It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I suspect such a regulation would at best accomplish nothing and at worst would be a disaster. How do you even define a "social network?" The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN, or too narrow and easy to evade. In all likelihood the outcome would be similar to GDPR -- the big companies that inspire it would have little difficulty with compliance while startups would find it that much harder to compete.
> The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN
HN is clearly a social network. What I envisage is a regulation that applies to social networking and user-generated content sites with greater than a certain number of users, e.g. 1 million.
Obviously there shouldn't be onerous regulation on small sites.
Ben Thompson @ Stratechery does the most in depth analyses of regulating companies like FB, which I think reach similar conclusions for different reasons, such as it's actually in the users' best interest in some ways.
It sounds nice in theory, but in practice I suspect such a regulation would at best accomplish nothing and at worst would be a disaster. How do you even define a "social network?" The regulation would either be too broad and wind up covering the comments section of HN, or too narrow and easy to evade. In all likelihood the outcome would be similar to GDPR -- the big companies that inspire it would have little difficulty with compliance while startups would find it that much harder to compete.