It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:

> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”

But big tech cannot be regulated at all. We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.

> But big tech cannot be regulated at all.

It cannot be regulated because we let dollar/capital rise above political authority.

> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”

Is that a good law or is it a barnacle? Is it enforced in the UK?

If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.

There is a counter incentive, the money the companies pay the politicians.

In the interests of accuracy, the law (the Metropolitan Police Act 1839) actually states

""" 54 Prohibition of nuisances by persons in the thoroughfares.

Every person shall be liable to a penalty not more than level 2 on the standard scale, who, within the limits of the metropolitan police district, shall in any thoroughfare or public place, commit any of the following offences; (that is to say,)

...

8. Every person who shall roll or carry any cask, tub, hoop, or wheel, or any ladder, plank, pole, showboard, or placard, upon any footway, except for the purpose of loading or unloading any cart or carriage, or of crossing the footway:

... """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/section/54

The plank of wood is one element in a much broader statute, rather than an example of hyper-specificity. And it might have been strictly applied at the time, but that doesn't mean you're definitely going to get into trouble nowadays.

In a similar vein, the UK *does* have laws that affect big tech. UK GDPR places requirements on processing of personal data:

""" Personal data shall be:

(a)processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’); """ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/5

Whether that's properly enforced is (as with the plank) a completely different matter.

In the UK, at least, we don't need new regulations, we need to more effectively apply the regulations we already have in place. But there is also a balance to be made between enforcement through fines and enforcement through changing behaviour: it's much better to work with companies to bring them into compliance than it is to just fine them and without actually changing anything.

The problem with regulating big tech is the unplacable internet. Who can regulate the internet? Who gets to make rules for the global network?

Politicians are keenly aware that regulation has to be administered, and administration costs money. The internet subsists on low overhead, and per jurisdiction administration would significantly change almost everything about the current internet. The public wont allow that.

If the public actually starts demanding regulation, we will see a fracturing of the internet into national networks. It will become impossible (or at least uneconomical) to run reddit, youtube, or facebook as global networks. They might continue to exists, but they will be sectioned off.

Any rule is as good as its enforcement.

The plank rule just exists, not enforced, so nobody observes it.

Same will happen with the high-tech regulation. In fact, it is already happening left and right where it does exist.

Devils advocate ish reason:

People understand what a plank of wood is and how it works.

People, including the vast majority of politicians, don’t understand our technology at all. It’s magic. Why does a light come on when they flip the switch? Magic. Computers are deep black magic.

How can they write effective regulation? Or tell the difference between proposals that are good or bad written by others?

If politicians regulated big tech more we’d probably end up with a ton of regulatory capture that legislated monopolies for big tech and shut out open source and startups, because who has the money to influence the ignorant lawmakers at scale?

We are now in a world where small groups of high priests understand certain things, and few others. We’ve been there for a while but it’s gotten far more opaque in the last 25 years or so.

Even something like a nuclear reactor or an aircraft is much easier to explain. The last episode of the Chernobyl series did a great job explaining what was wrong with that reactor design to a layperson. But computing… and networks… people who do understand it have forgotten just how ludicrously arcane and inscrutable it is to most.

A big difference too is that by the Church-Turing theorem there is (as a side effect of it) a provably infinite number of ways to perform any computation. Which means you can’t just legislate “don’t do that.” Physical machines are not like that.