Meta/Facebook wants new internet regulation, and has been calling for it for years. A South African body art industry association claims to want to be regulated by the government. Why?
Regulations, by definition, restrict freedom. They also involve costs. Whether it is merely the time spent on completing forms and documentation, or the employment of a fleet of ‘compliance’ professionals and lawyers, following government regulations is expensive.
It seems odd, then, that companies or industries often clamour to be regulated by the government.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, has publicly called for new internet regulation for years. Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth:
It’s been a quarter-century since comprehensive regulations have been updated. It’s time to work together to address new challenges.
To keep moving forward, tech companies need standards that hold us all accountable. We support updated regulations on key issues.
Supporting thoughtful changes to Section 230 [which indemnifies platforms against user-generated content, as long as they act appropriately when they are made aware of objectionable content].
We support thoughtful updates to internet laws, including Section 230, to make content moderation systems more transparent and to ensure that tech companies are held accountable for combating child exploitation, opioid abuse, and other types of illegal activity.
Protecting people’s privacy and data
We support updated privacy regulations that will set more consistent data protection standards that work for everyone.
Combating foreign election interference
We support regulations that will set standards around ads transparency and broader rules to help deter foreign actors, including existing US proposals like the Honest Ads Act and Deter Act.
Enabling easy data portability between platforms
We support regulation that guarantees the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate.‘
‘Dumb f***s’
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, doesn’t really want to do any of those things. He despises users. His entire empire is premised on exploiting private information for profit; stimulating user engagement by feeding them an endless stream of partisanship, rage and paranoia; restricting users to Meta platforms; and not being held accountable for user content.
The problem is some of his customers are calling for these things, as do self-appointed guardians of morality, as do politicians who don’t understand technology but are jealous of the power of Silicon Valley.
Responding to these demands would cost Meta money. It would mean investing in pro-active content moderation. It would mean permitting ‘dumb f***s’ (as Zuckerberg once referred to early Facebook users who trusted him with all their personal details) to leave Meta platforms and take their data with them. It would mean reducing the ways in which private information can be exploited for profit.
The solution to this conundrum is to lobby for legislation that would force Meta’s rivals to comply with the exact same restrictions. This not only imposes the same risks and costs upon competitors, but also raises the barriers to entry for new rivals.
Harmful
If regulation says you have to pro-actively moderate content to prevent certain types of ‘harmful’ content from being published, then new competitors must from the get-go employ an army of moderators and sophisticated moderation software at great expense.
No longer will anyone get to establish a platform with light-touch, reactive moderation, responding only to complaints by users. This way, Meta doesn’t lose users to platforms that are not as strict about, say, hate speech or foreign propaganda or dubious public health advice.
Worse, this transfers the choice of what exactly constitutes harmful content from individual private companies, among whom users may choose whose interpretation they prefer, to government bureaucrats who rule by force of law.
Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, took to Time magazine to propose an entirely new, specialised government agency ‘to protect consumers and competition’.
But it wouldn’t do that. By definition, it would reduce the scope of consumer choice, and place regulatory barriers in the way of competition.
Woke
Moreover, such bureaucrats can be truly scary, if you are inclined to liberty. The definition of ‘harmful’ is always broader than ‘illegal’, and extends to political speech, comedy, and serious debate.
On the left, we have the woke movement. It nominally protested against hateful and prejudiced speech, which is not a bad thing. However, as political correctness tends to do, it went much further and turned into a hyper-sensitive, judgmental outrage machine.
Even Barack Obama called out those whose sole contribution to anti-discriminatory activism is to call out other people for using the wrong words.
Noting that a lot of people, even on the left and especially among the young, fear falling foul of woke cancel culture, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote for Bloomberg. ‘The line of unacceptability is constantly, rapidly and unpredictably shifting; sanctions for crossing it are applied arbitrarily but sometimes harshly.’
This is exactly why regulating speech is so dangerous.
Morality police
On the right, we have the religious revival lot playing morality police, passing some truly absurd legislation undermining both individual freedom and free speech.
