[squibonpig]

I dislike that legal arguments often fail to distinguish cases where scale or speed create something transformative in themselves. Yes you could keep a few people out of a small venue, but good luck keeping a list of 1000 people out of a stadium. The tech creates new powers for large entities able to deploy it that aren't countered by any capacities gained by individuals and small groups. The argument should be made on the basis of what this tech enables itself and not by reference to some old tech that had different consequences.

[xp84]

Interesting. I kind of feel the opposite way. I don't want our laws to say it's perfectly okay for someone to do something until they scale, and then suddenly it's wrong.

> on the basis of what this tech enables itself

Hmm... I really don't like where that could head. Publishing books was considered a pretty simple 1st Amendment thing. Anybody can just publish whatever books. If you don't like it, don't buy the book.

But now that we have the Internet though, "what this tech enables" includes for propaganda to be distributed to us by foreign actors at the speed of light. There are a lot of people who would like to use excuses like that to prohibit the ability of people to just post non-government-sanctioned and non-corporate-sanctioned ideas online.

Personally, I'll take one set of rules that applies across the board.

[petsfed]

I mean, if you'd asked law makers in 1850 if we needed speed limits on the roads between towns, you'd be laughed out of the room. Does that mean we shouldn't have speed limits? Or does that mean that nobody in power dreamed that it would be a serious or wide-spread enough problem that just suing each individual for damages was insufficient? Sometimes, we even have to invent new ways to express the damages so that suit can even be brought.