How is the counterfactual, "we the governments", any more sensible than the "we the corporations", or the sillier ones?
For the obvious reason that governments, at least in democratic countries, are supposed to be about the people governing themselves. Governments are a means to solve cooperation problems.
Sure, this theory does not perfectly translate into practice. But it is the normative ideal of democracy. Hence your comment just comes off as snarky without really adding much to the discussion other than the point that yes, government power also must be restricted when it comes to information, just like it must be restricted in other areas of life. This is a useful point, but one that you might have made using much fewer words.
You need to understand the mindset of people like him. Basically the idea is that government is a single, monolithic entity that behaves stricly as an incompetent buffoon in all circumstances. Any good that comes from any subset of it is strictly accidental and must have been because others shepherded them to OKness, while any subset that does bad is proof the the whole is corrupt and incompetent. Further, any attempts at fixing it are obviously flawed because the government monolith is by definition unfixable.
Further, the cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint is strong, in that they can see how treating any other composite entity, e.g. corporations, or a single corporation, or whatever as a monolith will be ridiculed as "you can't judge this composite entity as a whole based on a subset of it's components". Similarly when the effects of the entities they like look like the results the fear from the government, it is all OK, because some magical thinking results in not understanding what a choice really is (namely that somehow being forced to do something because it is the only choice that minimizes harm when the mechanism is not government is freedom, but when it is government it is tyranny).
Then, of course, there's people like you, to whom profit is so suspect that you'll take your chances with the same government that brought you DCMA, PATRIOT, came within a hair-width of passing SOPA and PIPA, the war on drugs, warrantless wiretaps etc.
It's not that government can't do good things, it's that when they screw up, they do it real bad, and fixing it, if at all possible, takes decades.
If the government can pass a sensible internet privacy and security law, then I'm all for it. It's just that the potential of times probability of a screw up that makes everything worse for everyone is very high.
It's not profit itself that is suspect, it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist". This attitude leads to beliefs that anything at all should be allowed, if there is profit in it. Literally anything. Government provides a way to say "perhaps there are other considerations beyond profit". Since you only have the hammer of economics in your acceptable tool list, everything looks like a business nail, and you twist implausible scenarios in which business solves the problem. The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.
Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)
> it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist".
But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.
> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.
Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.
>> it is the attitude that "Under no circumstances should considerations beyond profit exist".
>But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.
This is semantic wrangling. It is generally pretty easy to create corporations. It would be even easier if the "regulation is strictly forbidden" crowd had their way. As it exists now, corporations are fairly anonymous, and as such, spinning out a corporation per "screwing" is not that hard. Sure long term value per corporation is non existant, but the long-term value of the strategy is pretty straight forward. It has already been shown that investment as it exists today favors short term profit over long term value anyway. Numbers this quarter are generally the main driver.
Further, without regulation preventing the screwing over of people, why wouldn't every company choose the guaranteed profit over other methods. They could just take the profit safe from the fact that anyone not generating gobs of cash right now could be simply "competed out of the market" via mechanisms that are currently illegal as monopolistic. It isn't conjecture either - those rules are a response to companies getting rid of the competition then as soon as the specter of "a good company" isn't looming over them, they returned to screwing people over.
Governments are a means to solve cooperation problems.
Yes, a very crude and usually ineffective one. So are corporations.
There is no good means to solve cooperation problems in the general case. The only way we know of that actually works is to have a group of people who are all committed to a specific goal and who all share the same factual beliefs as to how best to reach that goal. That is very rarely true, which is why cooperation problems rarely get solved very well.
But as I said, only a fringe minority care even slightly about the things Schneier wants regulated: e.g. data retention. To most people these are very low priorities. Should government actually being empowered here, it will push in the opposite direction he wants, because strong political interests are on the other side. He would probably happier with the outcome of deregulation. And that's politically achievable; what he wants to do with strong regulation, is not.
That's my point: Schneier is not dictator. Network regulation would be in his interest, if he could dictate what form it would take; as a minority in a democracy, he's on the wrong end of the regulatory pointy stick.
You're right, I'm treating a democracy as competing factions, not as a cooperating monolith ("people fighting themselves" ; "people governing themselves").
For the obvious reason that governments, at least in democratic countries, are supposed to be about the people governing themselves. Governments are a means to solve cooperation problems.
Sure, this theory does not perfectly translate into practice. But it is the normative ideal of democracy. Hence your comment just comes off as snarky without really adding much to the discussion other than the point that yes, government power also must be restricted when it comes to information, just like it must be restricted in other areas of life. This is a useful point, but one that you might have made using much fewer words.