> I really dislike the UK's overall mindset to online safety. The laws consistently feel like they were written by someone that prints out emails to read
The UK is a leading example of what calls for regulation turn into in the real world.
I’ve noticed a lot of calls for regulation in Hacker News comments lately. In the past week I’ve read multiple threads here where people angrily called for regulations and consequence for anything LLM related they didn’t like: When LLMs produced mistakes, when they produce content too close to copyrighted works, and so on.
There’s an idea that regulation is a magical function that you apply and then the big companies suffer consequences, products improve to perfection to avoid the regulations, and nothing is lost for consumers.
Then you look at real-world heavy handed technology regulation and see what really happens: Companies just have to turn off access to countries with those regulations and continue on with their business. People who use the tools get VPNs and continue operating with a little extra hassle, cost, and lag. Businesses avoid those countries or shut down because it doesn’t make sense to try to comply.
There’s a constant moving of goalposts, too: Every time someone points out the downsides of these regulations it’s imagined that better regulation would have exempted the small companies or made it cheap to comply (without details, of course).
I think heavy handed technology regulation is yet another topic where the closer it gets to reality, the less people like it. When you point out real world examples, the response is always “No, not like that”
> When you point out real world examples, the response is always “No, not like that”
My impression from this thread is that this is because the law was implemented in a way that's indicative of a lack of technical understanding on the part of the lawmakers and falls into a number of pitfalls that a law written by people competent in the field would avoid. Am I wrong?
The UK is a leading example of what calls for regulation turn into in the real world.
I’ve noticed a lot of calls for regulation in Hacker News comments lately. In the past week I’ve read multiple threads here where people angrily called for regulations and consequence for anything LLM related they didn’t like: When LLMs produced mistakes, when they produce content too close to copyrighted works, and so on.
There’s an idea that regulation is a magical function that you apply and then the big companies suffer consequences, products improve to perfection to avoid the regulations, and nothing is lost for consumers.
Then you look at real-world heavy handed technology regulation and see what really happens: Companies just have to turn off access to countries with those regulations and continue on with their business. People who use the tools get VPNs and continue operating with a little extra hassle, cost, and lag. Businesses avoid those countries or shut down because it doesn’t make sense to try to comply.
There’s a constant moving of goalposts, too: Every time someone points out the downsides of these regulations it’s imagined that better regulation would have exempted the small companies or made it cheap to comply (without details, of course).
I think heavy handed technology regulation is yet another topic where the closer it gets to reality, the less people like it. When you point out real world examples, the response is always “No, not like that”