation system? When Google demonetizes trans-friendly or trans-inclusive content because their inscrutable TOS and algorithm decide such content is "sexually explicit" (read: offends the sensibilities of schoolboards and advertisers), who has the power to say that's not what that term means? Nobody. I guess with YouTube, we can always take our business to its competitor, doesnt-exist.com.
> I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation
Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.
(To be clear, I don't have concrete answers here. There are no easy answers; it's a complicated problem. But that means the answer also isn't as easy as "Government already has too much power." Perhaps it currently has too much of the wrong kind of power, and not enough of the right kind).
> Did they though? I mean, to be clear, I'm sure they tried. But both back then and now, the songs were easy to get and is still easy to get. If anything, the whole affair Streisand Effected the hell out of them.
In the 1980s how did you produce or distribute music without the internet and computers that could produce music? The police arrested NWA at a concert for rapping “Fuck the police”.
> No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval.
I can and do have multiple backups of my media (Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Drive, and they are stored using a separate account in AWS S3 Glacier. Are you really comparing losing some pictures and data with losing your freedom or being harassed by a cop?
> Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.
Yes guess how hard it is to live a good life after getting arrested because you got on the wrong side of an overzealous Justice system? Or got shot by a trigger happy cop?
So we are in agreement that abuse of corporate power and abuse of government power are both bad things to be avoided.
I agree with you that the monopoly on violence requires more scrutiny than the soft-power of money. My argument is that certainly doesn't imply no government oversight, nor does it imply we don't have enough government oversight right now. Especially of corporations - your argument appears to be government power is dangerous to use because it can be abused vs. individuals and vs. music acts; can you think of an example where too much government oversight of corporate process has led to improper deprivation of liberties (jail time and the like)?
We can acknowledge government power is abused against individuals while still asserting it is the most effective tool against corporate overreach and should be wielded as such.
> So we are in agreement that abuse of corporate power and abuse of government power are both bad things to be avoided
No comparing government power and the harm they can inflict (taking away your freedom) to corporate power (they can take away pictures of little Johny) are night and day. I can live my whole life without dealing with Google.
> can you think of an example where too much government oversight of corporate process has led to improper deprivation of liberties (jail time and the like)?
In a very realistic scenario that someone said happens in highly regulated industries is that if you ever tell a friend on a company communication channel to call you even if it’s something personal you will be called by lawyers.
States are trying to pass laws where social media companies have to verify your identity and your age before you can post.
Government is trying to have back doors to all of your chat.
Government is arresting people based on their chat messages where they are talking about using pills that facilitate abortion between grown people?
Do I need to go on?
Is it worth having the government intrude in your life to protect your pictures of little Johny?
> if you ever tell a friend on a company communication channel to call you even if it’s something personal you will be called by lawyers.
So what? So you have to explain that you didn't violate the auditing laws? That's hardly a huge burden. Don't use corporate assets for personal communication, problem solved.
> Government is trying to have back doors to all of your chat
And they shouldn't. But the point is: for most users who haven't bothered to set up something like IRC, corporations already do. And you continue to harp on the ways that government can impact personal civil liberties when I am still talking about the ways government can restrict corporations from using unchecked power to make people's lives hell. For the purposes of this discussion, chat logs and abortion are irrelevant. Unless you think the personal right to have an abortion is somehow analogous to the corporate right to, what, Dodge tax law? Use dark money to fund a candidate like DeSantis getting into office?
If you're concerned about government overreach and a resulting threat to personal civil liberties, the best defense we have against it is strengthening and enforcing existing corporate auditing law. Because everything you're concerned about regarding civil liberties gets exponentially worse when corporations can buy politicians.
Government and corporate power aligning behind a common goal is on the road to fascism. I'm advocating for setting those power bases against each other.
> So what? So you have to explain that you didn't violate the auditing laws? That's hardly a huge burden. Don't use corporate assets for personal communication, problem solved.
So are you okay with the government subpoenaing your private phone communications because they think when you asked your coworker to call you on your personal phone to talk about where you wanted to go out drinking?
Fascism is when the government controls every area of your life and of corporations. Do you think giving the government more control of the private sector will lessen the chance of fascism?
> So are you okay with the government subpoenaing your private phone communications
You keep bringing it back to personal civil liberty because you don't have an answer to the question "So why is more government oversight of corporations bad?"
I actually have no problem with such a subpoena being attempted (it is part of the regular process of investigating a crime), but I have a problem with a court rubber-stamping it. I have no problem with the corporation I'm working for being obligated to track and furnish similar records for any corporate assets I use, and to be obligated to ask questions if they catch wind that I might be trying to skirt auditing law by pushing conversations that should be legally audited private. Catch the difference?
> Fascism is when the government controls every area of your life and of corporations. Do you think giving the government more control of the private sector will lessen the chance of fascism?
I actually do because the definition you gave is not actually what fascism is.
Fascism is a political movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, a supremacy mythos of that nation, and the militarism necessary to support such an inherently unstable structure. Among its tools can be usurpation of corporations. But tight control of corporations is also a hallmark of socialism and communism, among other structures. You may as well say its wrong to breathe air because fascists do that too.
A healthy democracy reigns in the excesses of an unfettered corporate sector. Those excesses, left unchecked, can (not will, but can) result in, among other things, fascist-leaning private company owners throwing in the power of their corporations behind like-minded politicians and building the machine that facilitates a Mussolini or Hitler rising to power. Mussolini, in particular, was funded by Italian industrialists.
> You keep bringing it back to personal civil liberty because you don't have an answer to the question "So why is more government oversight of corporations bad?"
I just gave you a real example of where corporate oversight leads to giving the government access to your personal communications.
> I actually have no problem with such a subpoena being attempted (it is part of the regular process of investigating a crime), but I have a problem with a court rubber-stamping it.
Have you not been paying attention to what the government has been doing in the name of the War on Drugs, the War on Crime and the War on Terrorism?
> Fascism is a political movement emphasizing extreme nationalism
Have you not been paying attention to what’s been happening since 2016?
> A healthy democracy reigns in the excesses of an unfettered corporate sector
Exactly what power are you afraid that Google can have over you compared to the government?
Let's assume, ad argumento, that they have monopolized digital ad tech, meaning other digital advertisers are excluded and almost all the ads you see are single-source.
Gosh, it sure would suck if fascists gained control of that single source, wouldn't it? And as we've seen, we can't trust that won't happen just because they nailed up "Don't be evil" above the door (and then it fell off later).
We should probably enforce the laws that are in place to keep a market diverse and healthy.
... I think I see your position though. You're concerned, given current political climate, that increased government oversight could give fascists more power. I echo that concern... Except that I believe we got here because fascists recognized that nobody was watching the tech henhouse and weaponized that. We had an awful lot of tech firms thinking they were bigger than political concerns and should be a world apart from government oversight right up until they realized they aided and abetted those who organized Jan 6th, then... Oops.
