Increase fuel economy -> Introduce fuel economy standards -> Economic cars practically phased out in favour of guzzling "trucks" that are exempt from fuel economy standards -> Worse fuel economy.
or
Protect the children -> Criminalize activites that might in any way cause an increase in risk to children -> Best to just keep them indoors playing with electronic gadgets -> Increased rates of obesity/depression etc -> Children worse off.
As the article itself says: Hold big tech accountable -> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply -> Big tech goes on, but indie tech forced offline.
- very basic macro economics
- very basic game theory
- very basic statistics
Come to think of it, kids should learn this in high school
It’s why when a law/rule/standard has a carveout for its first edge case, it quickly becomes nothing but edge cases all the way down. And because language is ever-changing, rules lawyering is always possible - and governments must be ever-resistant to attempts to rules lawyer by bad actors.
Modern regulations are sorely needed, but we’ve gone so long without meaningful reform that the powers that be have captured any potential regulation before it’s ever begun. I would think most common-sense reforms would say that these rules should be more specific in intent and targeting only those institutions clearing a specific revenue threshold or user count, but even that could be exploited by companies with vast legal teams creating new LLCs for every thin sliver of services offered to wiggle around such guardrails, or scriptkiddies creating millions of bot accounts with a zero-day to trigger compliance requirements.
Regulation is a never-ending game. The only reason we “lost” is because our opponent convinced us that any regulation is bad. This law is awful and nakedly assaults indietech while protecting big tech, but we shouldn’t give up trying to untangle this mess and regulate it properly.
Too many cobras > bounty for slain cobras > people start breeding them for the bounty > law is revoked > people release their cobras > even more cobras around
These are not unintended consequences. All media legislation of late has been to eliminate all but the companies that are largest and closest to government. Clegg works at Facebook now, they'd all be happy to keep government offices on the premises to ensure compliance; they'd even pay for them.
Western governments are encouraging monopolies in media (through legal pressure) in order to suppress speech through the voluntary cooperation of the companies who don't want to be destroyed. Those companies are not only threatened with the stick, but are given the carrots of becoming government contractors. There's a revolving door between their c-suites and government agencies. Their kids go to the same schools and sleep with each other.
If we can get the voters to understand the things you mention, then maybe we’d have a chance.
The US Supreme Court disagrees. https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2024/july/3/-/m...
I think most of the examples fit this, but a few don't.
The problem is that the real problems are very hard, and their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs, which may or may not line up with doing the right thing.
This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is a real problem, and those who engage in its distribution are experts in subverting the system. So is freedom of expression. So is the onerous imposition of regulations.
And any such issue (whether it be transnational migration, or infrastructure, or EPA regulations in America, or whatever issue you want to bring up) is going to have some very complex tradeoffs and even if you have a set of Ph.Ds in the room with no political pressure, you are going to have uncomfortable tradeoffs.
What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
Not sure how keeping kids off the internet keeps them indoors? Surely the opposite is true?
So what do you do to entertain children? Use what you have. Dunk them on the internet via YouTube first and then let them free range because you’re tired and can’t give a fuck anymore.
^1 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/GMA/Family/mom-arrested-after-son... ^2 https://www.aol.com/news/2015-12-03-woman-gets-arrested-for-...
Seriously, the problem is not politicians being clueless about all the above, but having too much power which makes them think they need to solve everything.
I've heard it called "law of unintended consequences" and "cobra effect".
When intentional, this is Regulatory Capture. Per https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp :
> Regulation inherently tends to raise the cost of entry into a regulated market because new entrants have to bear not just the costs of entering the market but also of complying with the regulations. Oftentimes regulations explicitly impose barriers to entry, such as licenses, permits, and certificates of need, without which one may not legally operate in a market or industry. Incumbent firms may even receive legacy consideration by regulators, meaning that only new entrants are subject to certain regulations.
A system with no regulation can be equally bad for consumers, though; there's a fine line between too little and too much regulation. The devil, as always, is in the details.
I used to walk and ride my bike to school. I was in 4th grade. 9 years old.
