Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — The current approach lags the reality of how these platforms operate, and the gap is widest on the data side.

Existing antitrust doctrine can be applied more vigorously to mergers and exclusionary conduct. That’s a question of will rather than of authority. Privacy and data portability are different — there we lack rules in any coherent form, and what we have is a patchwork of sectoral statutes written for banks and hospitals and video rental records.

Europe put a comprehensive framework into effect in May. California passed its own in June. We’re going to end up with a national standard by accretion, written by whichever state moves first, unless Congress decides it would rather write one itself.

The present approach is not sufficient.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent — Antitrust tools still have power if somebody uses them. Privacy rules are a patchwork.

The combination isn’t keeping up with the leverage these firms hold over data and distribution. In our industry that leverage is about to become very concrete, because the vehicle is turning into a device and the data it generates has to belong to somebody.

Updated rules on both fronts are needed, and I’d rather they came from a legislature than from a consent decree.

Myrtle Beach Correspondent — Current rules feel behind the technology, and I say that as someone who works inside the machine.

I buy targeting for a living. The amount I can know about a person for a very small amount of money would alarm most of the people I’m targeting, and none of them consented to it in any sense they’d recognize. They clicked a box in 2013.

Stronger privacy standards and clearer limits on self-preferencing are overdue. Self-regulation has had a long run and produced a lot of blog posts about commitment.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Current rules read like they were written for a catalog company. These firms aren’t a catalog company. They’re a gate, a file on the citizen, and a political actor when it suits them.

I don’t want a European-style novel that only the incumbents can staff, because a compliance regime that costs four million dollars a year is a moat with a nicer name.

I want duties a county lawyer can explain. What do you collect. Who do you sell it to. How does a person leave with her data. Can you bury a rival in your own ranking.

Market power and privacy aren’t two subjects. They’re one stack, because the file is what makes the gate valuable. Sufficient now? No. The duties are the place to start and they haven’t been tried in any serious way, which is a bigger scandal than the algorithm.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — If a company knows more about a rancher’s family than the sheriff does, and the family never signed a page they understood, the approach is not sufficient.

Say what you take. Say who gets it. Let people leave.

Stop hiding behind free. Free is the oldest price there is when the product is the customer.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — I write disclosures. The ones these firms use wouldn’t survive a residential closing if a bank tried them, and a bank would be sanctioned for trying.

Consider what we require in a mortgage. Standardized forms, a required schedule of costs, a three-day right to rescind, and a regulator who samples the files. None of that is exotic and all of it exists because we decided a homeowner shouldn’t have to be a lawyer.

We’ve decided the opposite about data. Consent is a checkbox at the end of forty pages nobody reads and everybody clicks, and we’ve built a doctrine pretending that constitutes agreement.

Update privacy so consent is actual. Update competition so buying the only rival isn’t called synergy. And do it without handing the keys to agencies that want these firms as partners against speech they happen to dislike.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — We live with house rules and player cards, so we know exactly what a file is worth. Ours is regulated, audited, and we’re told what we can do with it.

These companies built a house that spans the country and called it an app.

The present approach isn’t enough because the file is the business. Make the file visible to the person it describes. Limit the quiet sale. Limit the self-preferencing.

I’d try the obvious things before the heavy ones. The obvious things haven’t been tried.