> We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
What about a private sector solution?
We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time.
It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.
The private sector has over and again shown that it is not the right lever to use when trying to solve public commons / ecological problems. The private sector is what gave us Dickensian hellholes full of child coal miners, the North Atlantic cod collapse, the Bhopal disaster, etc.
Private enterprises are structurally incentivized to externalize their costs in order to compete with other private enterprises. They are about as good at preserving a shared public space (physical, ecological, or informational) as any of the hippos are in Hungry Hungry Hippos.
I'm not anti-market in general. I think within the bounds of a well-structured regulated market, they have shown an incredible ability to increase efficiency and allow goods and labor to flow around and organize.
But that only works when the market participants are playing a game with rules and enforcement. If you just get a bunch of people together all trying to win without regulation, you get a quarterback carrying an assault rifle onto the field.
> We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food.
Yes, but we do not rely on Michelin to make sure we don't each roaches or get food poisoning. We rely on regulation for that. Michelin ratings don't scale to the level needed for food safety. It's a niche, luxury product.
> It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
Reporting without enforcement is pointless. There were many many reports showing clearly that the North Atlantic cod population was going to collapse. The fisherman didn't care. They just wanted to get what they could out of the water for as long as they could.
This is a prime example of the private sector working, while Republicans crying fowl without knowing or caring that they are destroying the private sector solution.
Reminder that Google's response to the Republican claims is to RTFM when sending email marketing:
> Google denied the allegations, saying the spam filtering is based on actions taken by users. "As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation," Google said in a statement provided to Ars. "Gmail's spam filters reflect users' actions. We provide training and guidelines to campaigns, we recently launched an FEC-approved pilot for political senders, and we continue to work to maximize email deliverability while minimizing unwanted spam." [1]
GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
Getting regulators involved in this case is increasing nanny-state actions from the party that claims to hate the nanny-state.
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
i think this highlights an interesting dynamic we’re seeing pretty often lately, groups are trying to force their beliefs and the recipients are saying “i’m not at all interested.”
it really seems reminiscent to what i’ve read about the 60s-90s religious groups where these groups were trying to force their personal religious beliefs onto society.
these groups are now suing to use government force to force companies to force their views onto all of us.
again:
> GMail isn't biased towards/away from Republicans. The users receiving those messages are training the spam filter to dislike their messages.
The capture and revolving door definitely goes both ways.
Although my comment may not be sufficient to prove anything, there's a lot to explore with this topic. For instance, here's an example in the other direction:
>more than 80 former Schumer staffers have gone on to subsequently work at the Big Tech firms. And Schumer's two daughters have also both worked directly for Big Tech—one for Amazon, and one for Facebook subsidiary Instagram.
This article is only about the one direction, but you can be sure the revolving door goes both ways in big-tech. Just look at all the ex-NATO officers currently wor
If Google (specifically GMail) is rent-seeking, the Republican lawsuit isn't an example of it.
The study Republicans cite only displayed a bias in the default training of a new email account that had never trained the spam filter:
> "Shahzad said while the spam filters demonstrated political biases in their 'default behavior' with newly created accounts, the trend shifted dramatically once they simulated having users put in their preferences by marking some messages as spam and others as not," the Post article said. [1]
In other words, Republican email messages are more likely to use spammy phrases. Once a user starts marking any messages as "mark as spam" or "move to inbox", the bias dissipates.
This is not anywhere close to a good example of rent seeking.
Reciving thousands of spam emails per user per day is ... not normal. If they weren't exxagerating then there must have some factors that saw them targeted specifically. I encoruage you to run your own mail server and publish your address on the web and see that the reality is pretty manageable without any filter.
Everything that has transpired over the past ~30 years with the big tech companies should have shown you that the private sector does not give a shit about our individual rights.
What about a private sector solution?
We consider Michelin stars to be indicative of exceptional food. You can still get amazing food outside of their reviewed restaurants, but to be included in their list you need to pass a pretty thorough anonymous inspection over time.
It could be at an individual reporter level or a publication level and reviewed using a set of public, transparent criteria.
It would be far from perfect, but a bottom up review is definitely better than any top down censorship.