| > To act as an extra layer of regulation that even local government cannot or will not provide Whoever possesses the data and information is the only actor who can meaningfully perform regulation. You can't effectively regulate blindly. Right now Google has the most data, more than the various state and local governments. So there's really two possibilities: 1. Google is 'responsible' for the regulation, under the delegated authority and monitoring of governmental bodies 2. Local governments retain the responsibility to regulate these entities, but they need the power to compel the necessary data from Google so they can do the job. That requires a lot of trust in various levels: that Google provides the correct data, that there is a way for local government to act on it, and for there be the right social 'API' in place where Google only shows ads from licensed entities. At the end of the day, these are practically speaking the same thing, except we use different language to describe it. The 2nd possibility has more hops in it, so it's less efficient, but maybe it's safer. It's kind of like how we do money transmission and terrorism finance regulation now -- the government is nominally responsible for making sure bad actors can't send money, but the only way to do that is for banks, PayPal, et al to send data to the government. |