> proactive monitoring is cost prohibitive compared to reactive punishment and a legal framework for doing so
Counterfactual: finance, another high-margin industry with a penchant for bad decision making, funds a proactive and multi-pronged regulatory apparatus. We are all safer for it.
in large part this is made easier because most money travels by known and monitored channels (banks, businesses certified to be money transmitters, etc) with very little going via cash.
data on the other hand is a much more diverse & fluid asset that travels via a million unmonitored/encrypted channels and can be copied easily. if all money could be easily copied and most transactions were in cash, proactive regulation would be too expensive. i think.
> data on the other hand is a much more diverse & fluid asset that travels via a million unmonitored/encrypted channels and can be copied easily
Securities are quite diverse. And people regularly try to get around securities regulation by calling their securities "stamps" or "tokens" or "coins" or whatever. A regulator for social media companies over a certain size might not be a bad idea. (My preference is consumer controls with strict penalties for non-compliance, à la how Illinois governs biometric data [1].)
Counterfactual: finance, another high-margin industry with a penchant for bad decision making, funds a proactive and multi-pronged regulatory apparatus. We are all safer for it.