https://medium.com/enrique-dans/mark-zuckerberg-would-do-well-to-address-facebooks-problems-before-calling-in-the-politicians-to-8323af7243a9

Enrique DansBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingMar 31Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in Saturday’s Washington Post, “The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas”, once again highlights the issue of regulating social networks, which has so far resisted such efforts: speaking in light of the myriad problems supposedly due to the absence of regulation, along wit some attempts by Facebook itself to impose some control over the content it publishes, Zuckerberg is calling for governments to take a more active role in controlling harmful content, preventing interference in electoral processes, safeguarding privacy, and allowing people to transfer their data from one app to another, otherwise known as data portability.

Zuckerberg’s arguments are based on a fundamental error: the idea that “the internet needs new rules”, as if it were some kind of special place or regulation-free zone and it was necessary to write the rules from scratch. We’ve grown used to hearing legislators call for greater regulation of the internet, but somebody like Zuckerberg, who understands the web, should know better. Greater regulation will simply open the door to new laws that will be ignored because they cannot be enforced, which, as Albert Einstein rightly pointed out, is the fastest way to destroy respect for a government.