[wpasc]

I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science.

I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated.

I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).

[AnthonyMouse]

The problem is, whenever something bad happens, people look to regulation, but they never look at the existing regulation to see how it might have led to this. They always want to add something new rather than fix what's already there.

One of the strongest defenses against monopolies is adversarial interoperability, because it blunts vertical integration. It allows a new competitor to replace one piece of the supply chain and still use the rest of it, even if it's operated by the same conglomerate competing with them for that one piece. Because then you can have five companies replace the five pieces one at a time and end up with competition on all fronts, without them having to find each other and coordinate ahead of time before any of them can act.

But we now have multiple laws conspiring to prevent that in tech. CFAA, DMCA 1201, EULAs, patent thickets, etc. We get monopolies because we passed laws that thwart competition. So how about we do something about those laws rather than adding new ones, when the incumbents are likely to have more influence in drafting the new ones than the average user or startup founder?

[opportune]

>ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting

Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.

[nerdponx]

That, or we've already seen where this road leads: our best and brightest talent being used to make rich people richer. Nobody with a high-paying job in finance is losing that job.

[Nasrudith]

Personally I suspect another aspect are ugly aspects of (high school) social order and anti-intellectualism. If the people they look down on start succeeding they get really mad.

Virtually nobody complains about bankers and businessmen taking their jobs with outsourcing and wasn't taken seriously. Automation and AI creating more productivity instead of just moving jobs? The "nerds" doing it? "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!" hysterical reactions and rage. If tech becomes involved in an industry suddenly it is the great satan like Tesla, or any of the artificial meat companies and spoken of as not a part of the industry in spite of larger and smaller existing players and even foreign businesses receiving more respect.

The mythical long lasting tech-bro insited as everywhere from countless hit pieces which hold homeowners blameless for rising rents along with other business jobs but engineers and programmers solely are clearly the great evil responsible for high rents.

It harkens back to deep feudalistic stupid where the peasants and aristocracy distrusted the merchant and miller for making money from working smart and being "anomalys" to the social order. Money not made through serfs or conquest? Clearly deeply unnatural and wrong. Just look at Belphegor - literal demonization of discovery and ingenious inventions. Judging by actions and impacts alone he should be an angel.

[taurath]

Regulation can be freeing, especially anti-trust when it prevents incumbents from getting so large they take over. Things like privacy regulations are somewhat stifling, but over time they can become a lot more easily abstracted. There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API.

[opportune]

>There's no reason all the tooling around data pipelines we have right now can't take into account GDPR out of the box and with a simple API.

Actually, I can think of lots of reasons. It's certainly possible but it won't ever be simple and well-generalized.