There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not *pro*-monopoly - they're just *realists* who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma
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This ploy is cousins with @jayrosen_nyu's idea of "#savvying," defined as: "dismissing valid questions with the insider's, 'and this surprises you?'"
https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369?lang=en
In both cases, an apologist for corruption masquerades as a pragmatist who understands the ways of the world, unlike you, a pathetic dreamer who foolishly hopes for a better world.
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In both cases, the apologist provides cover for corruption, painting it as an inevitability, not a choice. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."
The reason this foolish nonsense flies is that we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really *do* get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really *do* ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.
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Take the #GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. The GDPR establishes strict limitations of data-collection and processing, and provides for brutal penalties for companies that violate its rules. The immediate impact of the GDPR was a mass-extinction event for Europe's data-brokerages and surveillance advertising companies, all of which were in obvious violation of the GDPR's rules.
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But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans.
One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like #Facebook and #Google can afford.
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These compliance costs are a "#CapitalMoat" - a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels:
This is wrong.
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@pluralistic It would be nice to see the U.S. pass some sort of privacy law. I think countries reaching across borders is a crude way around getting one, and it comes with it's own headaches.
And while I like some of Mike's takes in general (mainly around bad speech laws), I remember a few older ones where he didn't seem keen on privacy laws.
https://qoto.org/@olives/111886660618312673 A take of mine on how platformization is going too far. As I wrote there, we're *at the point* where Facebook has even come up with a "fake court" (the "oversight board"). That really should be a warning sign that platforms like this shouldn't really exist.
