I’ve been floundering to find my angle on the “Please Don’t Regulate Facebook” angle that Robert Scoble started early this weekend.  It’s not that that I don’t have an opinion on it, I just can’t think of another way to say what I’ve said so many other times before: regulating technology is generally bad, because the government (despite how tech savvy they want us to believe they are) almost always ends up showing how clueless they really are.

Robert Scoble attempted to make the point that Facebook is too big and too embedded into the social structure of the web to regulate.  To that, I reply: no company is too big for the government to try to regulate.  Need proof? Look at the debacle of the FTC’s attempts to regulate web disclosure.  Despite the fact that they’ve essentially outlawed any way to talk about your employer online, people continue to do it and make valiant efforts at complying with the ambiguous FTC regulations on social media.

Still, this morning, I saw the best take put out there so far on the regulation of Facebook angle, one from my buddy Steven Hodson:

Don’t regulate Facebook. Don’t even think about regulating Facebook. Sure there might be some sense of our privacy being all important and that the government has our best interests at heart and is willing to battle Facebook on our behalf but the reality is far different. Yes Facebook might be hauled up on the carpet and told that they need to mend their ways, which they will do but in half -measures – just enough to keep the government happy.

The truth is that no amount of government intervention or Facebook half-steps will stop the company growing, growing to the point that whatever they may have had to step back from due to regulation will end up being steamrolled over. The company has already proved that it is willing to push the limits of what is considered acceptable and then take a step back when the uproar gets to loud, only to wait a little while and then move ahead two steps with the same ideas but with a new name.

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So if the government really cares about our online privacy the best thing they could do is to leave Facebook alone. By leaving it alone there will come a point when Facebook will have shot itself in the foot one too many times and the users will finally see it for the naked Emperor that it is.

No amount of regulation will accomplish this – only Facebook itself will.

I don’t really need to add to that. I’m not finished compiling the numbers, but based on an ongoing sentiment analysis I’ve been running on Facebook’s new features since the day of f8, expressed negative feelings on the web have leveled out at an unsettling (for Facebook) 38%! Nearly half of the mainstream of the web, not the geek set, are displeased with the way the new Facebook new features work. In fact, in an even more telling statistic, the geek set (those that mostly retweet Mashable and Techcrunch and other niche blogs) feel more positively on the whole about Facebook than the mainstream – negative sentiment there settles out at around 7%.

The government can take this one of two ways: there is a mandate to take action on Facebook, or they can let market forces shove Facebook into a corner on figuring out a better way that doesn’t compromise privacy.