Thread by @thdxr

With all the talk about regulating Facebook, it's a good time to consider the difference between horizontal and vertical regulation

Thread 👇

Regulation tends to be horizontal. It identifies specific effects of the company, i.e. privacy violations, and attempts to create rules horizontally for the entire market

As many have noted with GDPR, the large companies it was created for can easily afford compliance while smaller companies have a new barrier to competing.

Horizontal regulation is conservative about disrupting large players at the expense of everyone else, aka regulatory capture

Vertical regulation ignores specific effects (symptoms) and instead looks for root causes. What about the specific company lead to the current problems? Centralization? Unfair monopoly? Rent seeking? Age-old problems often enabled by horizontal regulation itself

If Facebook does need regulation we should ask the vertical question "What about Facebook is preventing better options from emerging?" not the horizontal question "How do we ensure user privacy?"

The latter is a downstream effect of the former and unlikely to be solved top down

Vertical regulation is aggressive with the companies that cause the issues and conservative with everyone else. Scalpel vs Hammer