Cory Doctorow

So you can tick a box in your browser preferences and it can come turned on by default that says, I don't want to be spied on.

And then they're not allowed to ask you.

I mean, the answer is just going to be no.

And so...

I think that corporations want you to think that it's transcendentally hard to write a good law that bans companies from collecting data on you.

And what they mean is it's transcendentally hard to police monopolies once they've attained monopoly status because they are more powerful than governments.

And if that's their message, then a lot of us would be like, well, we need to do something.

We need to turn the cartel into a rabble again, as opposed to, God, I guess governments just have no role in solving this problem.

No, I think that one of the things we should probably anticipate Time Warner saying in defense of this merger is the same thing that Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House said in defense of their failed merger that was blocked under the Biden administration.

They said, oh, well, we'll still internally bid against one another within our divisions for the most premium material, and that we'll be exposed to discipline that way.

And I love what Stephen King had to say about this when he testified.

He said, that's like me and my wife promising to both bid against each other on the next house we move into.

The thing we really want to be asking before we ask any of these other questions is how often are you going to have to answer this question?

So lots of people are like, oh, we should just ban hate speech and harassment on platforms.

Well, that's hard, not because we shouldn't do it, but because agreeing what hate speech is, agreeing whether a given act is hate speech, agreeing whether the platform took sufficient technical countermeasures to prevent it is the kind of thing you might spend five years on, and hate speech happens 100 times a minute on platforms.

Meanwhile, if we said...

We're going to have a bright line rule that platforms must allow people to leave but continue to communicate with the people they want to hear from.

Then people who are subjected to hate speech who are currently there because the only thing worse than being a member of a disfavored and abused minority is being a member of a disfavored abused minority who is isolated from your community.

Those people could leave and go somewhere else.

And it's not that we shouldn't continue to work on hate speech in parallel, but if you think that a rule that takes three years to answer a question is going to solve a problem that happens 100 times a second, you're implicitly committing to full employment for every lawyer in the world to just answer this question.