You show me a 9-year-old walking alone to school today, and I'll show you a parent who's getting investigated for child neglect. It's maddening.
So that chain of consequences means today's kids are meant to be watched 24/7, and that usually means they're cooped up inside. They're still facing "Stranger Danger" (except through Snap or whatever games they're playing), and now they're also in poorer health.
To begin with, the premise would have to be challenged. Many, many bad regulations are bad because of incompetence or corruption rather than because better regulations are impossible. But let's consider the case where there really are no good regulations.
This often happens in situations where e.g. bad actors have more resources, or are willing to spend more resources, to subvert a system than ordinary people. For example, suppose the proposal is to ban major companies from implementing end-to-end encryption so the police can spy on terrorists. Well, that's not going to work very well because the terrorists will just use a different system that provides E2EE anyway and what you're really doing is compromising the security of all the law-abiding people who are now more vulnerable to criminals and foreign espionage etc.
The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing. Accept that you don't have a good solution and a bad solution makes things worse rather than better so the absence of any rule, imperfect as the outcome may be, is the best we know how to do.
The classical example of this is the First Amendment. People say bad stuff, we don't like it, they suck and should shut up. But there is nobody you can actually trust to be the decider of who gets to say what, so the answer is nobody decides for everybody and imposing government punishment for speech is forbidden.
It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.
As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.
Or go further.
Sometimes the answer is to remove regulations. Specifically, those laws that protect wrongdoers and facilitators of problems. Then you just let nature take its course.
For the mostpart though, this is considered inhumane and unacceptable.
Too bad this isn't the case here.
If you're talking about legalizing vigilantism, you would then have to argue that this is a better system and less prone to abuse than some variant of the existing law enforcement apparatus. Which, if you could do it, would imply that we actually should do that. But in general vigilantes have serious problems with accurately identifying targets and collateral damage.
It gets messy because, by definition the moment you remove the laws, the parties cease to be criminals... hence my Bushism "wrongdoers" (can't quite bring myself to say evil-doers :)
One hopes that "criminals" without explicit legal protection become disinclined to act, rather than become victims themselves. Hence my allusion to "nature", as in "Natural Law".
"Might is right" is no good situation either. But I feel there's a time and place for tactical selective removal of protectionism (and I am thinking giant corporations here) to re-balance things.
As a tepid example (not really relevant to this thread), keep copyright laws in place but only allow individuals to enforce them.
This is what judges are for. A human judge can understand that the threshold is intended to apply across the parent company when there is shared ownership, and that bot accounts aren't real users. You only have to go back and fix it if they get it wrong.
> The only reason we “lost” is because our opponent convinced us that any regulation is bad. This law is awful and nakedly assaults indietech while protecting big tech, but we shouldn’t give up trying to untangle this mess and regulate it properly.
The people who passed this law didn't do so by arguing that any regulation is bad. The reason you lost is that your regulators are captured by the incumbents, and when that's the case any regulation is bad, because any regulation that passes under that circumstance will be the one that benefits the incumbents.
"children are getting raped and we aren't going to do anything about it because we want to protect indie websites" sounds a lot worse than "this is a significant step in combatting the spread of online child pornography", even if reality is actually far more complicated.
The next UK general election is ~5 years away so this makes no sense.
The more likely reason is that it's simply good policy. We have enough research now that shows that (a) social media use is harmful for children and (b) social media companies like Meta, TikTok etc have done a wilfully poor job at protecting them.
It is bizarre to me how many people here seem willing to defend them.
tl;dr: This is a myth.
There is no incentive to the consumer to purchase a vehicle with worse fuel economy.
There USED to be an incentive, 30-40 years ago.
It is not 1985 anymore.
The gas guzzler tax covers a range of fuel economies from 12.5 to 22.5 mpg.
It is practically impossible to design a car that gets less than 22.5 mpg.
