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As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are we losi

• merinowool 8y ago
  It is worth it for those that do it. This is thousands of hours of paid meetings, presentations, lunches, conferences. They just get themselves busy and collect tax payers hard earned money. If it is good for the society? Bureaucrats don't care, as they are winning.
• bitL 8y ago
  Imagine most of those involved in regulations are barely able to use Word/Excel, yet are "elected" to decide the fate of technology.
  • rnnr 8y ago
    And who is going to stop them, when even multi-million companies just shallow the pill(like GDPR) and even try to market it positively that they are gonna adopt it first.
    • lucio 8y ago
      >multi-million companies just shallow the pill They're very happy. It's not a "pill" to swallow, it's a tool to squash any small competitor.
    • c3o 8y ago
      Big business massively lobbied against the GDPR. One big reason it ended up so strict is because the final negotiations happened to coincide with the Snowden revelations, giving cover for politicians to resist the lobbying.
• fanzhang 8y ago
  Free markets aren't always good at pricing things. For example highways wouldn't get built because of the holdout problem if there wasn't eminent domain. There is also such thing as inalienable rights: the ability to sell yourself into slavery probably should be banned, even though libertarian agents seemingly should know the value of their own freedom. But it also seems evident in this regulation that no one is doing that calculus. Everyone is clear on "with this regulation we gain X", but only a small fraction of people seem to be thinking "and then, people will behave in Y way and we lose Z". With many US regulations, there are public comment periods, and those comments are summarized and published. At least when many regulations pass, people know the potential downsides. Can anyone link to the EU equivalent of this? What has the EU parliament office said about the pros and cons?
  • barry-cotter 8y ago
    I suggest you look up the history of road building in the U.K. The holdout problem is far from insuperable, even without eminent domain.
    • orbital-decay 8y ago
      Can you recommend any good sources on that?
      • barry-cotter 8y ago
        https://www.amazon.com/Development-Consent-Voluntary-Services-Sequoia/dp/1558152733 https://www.amazon.com/Development-Consent-Voluntary-Service... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_roads_in_Great_Britain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_roads_in_Great_Britain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_toll_(historical) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_toll_(historical)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• forapurpose 8y ago
  > As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask ... Maybe it's time? That implies that this propaganda about regulations and regulators and this question haven't been talking points for the right and for libertarians for decades, and on HN probably for as long as it's existed. The current U.S. president and GOP go on and on about it ceaselessly. Maybe it's time to ask if proprietary software is more secure than open source, or if Microsoft or Google are monopolists, or if the iPhone will ever take off. Or, 'maybe it's time' to add some value to the conversation rather than yet more rhetoric.
  • joejerryronnie 8y ago
    I don't think this comment is adding value to the conversation. It is also riddled with the commentor's own political rhetoric.
    • jack9 8y ago
      You illustrated the point. The GPs comment is philosophical but there's still people who are fooled by these comments into thinking they have novelty, when it's simply a position that has existed since inception.
• mikeash 8y ago
  This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and regulations on customer data.
  • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. It's not just that though. There are good and bad regulations in the sense that the law against murder is good and DMCA 1201 is bad, but there are also compliance costs for any regulation, even good ones. Economic transactions have a certain amount of surplus. The value of doing something is $100 and the cost of doing it is $20, so we do it and gain $80 worth of surplus. Compliance costs consume part of the surplus. Maybe it costs $5 more but we gain $10 in positive externalities, so it's worth it from a societal perspective. (But not from the perspective of the parties or we wouldn't need a regulation to get them to do it.) The problem comes when you start stacking them. $25 is still less than $100. $50 is less than $100. $90 is less than $100. But at $101 people stop participating in the transaction and you lose the whole stack. All the benefits of the transaction, to everyone, including the positive externalities the regulations were intended to provide, are lost. This is true even if every regulation is individually justifiable. There comes a point when the compliance costs exceed the economic surplus available to cover them. It doesn't matter if the regulations have nothing to do with each other, they can still conspire to destroy the thing they were supposed to be improving.
    • scotty79 8y ago
      > There comes a point when the compliance costs exceed the economic surplus available to cover them. If something is not worth doing right maybe it shouldn't be done at all? You are making the same point, opponents of minimum wage. "But I'll go out of business!!!" If your business is that bad, than maybe you should!
