> Different phones have different capabilities, what's there to explain?
That your definition of ‘phone’ is meaningless. If phones can have any capability you like, then ‘phone’ doesn’t mean anything.
Once you are playing that game you may as well just declare that social networks can be regulated because they are a ‘capability some things that can also communicate with phones have’, and phones are already regulated.
Anti-spam legislation doesn’t regulate the technology. It legislates the behavior of the spammers.
This is no different from say, assault, which doesn’t regulate hammers and baseball bats, but makes it illegal to hit people with them without their permission.
Don’t be silly. The government doesn’t regulate how these services operate.
If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.
The phone system doesn’t lack regulation. Phone spam is already illegal. The reason for phone/VoIP spam is because the system is too inflexible to make it easy to prevent, and the reason the system is inflexible is that it is regulated.
We already have portability. When you sign up to a new network, you provide your phone number and email address, and your friends can find you.
Can you give an example of the kind of conflict you thought was pointless? Early TNG seemed like a new age cult to me, and then it became more real without losing the positivity.
> Wouldn't these points also apply to the internet itself? Large monopolies in infrastructure, having to teach people what domains are, diplomatic conflicts between nations over access to information/infrastructure, prolific spam and scams, etc.
Yes, many similar problems have indeed arisen, but the point is that they are being solved by many private actors, and not by regulation.
Email spam is solved by spam filtering. To the extent that spam filtering isn’t adequate, communications simply move away from email to other messaging services that have better permission models. To the extent that messaging services are not private enough, communications shift to E2E encryption. To the extent that domains are confusing, people shift to search and apps. The list goes on.
> I think the thing is that people like yourself are probably conscientiously indifferent to the attraction, influence and dependency that “Big Tech” produces.
Not at all. I just think it’s obvious that the sentiment has been waning for some time now. Who is going around saying how great big tech is?