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170, with an 6.2 L 8 cylinder engine making ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY FIVE horsepower is officially rated for 13 mpg but that's bullshit, it's Dodge juicing the numbers just so buyers can say "I paid fifty-four hundred bucks gas guzzler tax BAYBEE" and in real-world usage the Demon 170 is getting 25 mpg. Other examples of cars that cannot achieve 22.5 mpg are the BMW M2/M3/M4/M8, the Cadillac CT5, high-performance sports sedans for which the gas guzzler tax is a <5% price increase. ($5400 is 5% of the Demon 170 price, but 2-3% of what dealers are actually charging for it.)
The three most popular vehicles by sales volume in the United States are: 1. The Ford F-150, 2. The Chevy Silverado, and 3. The Dodge Ram 1500.
The most popular engine configuration for these vehicles is the ~3L V6. Not a V8. A V6.
Less than 1/4th of all pickup trucks are sold equipped with a V8.
According to fueleconomy.gov every single Ford, Chevrolet, and Ram full-size pickup with a V6 would pay no gas guzzler tax.
Most V8s would be close, perhaps an ECU flash away, to paying no gas guzzler tax. The only pickups that would qualify for a gas guzzler tax are the high-performance models-- single-digit percentages of the overall sales volume and at those prices the gas guzzler tax would not even factor into a buyer's decision.
People buy trucks, SUVs, and compact SUVs because they want them and can afford them.
Not because auto manufacturers phased out cars due to fuel economy standards. Not because consumers were "tricked" or "coerced". And certainly not because "the gubmint" messed things up.
They buy them because they WANT them.
The Toyota RAV4 is the 4th most popular car in the US. The Corolla is the 13th most popular. They are built on the same platform and dimensionally, the Corolla is actually very slightly larger except for height. They both come with the same general ballpark choices in engines. The gas guzzler tax only applies to the Corolla, but that doesn't matter because they both would be exempt. People don't freely choose the RAV4 over the Corolla because of fuel economy they buy it because the Corolla has 13 cubic feet of cargo capacity and the RAV4 has 70 cubic feet.
And before anyone says that the gas guzzler tax made passenger cars more expensive, passenger cars can be purchased for the same price adjusted for inflation they could be 50 years ago, but people don't want a Mitsubishi Mirage, which is the same price as a vintage VW Beetle (perennial cheapest new car from the 1960s) and better in every quantifiable metric, they want an SUV.
What may be true is that there is a national policy to keep fuel prices as low as possible, for a myriad of reasons, with one side effect of that policy being that it has enabled people to buy larger less fuel-efficient cars.
I do not believe it is auto manufacturers who are pushing for this policy. I believe it is the freight and logistic market. The auto market is valued at $4 billion, the freight and logistics market is $1,300 billion. GM and Ford are insignificant specks compared to the diesel and gasoline consumers of the freight and logistics firms (who have several powerful lobbies).
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/08/v8-market-share-ju...
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f6197.pdf (gas guzzler worksheet)
You don't think Meta, TikTok etc are the cause of the problem ?
I appreciate that Lfgss is somewhat collateral damage but the fact is that if you're going to run a forum you do have some obligation to moderate it.
I've just finished recording a Cybershow episode with two experts in compliance (ISO42001 coming on the AI regulatory side - to be broadcast in January).
The conversation turned to what carrots can be used instead of sticks? Problem being that large corps simply incorporate huge fines as the cost of doing business (that probably is relevant to this thread)
So to legally innovate, instead, give assistance (legal aid, expert advisor) to smaller firms struggling with compliance. After all governments want companies to comply. It's not a punitive game.
Big companies pay their own way.
Politicians can be very very good at those things, when they have a reason to be.
This is a way to regulate political speech and create a weapon to silence free speech online. It's what opponents to these measures have been saying forever. Why do we have to pretend those enacting them didn't listen, are naive, or are innocent well intentioned actors? They know what this is and what it does. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Related to this, and one version of a label for this type of silencing particularly as potentially weaponized by arbitrary people not just politicians is Heckler's veto. Just stir up a storm and cite this convenient regulation to shut down a site you don't like. It's useful to those enacting these laws that they don't even themselves have to point the finger, disgruntled users or whoever will do it for them.