They have passed laws to prohibit even mentioning homosexuality in schools, and banning literature that contains references to it. They have passed laws that outlaw cross-dressing in any public performance, which would force innocent cosplay conventions to ban children, that would condemn the PG-13 Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire as sexual degeneracy, and that would denounce Shakespearian actors and political satirists in drag alike.
Even PW Botha didn’t dare ban Pieter-Dirk Uys’s drag character, Evita Bezuidenhout.
In matters of minority rights, these moralistic zealots are threatening to reverse half a century of liberal progress, and blur the line between church and state.
They’re not even subtle about it anymore. ‘Learning From Vlad the Impaler,’ reads the headline on a pro-Trump article in The American Conservative. ‘The American people need a champion who is willing to be the bad guy.’
Do they, now? And do we also need these people to be in charge of dictating to social media companies what they may permit users to say?
No, thank you. As a South African, I can’t even vote for these regulations, which will likely be written by some right-winger in Texas or left-winger in San Francisco, but end up applying to the whole world.
Piercing
Meta’s proposals for regulation are designed for one purpose only: to establish a set of standards and restrictions that its properties can readily meet, but that are obstacles in the path of smaller rivals and prohibit competitors from offering different approaches to matters like content moderation.
Closer to home, I happened to come across the Council for Piercing and Tattoo Professionals (CPTP) recently.
I had read an article about a man who got arrested in the US state of Arkansas for ‘unlawful body piercing’, and wondered what the South African law had to say about ear piercings for minors, or performing body piercings on anyone without a licence.
As it turns out, South African law doesn’t say anything about it, which came as a great relief.
I learnt this from the Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection, a document published by the CPTP. It seems to have gone missing in a website reconstruction accident since I saw it a few days ago, but it contained some excellent voluntary advice and recommendations.
On the face of it, the CPTP seems like a useful industry association, upholding good standards and practices among its members. If I were in the market for such services, I might prefer a provider who was a CPTP member.
Regulation
The Guidelines document opened, however, with a paragraph expressing the need for government regulation of the industry. And I thought, what, why?
It isn’t as if piercing or tattoo injuries are a grave social crisis. People who acquire body art generally are wise enough to select providers who come recommended, and the industry itself seems to be largely responsible and desirous of projecting an image of hygiene, safety and professionalism.
Why would the government need to step in when there is no apparent problem to resolve?
Of course, the only answer is that, like Meta, the goal is to curb competition. If the government were to regulate the industry, it would probably appoint an industry association like the CPTP as a self-regulatory body, which would give it and its members great market power.
In the same way that appointing taxi associations as arbiters of who receives taxi operator permits created exclusive cartels, this ‘self-regulation’ system establishes a cartel that protects incumbent providers at the expense of new rivals.
These are but two examples, but it is a general rule. If some company or industry association lobbies for government to regulate their industry, or wishes government to adopt their solution (or something much like it) as an industry standard, it is never because they’re trying to be nice and responsible, and are terribly concerned about the welfare of their customers.
The intention of calling for regulation is invariably to protect their own market power and to make things harder for rivals or would-be competitors.
Restriction
The very term ‘regulation’ is a misnomer. Entirely free markets are already well-regulated, merely by consumer choice. Companies that fail to meet the quality standards and price points that customers are willing to accept will fall to companies that succeed.
We do not need state intervention in order for market forces to produce desirable outcomes, as Steven Horwitz explains.
What the government calls regulation is better termed ‘market restriction’. The state’s interventions are always restrictions or requirements. They arguably disregulate the market by placing far too much power in the hands of both the regulators and the companies subject to regulation, at the expense of customers.
As Horwitz asks, ‘Is behaviour more “regular” when firms are genuinely profit-seeking or when they attempt to manipulate the “regulators” through rent-seeking?’
Sometimes one might argue that these restrictions are justifiable, in a paternalistic protecting-consumers-from-their-own-choices kind of way, but most do not meet this standard.
Free markets are well-regulated by those who wield supreme power in the market: customers who choose when and where to spend their money.
When the state gets involved, it imposes restrictions that favour some market participants at the expense of others. When companies ask for ‘regulation’, that is what they really want.
They don’t want a level playing field. They want one tilted in their favour.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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