(01-24-2018 12:11 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  We are talking two separate tools when we talk Anti-Trust, reactive, versus regulation, proactive.

It's always a bad idea to impose both in my opinion.

However, if you go down either path you have to actually push.

I believe strongly in a liberal reading of our current anti-trust laws to break up a lot companies in a lot of various industries. However, that comes with a caveat, difficult and complex regulation should be avoided when it comes to the tech industry.

Any industry where the real product is innovation regulation is the wrong tool. We should be reactive in our approach to arising issues.

For what it is worth, there is no such thing as a benign monopoly.

Facebook owns the #1 an #4 most visited social media sites as July 2017.
Google owns the #1 and #3 most visited websites as July 2017.

Facebook and YouTune each pull in about 1.5 billion unique visitors per month. Twitter is third with 400,000 and the numbers plummet from there.

Just being big doesn't warrant regulating them to death or even require a bust-up but it does require careful monitoring because there is potential for abuse.

Not precisely on point but I would like to see a limited version of the EU's "right to be forgotten". If you make the local news for killing someone driving drunk, the right shouldn't extend to that.

But I suspect there will be a push for such a right as the tech babies get older and more and more of their lives are online. Some by choice, some by choice of a minor, some of it simply by being tagged by someone else.

I also think if some celebrity gets their phone hacked and someone steals their text messages, emails, or dirty photos that they should have a right to force removal of those from search engines and hosting sites.

We've created a quasi-legitimate business of hacking known people's private communications for profit.