You can’t really put a corporation in jail, but you could cut it off from the world in the same way that a person in jail is cut off. Suspend the business for the duration of the sentence. Steal a few thousand bucks? Get shut down for six months, or whatever that sentence would be.
Because no one would fork over stupid amounts of money for a f*k off big truck if they didn't have a real need. Right?
I have imagined a sci-fi skit where James works at CorpCo, a company that was caught doing something illegal and sentences to prison. As punishment James goes to work by reporting in at a prison at 8 am. He sits in his cell until his 'work day' is over and it's released at 5 pm to go home. It's boring, but hey, it pays well.
CSAM is NOT a hard problem. You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved.
You don't solve CSAM with scanners. You don't solve CSAM with legislation. You don't solve CSAM by banning encryption.
You solve CSAM by giving money to law enforcement to go after CSAM.
But, see, the entities pushing these laws don't actually care about CSAM.
Everything else you listed are right wing conspiracy theories.
As an example of impacts not necessarily correlated with size, a comms platform for, say, the banking or finance communities, or defence and military systems, would likely have stronger concerns than one discussing the finer points of knitting and tea.
It almost always doesn't, because the big guys have lobbyists and the small guys don't.
The big guys would rather not have to comply with these rules, but typically their take is, well, if we're going to have to anyway, let's at least make it an opportunity to drive out some of the scrappy competition and claim the whole pie for ourselves.
The other link you have is neighbors that obviously dislike each other, and they told the cops the kid was in danger.
Although I do think they overlook that their legislation is restricted to their domestic market though, so any potential positive effect is more or less immediately negated. That is especially true for English speaking countries.
Imagine a society so stable it doesn't need new laws or rules. All the elected representatives would just sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs. A bad look in their eyes.
This is how it should be of course.
That is like saying "when we write software there are bugs, so rather than fix them, we should never write software again".
Your second example is ascribing to regulation something that goes way beyond regulation.
Lfgss is heavily moderated, just maybe not in a way you could prove to a regulator without an expensive legal team...
Things change - e.g. 50 years ago no online chats, no drones, very little terrorism, travel was more costly and slower, medical drugs were less efficient, live span was shorter.
It might even be possible now to combine nuanced perspectives/responses to proposed policies from millions of people together!? I think it's not that unreasonable to suggest that kind of thing nowadays, I think there's precedent for it too even though stuff like how-wikipedia-works isn't really ideal, (even though it's somewhat an example of the main idea!).
This way, the public servants (including politicians) can mainly just take care of making sure the ideas that the people vote-for get implemented! (like all the lower tiers of government currently do - just extend it to the top level too!) I don't think we should give individuals that power any more!
Sketchy large employers like G4S responded by setting up tens of thousands of "Mini umbrella companies" [1] with directors in the Philippines, each company employing only a handful of people - allowing G4S to benefit from the £4,000 discount tens of thousands of times.
Sadly, exempting small operations from regulation isn't a simple matter.
He was recently interviewed about that book on the New Books Network:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/michael-g-vann-the-great-hanoi-r...>
Audio: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1560680456.mp3> (mp3)
(Episode begins at 1:30.)
Among the interesting revelations: the rat problem was concentrated in the French Quarter of Hanoi, as that's where the sewerage system was developed. What drained away filth also provided an express subway for rats. Which had been brought to Vietnam by steamship-powered trade, for what it's worth.
(That's only a few minutes into the interview. The whole episode is great listening, and includes a few details on the Freakonomics experience.)
There has not been regulation for online forums for forty years and Earth did not explode or human kind did not end.
In particular, Merton notes:
Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.
Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016).
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co...>
More on Merton:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton#Unanticipated...>
Unintended consequences:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences#Robert...>
Manifest and latent functions:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...>
Complex corporate structures enable plausible deniability. The CEO of GFS probably didn't know what was happening, but also probably didn't want to know whilst enjoying the low fees charged from the recruiters.
