Ah, you're so close ;)

Thanks for taking the time to reply, these discussions are much more interesting on HN than anywhere else on the internet.

Your line of thinking really drives me crazy because I feel like we're so close to agreeing. The horseshoe is almost touching in this thread.

I don't know enough about China to know if their societal engineering efforts are considered successful, but I do know enough to see the parallels to the regulatory solutions that you're floating.

I think these are all well intentioned but terrible ideas:

> can only have X percent profit margin

Profit margins can be engineered with creative accounting. You can't practically do this.

> Force companies to invest

I don't even know how you would force a company to invest in something. Generally you'd tax or subsidize them, but in either case you're disrupting market forces.

> maybe we say that facebook has to open up their internal APIs

This would actually help the situation in the short term, but it's still not a good idea. Facebook would continue asserting intellectual property rights on the data they serve and entrench them as a public utility. The goal here should be to create an environment that's hostile to Facebook by protecting them less.

> forcing the ad marketplace to operate like a 'lit' exchange

The ad marketplace doesn't need to be transparent, because Facebook can't actually compete for attention if they lose government protection of their IP or government protection from the harm caused by their UGC. If Facebook didn't have these protections, we wouldn't need to worry about the marketplace because their business would fail.

Though Facebook is currently in a position to easily commit undetectable fraud on ad buyers. The low quality of their market should be another reason to not use Facebook. The reason we don't have a transparent and competitive ad market is because Facebook gets to decide the rules for their marketplace.

> Facebook should've never been allowed to buy Instagram.

I don't think they should have been prevented from buying Instagram. If they didn't own them, they'd just share data anyway for mutual benefit. Who owns the stock is separate to me from the abusive products they produce.

> forcing social media networks to pay news media sites for their content

News media sites are their own problem, but they shouldn't get a special carve out for being paid to be indexed. If they don't want their content public on the internet, they shouldn't publish it. Once they do, they should assume it can be liberally indexed/mirrored/redistributed.

I think we'll ultimately see blockchain solutions take over the space, because fundamentally they work and are an unstoppable technology.

It's also possible that all these regulations don't have any of their intended effects, but are still successful in crippling Facebook by making its operation very restricted. In other words, use regulation to make Facebook a worse product, to the point where the users organically leave.

The best outcome would be if we simply got rid of all these silly intellectual property protections and let the chips fall where they may. That would end a lot of media companies, but it'd be better than the problems they've caused.

A good outcome is that social media companies eventually lose their users organically, through some combination of onerous regulations that can't apply to decentralized projects, and new technologies that don't fit their business model simply being better.

A bad outcome is if governments adopts social media in official ways, it becomes essential to government business and therefore gets regulated into permanence. This blurs the line between what it means to have a Facebook account as opposed to an internet connection. That's probably where Facebook will take us if they can write the regulations. Maybe to vote or do some other government business, I'll need to let Facebook verify my identity, which will be fine, because it's totally regulated and normal.

I've read a lot of posts on HN about the "aha" moment of people using metamask for the first time. I think we're going to see a new wave of internet technologies that obsolete things like Facebook and Twitter very quickly. They might also be way more damaging and worse, but they won't be companies and they won't be able to be regulated. I'm not sure how that plays out, but we'll figure it out when we get there, because that's where we're going.