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If you make special laws for a few companies, you are fighting the hydra. There will come something after you fined Google or Facebook long enough for being too

by foepys 8y ago

If you make special laws for a few companies, you are fighting the hydra. There will come something after you fined Google or Facebook long enough for being too big. Defining a size for "mega corporations" is also quite arbitrary and I'd quite worse because it doesn't fight the underlying problem: every human should have the right of privacy. > Do you have evidence that it is, in fact, reining them in? We will see what happens. The first complaints against Facebook and Google have already been filed.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
I said dealing with these mega corporations per se. This in no way suggests making special laws for a few companies. If the entire world currently agrees that a handful of companies are The Problem, then there should be some means to go after said handful of companies and get them to stop being The Problem without creating blanket laws negatively impacting the entire world, especially smaller organizations. Dealing directly with a problem company usually involves charging them under existing laws (anti-monopoly laws?) and things like that. It usually does not mean making unenforceable laws that name them by name or define things in a Jim Crow style that clearly targets them in specific and that is unlikely to stand up in court.
- beagle3 8y ago
  The problem is, it's not a handful of companies, it's a few hundreds or even thousands, which makes rigorous laws sensible. Google, Facebook, Twitter have a roster of the web pages you have viewed, whether you interacted with them or not. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and every other phone company has a complete log of your location history (for mobiles), message & call history, and unencrypted browsing history. They have no need for it to provide service (beyond the month or two in which these actions occured), but they do sell it to third parties, the list of which you have never seen. Your credit card company does the same with your credit transactions. This is already 30 companies or so, just in the US, and it is just the tip of the iceberg. GDPR says "a person's data is their own property", which is easy to understand and enforce. You may not like it, but it's along the line of copyrights and trademarks, except the beneficiary is mostly the common man.

by foepys 8y ago

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I said dealing with these mega corporations per se. This in no way suggests making special laws for a few companies. If the entire world currently agrees that a handful of companies are The Problem, then there should be some means to go after said handful of companies and get them to stop being The Problem without creating blanket laws negatively impacting the entire world, especially smaller organizations. Dealing directly with a problem company usually involves charging them under existing laws (anti-monopoly laws?) and things like that. It usually does not mean making unenforceable laws that name them by name or define things in a Jim Crow style that clearly targets them in specific and that is unlikely to stand up in court.

beagle3 8y ago
The problem is, it's not a handful of companies, it's a few hundreds or even thousands, which makes rigorous laws sensible. Google, Facebook, Twitter have a roster of the web pages you have viewed, whether you interacted with them or not. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and every other phone company has a complete log of your location history (for mobiles), message & call history, and unencrypted browsing history. They have no need for it to provide service (beyond the month or two in which these actions occured), but they do sell it to third parties, the list of which you have never seen. Your credit card company does the same with your credit transactions. This is already 30 companies or so, just in the US, and it is just the tip of the iceberg. GDPR says "a person's data is their own property", which is easy to understand and enforce. You may not like it, but it's along the line of copyrights and trademarks, except the beneficiary is mostly the common man.