I know my wife likes storing things in the boot of our car and I'm not even American. It means they're always conveniently there - chairs for sitting in the park, shopping bags, groceries that she's going to take to a party or bought for someone else, kids sports equipment.
> What may be true is that there is a national policy to keep fuel prices as low as possible, for a myriad of reasons, with one side effect of that policy being that it has enabled people to buy larger less fuel-efficient cars.
Yes. Americans have always had cheap fuel and it's shaped the entire society around it.
Bigger vehicles are popular in the US because people want to be in a bigger vehicle and sit higher up than others, AND can afford to do so (ignoring their long term finances). I.e. the politically popular policy of low gas prices.
That's the long and short of it. Buyers rewarded the sellers that sold big and tall vehicles, so obviously sellers are going to sell big and tall vehicles.
There was no situation where buying a big and tall vehicle was cheaper than a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle, so conclusively, people chose to spend more to get what they wanted. Of course, once someone else gets a bigger vehicle, then you are less safe, unless you get a bigger vehicle, and so on and so forth.
Misinformation and disinformation were terms created by censors as an excuse to censor ideas they didn't like, mostly criticism. What we call misinformation and disinformation has been a property of communication since grunting. People are wrong about stuff, even people who we currently think are right. To censor is going back to just knowing the wrong thing for years because someone with censor powers thought they were right.
If a company suddenly starts doing something that costs society more in externalities, does it suddenly start paying more taxes to deal with the enforcement required to get them to stop?
After all, the whole point of regulation is to get the regulated to stop hurting society and costing it money.
But: https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/seoc2/1996_1997/ad...
Any bureaucracy evolves, ultimately, to serve and protect itself. So the populist boss snips at the easy, but actually useful parts: Social safety nets, environmental regulations, etc. Whereas the core bureaucracy, the one that should really be snipped, has gotten so good at protecting itself that it remains untouchable. So in the end the percentage of useless administratium is actually up, and the government, as a whole, still bloated but even less functional. Just another "unintended consequences" example.
We'll see if Argentina can do better than this.
But how about Trump winning popular vote? Millions of people are sure this is about as bad as explosion of the Earth or ending of the humankind.
It's literally managements job to be aware.
Imagine if a crossing guard waves cars through an intersection as children crossed and goes "Well, you know, I wasn't driving the car".
Although to be fair to your hypothetical millions, a guy known for repeating getting bankrupt was elected to lead the country. Seems a bit fair to say his track record implies he'd bankrupt the country.
Look at the prices of new trucks, then at the median salary. People should not have car payments that rival a small mortgage, yet they do.
We were interviewed, they found there were no issues, and the case was dropped. Very stressful experience, though.
And for what? I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. We had endless fields and roads around us to explore. The only off-limits area was an abandoned hog confinement, which to be fair, absolutely could have killed us (by falling into the open trench of porcine waste) – naturally, we still went there.
I know that reeks of survivor bias, but given the length of time Homo sapiens have survived, I think it’s a reasonably safe assumption that kids, when left to their own devices, are unlikely to be seriously injured or killed. Though, that’s probably only true if they’ve been exposed to it gradually over time, and are aware of the risks.
Many things in a society exist on thin margins, not only monetary, but also of attention, free time, care and interest, etc. You put a burden, such as a regulation, saying that people have to either comply or cease the activity, and people just cease it, like in the post. What used to be a piece of flourishing (or festering, depending on your POV) complexity gets reduced to a plain, compliant nothing.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
However this doesn't mean the government should not act. An interview of a false complaint is a small cost to pay compared to not doing anything when there is a real problem. Most of the time those employed to do the investigation known to look for signs of false reports and neighbor conflicts in order to filter them out, but at the same time they do need to make sure as to not miss-classify a real complaint.
Not true: Section 179 [0]. Luxury auto manufacturers are well-aware of this [1] and advertise it as a benefit. YouTube et al. are also littered with videos of people discussing how they're saving $X on some luxury vehicle.
> Not because consumers were "tricked" or "coerced". ... They buy them because they WANT them.
