On 8/13/19 3:10 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:
With a global company, there's no such thing as a local natural monopoly in play; how would you assign oversight to a global entity? Which "public" would be the ones being protected? The city of Seattle, WA, where Amazon is headquartered? The State of Washington? The United States, at a federal level? What about the "public" that uses Amazon in all the other countries of the world?
Consider how radio, television, and telephony grew and became regulated. (For a moment there, it felt like a discussion that I would have on the CyberTelecomm mailing list.) Each country would regulate the monopoly in the manner best suited for that country. Amazon would need to set up divisions in each country, or union of countries such as the EU.
There's no way to make a global entity a regulated public utility; we don't have an organization that has that level of oversight across country boundaries, unless you start thinking about entities that can enforce *treaties* between countries.
Actually, you'd be surprised to learn we already have infrastructure in place to do exactly that. The International Telecommunication Union is a fine example of how this could be done. Study up on it. From my experience in the telco and modem world, the individual countries have working parties for each element. The working parties develop Standards (the initial cap is intentional) within each country. The output from the working parties in each country send their recommendations to a government bureau -- in the United States, that would be a working party associated with the State Department. (For example, my work on in-band modem control went through TIA/EIA TR-29, which then was passed on to Study Group D, which went to the ITU.)
And I'm not sure I'd want our Ambassadors being the ones at the table deciding how best to regulate Amazon. :/
That's just the point. The regulation would *not* be done by ambassadors. The treaties, rule, regulations, and procedures are *already* in place to smooth the process through people that are not political appointees. Regulation of Amazon would probably be broken into parts: technical, policy, managment, auditing, perhaps more. Policy would originate in the USA with Congress, with help from the industry. Other parts would be parceled out to the people better (not necessarily the best) equipped to do the job. And that's my pair-o-pennies on the subject. Other people may have differing opinions.