That is at least my argument for saying 'yes, personal responsibility is key' while at the same time saying 'regulation is essential'. We need both, so we have guidelines and less BS.
Agreed. The challenge is how to meaningfully regulate away these sort of things. It's always a moving target. Human beings are often products of their environment and culture. To have a culture of people with a sense of responsibility towards choosing purchases and information online, I think we have to change the whole landscape that people are doing that in, make it one that encourages that by default. The default now is greed. That's what is most encouraged. You can expect people to choose better all day without ever getting close to touching the motivating factors being exerted on them, influencing those choices. It just seems obvious to me that if you want to change the reactions of creatures who are as 'reactive' as humans tend to be, you have to change the environments they are reacting to. I think we need to set a stage that's not so prone to generating and sustaining such things in the first place. I don't think it will ever be enough to make new rules for the existing one. Decades of status quo, just patching leaks, to keep the behemoth going without too much upset leaves the rest of us stagnating in the same old, waiting for the the next quick fix to keep it all going. It's like nothing ever gets better anymore. The same problems just move to new places as society and technology advance.
We can go further, to the general state of consumerism. I see that as but a symptom of where we are in the progression of capitalism. It's a system predicated on some of the very buying and selling patterns that seem to encourage a special kind of ignorance. The behavior needed to make it work, the things we wind up accepting, make us dumb. Or perhaps I should say 'especially shortsighted.' People develop blind spots living in the cultures that bloom from such socioeconomic soil. Thick layers of old skin to shed. But we still aren't heading that way. Some folks are, but it's not enough for individuals to simply be able to see it. As long as consumerism is a dominating force in major societies, there will be things like Wish and so much more. And living in that society, you are almost beholden to the exploitation. Engaging in it and being pulled by it is going to be a matter of course if you have any goals at all. We all perpetuate it as individuals, over the course of just living within this. It's just so much more than anyone can hope to keep track of. The structure we'd have to build to regulate it all effectively would be bigger than the things it regulates, I'm almost betting. I kind of see it as an endless cat and mouse game. Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies. Though the fact that I see it as endless is probably a fallacy of plain human perception. There are many ways it does end, or at least change irreversibly. Global warming being one potential catalyst.
Basically, I think the internet marketplaces for both things and information are just a natural extension of how our society already is. It's not that it's nessesarily outpacing... just as the fastest growing branch on a tree does not 'outpace' the growth of the tree itself. More they are one in the same and what you see online is just a product of how the 'civilized' world as a whole has operated for a long time. It's the next stage AFAIC. I don't know if we can really hope for a different internet without addressing the real world it exists in first. I think if there was somehow some radical change in how economies work, you would see big changes mirrored across the net. Whereas if you try to make the net operate differently than the real world, it eventually gets consumed by the ways of said real world. But that's assuming you can make the leap to see the internet and the real world as one in the same. For me, the internet is not this shadow realm, or some augmentation. It is an actual thing that exists, within the real world. A part of it. Not a discreet space in any sense.