> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.
Public awareness is step one.
Personalized advertising is a progressive tax. Because the rich spend more and the poor spend less, Meta et al makes more money from the rich than it makes from the poor, while offering the same service to everybody else. As a result, we get the educated rich upper-middle class complaining about advertising, while everybody else is happy about not having to pay their long-distance charges any more.
The CEO of Alibaba was kidnapped after he publicly criticized the government.
It's generally no surprise that there are not that many critical voices in a dictatorship.
I feel sorry that democracies are failing their citizenry like this.
Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?
Although it does appear to be true in London https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
> We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough
Your example is a good reason why that approach was foolish.
So no, it's not literally unregulated, but if it was regulated effectively Samsung would be scared shitless to pull stuff like this. They clearly aren't.
Are these fines ever paid? Or is it appeal upon appeal and 10 years later they pay a tenth of the fine?
If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.
Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.
Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.
> Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
If a human cannot immediately see a negative outcome on their visual or mental horizon based on the knowledge they have at that moment most of their insights or feelings about what problems will occur will be incorrect.
Talking about AI and data is a good example of this. A bit of data here and there seems useless, but the moment you get enough the pattern of your life can emerge from it and suddenly you can be tracked and manipulated with an amazingly high probability. And it's not a one time thing either. Anything mispredicted gets put back in your profile as another data point.
""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.
Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)
...
8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:
... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54
The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.
In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:
""" Personal data shall be:
(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5
Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.
In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.
> within the limits of the metropolitan police district
It's a local London law. In England such laws are passed by parliament because there is no other mechanism, but in countries with devolved lawmaking states and cities have much crazier laws.
That's disingenuous. The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology for years. There are huge outcries every single time any politician tries to regulate big tech.
Now I know that this isn't because the public is somehow ideologically opposed to regulation. We have been paid off, just as much as the politicians have. When they increase the prices of televisions and say it's because they this new regulation, we show up to support them.
He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space
The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.
Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.
As far as the censorship goes UK is trying hard. So follow the money?
People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.
People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.
How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?
If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?
We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.
Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.
A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.
We can't do that any more; the people who support tech regulation are so cartoonishly anti-corporate that any suggestion of embedding somebody who understands tech will be met with accusations of lobbying and a careful review of that person's employment history.
It's obvious to pretty much everybody that regulating banks, railroads or phone companies requires people who have previously worked for banks, railroads and phone companies, and have a good understanding of how such organizations work on the inside. We, generally, don't do that with tech.
Surround yourself with good advisors and the surrounding kingdoms will notice and be less inclined to attack. If you have bad advisors, your enemies will perceive that as their opening
This isn't a real thing. It's like the thing about it being legal to shoot Welshmen if they're in York after nightfall, and other such shit.
Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.
If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.