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• sbov 8y ago
  The link tax is one thing, but I would say GDPR actually aids in price discovery, because without GDPR one side of the transaction has no idea what price they're paying.
  • jimmaswell 8y ago
    0. The price anyone paid when their data was used was 0. There are 0 real-world negative consequences on anybody's personal lives due to their information being used by advertisers. They benefited for free.
    • quiq 8y ago
      I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this. Sure, using "free" ad funded services doesn't cost any money, but a price is still paid. Do you really think there is 0 possible consequences of every step you take both physical and virtual being persisted and replicated and mined ad infinitum? People think they pay with their attention, but they also pay with their privacy. Not the "my interests include fantasy football and romantic comedy" kind of privacy, but the "on June 4th I visited a gay bar 6 hours from home so no one would recognize me" kind. Then since you scrolled through Facebook while you were there, they start suggesting other people there as friends, and showing you ads based off of their interests. Knowledge of who you associated with and what you do when no one you know is watching might not seem dangerous to you now in the western world living through the longest period of peace in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, but that shit gets people killed. You don't have to look far back. You don't have to look far away either, shit happens today. How many people lost their lives in communist/fascist revolutions over the past century even, if only because "they associated with the enemy"? Can you imagine what the SS could have done with the kind of data that modern ad companies have?
  • taysic 8y ago
    It's possible some sites will switch to paid if they feel the targeted ads model in untenable. Others will just disappear, so in that sense there will be no price discovery.
    • 8y ago
• rorykoehler 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more. EU regulations are playing into the hands of large established dinosaurs at the cost of indie and SME businesses. Im really concerned at how this will pan out.
• 7952 8y ago
  In an ideal world regulations would work like technological standards. By following web standards you benefit from a huge body of previous work and effort. You can deploy a website without needing to build a web browser or worry about designing a transfer protocol. You can concentrate on things that have real customer value. The same can apply to regulations. It can reduce competition in areas that damage the consumer and wider society. You don't have to invent your own safety rules (for example), you just have to adopt the existing standard. The problem of course is that regulators can be heavy handed, sometimes innefficient and make it more difficult for small companies to compete. But that does not mean that regulations are intrinsically bad.
  • nickpp 8y ago
    Regulations are compulsory - no matter if they are bad or not. Technical standards on the other hand, are optional. People will adopt them only if the benefits will outweight their drawbacks, thus ensuring that only beneficial technical standards survive. That little difference (optional vs compulsory) changes everything. Good ideas, when compulsory, are still a dictature, while free choice is what makes a democracy.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      s/good ideas/ideas directly beneficial to implementer/ Technical standards are not adopted when they interfere with business goals. That's why we have no ubiquitous computing yet, that's why it took regulation to make a standard charging port for phones happen. Regulations are necessary to solve coordination problems on the market - the very problem that's defined by individual voluntary choices leading to bad outcomes for everyone.
      • nickpp 8y ago
        s/good ideas/ideas directly beneficial on the free market/ - to the implementer and/or the customer. The implementer doesn't do things in a vacuum. Customers and competition will swiftly punish ideas beneficial to the implementer but bad for the market. That being said, the regulators do tend to have the arrogance of thinking they know better than the consumer. They take non-issues on the market (charging port) and impose crappy solution (micro-usb) while the eventual better solution (usb-c) is still much worse than some of the offers on the market (Apple's lightning port). With thinking like that we would end up with zero innovation or competition on the OS platform just to solve the "coordination problems on the market". Because who needs Mac OS or Linux, right?! Windows should've been good enough for anyone! Of course, that is why big-cos like Microsoft love that kind of regulatory thinking.
• lucio 8y ago
  >are we losing more than we are gaining? who's "we"? some people are losing (individuals, small business, startups, entrepreneurs), and some people are gaining (bureaucrats, regulatory bodies, well-established big companies, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security)
• pjc50 8y ago
  It's true that there's a cost to compliance, but this handy paper has come out claiming that there's no evidence that regulation reduces industry dynamism: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/federal-regulation-not-cause-declining-dynamism.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/fe... (The author is a noted libertarian, so it's good to see him publishing a paper that shows the opposite result to what he'd expect)