[dheera]

How can you regulate conspiring? It would seem to me that people have the right to private channels of communication, and free speech over said communication. They could do it over Signal and nobody would know nor have records.

[cl42]

You can regulate conspiring. There are tons of laws for this already, either within antitrust, criminal law, etc.

The challenge is proving the conspiring happened. If a CEO specifically admits to calling companies and conspiring, then, well, there's the evidence.

EDIT:

Case in point from 2014 -- "Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley..."[1]

[1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay...

[to11mtm]

What's interesting to me is I thought at first that maybe the only reason this won was because California is one of the few states where non-competes are illegal (this being a form of de-facto non-compete.) Then I read the link and saw that even the Feds (US DOJ) found their practices worth investigating and acting on.

Still, it's weird to think about it. I live in a state where my First Senior role in 2015 paid less than the Cali mandated wage for a basic 'Software Engineer' at the time.

[elithrar]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

They have the right to it, but organizations are not air-tight, especially when it comes to policies that f-ck over employees.

[thebean11]

The speech isn't at issue here, it's the act of lowering wages in cooperation with your competitors.

Do you think a murder conspiracy is a free speech issue as well?

[dheera]

Why is conspiracy the issue? Murder and unreasonably low wages sounds like the actual crime to me. Regulate that instead of regulating a chat over dinner.

[nonameiguess]

You seem to be wondering why the act of conspiracy to commit a crime is itself a crime on top of the crime you conspired to commit.

The reason is the Mafia. They stuck around for such a long time in part because the bosses never committed any crimes themselves, and were often careful to never even directly order anyone else to commit crimes. Nonetheless, they were in charge, and it was quite well understood by the rest of the conspirators exactly what they wanted. But it was effectively impossible for law enforcement to stop them, and that meant there was no way to stop the actual crimes because the supply of lower-level people willing to commit them for sufficient compensation was effectively infinite.

We finally managed to bring them down in part by making conspiracy to commit crime itself be a crime. This was called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO and was passed in the US in 1970. From that point forward, it has been a crime to influence others to commit crimes, and enhanced sentencing is available in cases where this is done as part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

[kelnos]

Well, define "unreasonably low wages", in isolation, in the legal sense. You can't, really, at least not beyond talking about minimum wage for hourly workers (which is obviously not what we're talking about here).

In this case the wages were "unreasonable" because they were lower than they would have been without the collusion. If there hadn't been collusion, but the companies independently came to the same numbers on wages, they would not have been unreasonable, by definition.

The purpose of these laws is to protect workers from people who have a lot more economic and employment power than the workers. That's why it's "collusion to lower wages" and not just "lowering wages". The latter is (generally) legal as long as it's not accompanied by the former.

[dheera]

> Well, define "unreasonably low wages"

You go inspect the life of an delivery driver. If they are struggling to pay rent, eat healthy, or get a reasonable amount of legally-mandated family time and sleep because they are having to work excess hours, their wages are too low. Have a judge mandate an increase in their wages by some value. PID feedback loop on that legally-mandated bonus until their lifestyle becomes acceptable.

Do this for a random sample of people and establish a per-county minimum wage.

If the judge doesn't understand how to deal with a simple feedback loop, fire them and replace them with an engineer. A backend engineer who has to regularly deal with actually solving problems around allocating resources and making sure processes don't die is probably a perfect fit.

[jason0597]

Replace judges with software developers? Really?

[thebean11]

The crime isn’t the wages themselves, it’s the collusion to lower wages.

This specific type of collusion (collusion is an action not speech) that is illegal.

[dheera]

Maybe the wages themselves should be the crime.

You can chat all you want with your friends over coffee about stealing stuff and although it's psychologically messed up, there's nothing legally wrong about that. It's when you actually steal that you've committed a crime. Same thing.

[thebean11]

Taking the tech wage collusion example, the wages themselves were still very high (we're talking about Google and Apple salaries here) but the collusion to keep them from being higher was still a crime.

Tech CEOs can talk about whatever they want. The talking isn't the crime it's the act. They could talk in theory about colluding, it becomes illegal when they DO it. I'm not sure how else to explain it.

[mattnewport]

Covering your tracks when committing a crime doesn't make it not a crime. At best it makes you harder to catch.

In this case he posted publicly so was obviously not trying to cover his tracks. I've no idea whether he is doing anything illegal under Israeli law though.

[dheera]

> Covering your tracks when committing a crime

That's if you believe it to be a crime. The law isn't always right. Communication is an unalienable right. The flow of information is not something that should be regulated.

Giving unreasonably low wages should be the crime, not conspiring.

[kelnos]

> That's if you believe it to be a crime. The law isn't always right.

Sure, but until that law is challenged in court and found to be unconstitutional (or whatever process is present in whatever country), or until that law is repealed, it is the law, and if you break it, you risk consequences.

> Communication is an unalienable right. The flow of information is not something that should be regulated.

That's really just your opinion. I do happen to mostly agree with you, but I don't see how this has much to do with the issue at hand. If you talk about doing something illegal (and especially if you then go and do that thing), and leave behind evidence of that conspiracy for law enforcement to find, you'll be punished for it.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have freedom from the consequences of that speech.

> Giving unreasonably low wages should be the crime, not conspiring.

Stop focusing on the word "unreasonable". Whether or not the wages are "unreasonable" is a matter of opinion in this sort of case, and really doesn't matter. The thing that is illegal is colluding to lower wages, where, without the collusion, wages would have been higher.

I am happy to live in a country where a bunch of billionaire CEOs aren't allowed to sit in a room together and decide to artificially lower the market rate for their employees' services.

[imajoredinecon]

> How can you regulate conspiring?

It seems to work pretty well in practice: testimony from other participants in the conspiracies, technical evidence (just because E2E-encrypted messaging exists doesn't mean it's the sole choice of people conspiring to commit crimes), ...

> people have the right to private channels of communication

This is an intuitively appealing idea (and something I think I personally agree with) but doesn't seem to be totally settled. But let's assume it is:

> [People have the right to] free speech over said communication

Well, no: free speech isn't absolute. That's why people are generally in favor of laws against plotting murders.

[pjerem]

This would require conspiring as such a scale that it would be impossible not to leak. It could even be a prisoner’s dilemma since you would have to conspire with lots of your competitors, someone could have interest into leaking the conspiracy.

[kelnos]

Sure, and if there were no records of it, and no compelling witness testimony, then the people conspiring would likely get away with it.

Fortunately, often people committing crimes slip up and use communication channels that leave a paper trail.

[roland35]

It has happened!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545

[smorgusofborg]

The smart company goes along with the conspiracy but records everything and then they rat and turn over the evidence. They screw employees and their competitors and get exempted from the fine. In theory, they could collect a portion of the fines that their competition pays as whistleblower comp.

[kelnos]

Sure, but if the competition finds out they did this, they could then band together to destroy this "smart company's" business. Which also might be illegal, but by the time the wheels of justice turn, it might be too late for that business.