To be fair, they only want them because they've been made into extremely comfortable daily drivers. Anyone who's driven a truck from the 90s or earlier can attest that they were not designed with comfort in mind. They were utilitarian, with minimal passenger seating even with Crew Cab configurations. At some point – and I have no idea if this was driven by demand or not – trucks became, well, nice. I had a 2010 Honda Ridgeline until a few weeks ago, which is among the un-truck-iest of trucks, since it's unibody. That also means it's extremely comfortable, seats 5 with ease, and can still do what most people need a truck to do: carry bulky items home from Lowe's / Home Depot. Even in the 2010 model, it had niceties like heated seats. I just replaced it last week with a 2025 Ridgeline, and the new one is astonishingly nicer. Heated and ventilated seats, seat position memory, Android Auto / Apple CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, etc.
That's also not to say that modern trucks haven't progressed in their utility. A Ford F-350 from my youth could pull 20,000 lbs. on a gooseneck in the right configuration. The 2025 model can pull 40,000 lbs., and will do it in quiet luxury, getting better fuel economy.
[0]: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946#idm140048254261728
"some"?
> The Act would also require me to scan images uploading for Child Sexual Abuse Material and other harmful content, it requires me to register as the responsible person for this and file compliance. It places technical costs, time costs, risk, and liability, onto myself as the volunteer who runs it all... and even if someone else took it over those costs would pass to them if the users are based in the UK.
There is no CSAM ring hiding on this cycling forum. The notion that every service which transmits data from one user to another has to file compliance paperwork and pay to use a CSAM hashing service is absurd.
I doubt this. Legislation is written by committee and passed by democracy. Most of the voting public don't look up the voting records which are available to them. Most of the voting public can't name a third of the members of parliament.
If there is a conspiratorial take, the one about regulatory capture is more believable.
Generally it's something along the lines of "a truck or van registered to a business is assumed to be a work vehicle, so pays less tax than a passenger car".
Of course you need to have a business to take advantage of that loophole, but it doesn't need to be a business that actually has any use for the truck- it could be a one-person IT consultancy.
Consumers want larger vehicles, and manufactures bend the rules to allow for such vehicles to be more easily build. Manufactures write the laws, after all. CAFE allows for SUVs and other "light trucks" to get worse fuel economy than a car. Since fuel economy allowances are based on vehicle footprint, and its easier to make a car larger than it is to improve fuel economy.
So while the fuel economy is higher in the UK, it isn't as high as it first appears.
The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...
Apparently this isn't:
"Just seven electric-vehicle charging stations have begun operating with funding from a $5-billion US government program created in 2021, marking “pathetic” progress, a Democratic senator said on Wednesday."
https://nypost.com/2024/06/05/business/democratic-senator-bl...
What might make such a system work in practice is to only let a small randomly selected group of people vote for each issue. You still get a similar representation as a full vote, but with each person having much fewer votes to attend to it isn't overwhelming.
As a fiat currency issuer, you have two options, you can create money for circulation (government spending) or you can destroy money and it’ll never circulate again (taxation).
The famed section 230, passed in 1996, is an update to a section of the 1934 Communications Act, which is but one set of laws regulating many aspects of forums. Lawsuits in the early 90s led Congress to modify, but not abolish, the stack of laws regarding all communications technology.
Now that you know but 2 of the many laws affecting online forums, you can dig up plenty more yourself.
My dude, I’m sorry to tell you, but the problem usually is law enforcement. For so many things. You try barely training people who already like beating people up and then give them a monopoly on legal violence.
Btw, the reason the cops were invented in Britain was to put down riots by the populace bc they were so poor[1], and in America it was to divide poor whites and poor blacks and turn the poor whites into slave catchers.[2]
[1] https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/20/why-does-the-police-exist...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876628302/the-history-of-poli...
An alternative might be, no regulation, but businesses are responsible for the costs of business to society (pollution, poor mental health, potential that it's a scam). After all, businesses benefit from these things, so they should gladly cover their cost to society.
Personally, I prefer less pollution.