4 ms·

> It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs. On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be b

by vladd 8y ago

> It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs. On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.

twblalock 8y ago
> The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal network cost (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership. The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?
- vladd 8y ago
  Subscriptions is the end-result. To get there you need many things: brand, reputation, good crawling, incoming links from authoritative sites. All of these are predicated on the idea of a global Internet. If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems. A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Assuming what you say is true, would one expect prominent newspaper websites that are GDPR-compliant and accessible from the EU to be doing better financially than prominent newspaper websites that aren't? Is that the case?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      That's a good question. But is that data even available, especially in the format that would allow to tease out how much each aspect of the enterprise contributed to the financial situation? As an addition to the GP's argument, consider that these days, news stories are meant to be linked to on social media. People have friends and audiences in many places in the world. If someone with parts of their audience in Europe wants to share a news story, will they choose an article on GDPR-blocking site, or on a GDPR-compliant one?
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Not necessarily, since complying would likely yield only like 2% (number made up) extra returns on whatever their revenue already is. The most important factor is still if your newspaper is any good.
ucaetano 8y ago
> On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The EU cares.
- vladd 8y ago
  I don't think EU will be special in the grand scheme of things. US legislation is already pending under draft form ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-privacy/prison-time-hefty-fines-for-data-privacy-violations-draft-u-s-senate-bill-idUSKCN1N65U2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-privacy/pris... ). To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    If sharing won't generate enough revenue to pay for the cost, why would you? You can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't pass regulations and then complain people don't want to do business with you.
    - vladd 8y ago
      > If sharing won't generate enough revenue to pay for the cost, why would you? Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit. Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.
      - mrep 8y ago
        1. There is a time value of money so if those costs are high enough, the meager returns can be less than they can get elsewhere and thus they shouldn't do it. 2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.

by vladd 8y ago

twblalock 8y ago

> The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal network cost (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership. The LA Times makes money from subscriptions. How many EU citizens do you think would purchase LA Times subscriptions if the site complied with the GDPR?

vladd 8y ago
Subscriptions is the end-result. To get there you need many things: brand, reputation, good crawling, incoming links from authoritative sites. All of these are predicated on the idea of a global Internet. If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems. A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Assuming what you say is true, would one expect prominent newspaper websites that are GDPR-compliant and accessible from the EU to be doing better financially than prominent newspaper websites that aren't? Is that the case?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    That's a good question. But is that data even available, especially in the format that would allow to tease out how much each aspect of the enterprise contributed to the financial situation? As an addition to the GP's argument, consider that these days, news stories are meant to be linked to on social media. People have friends and audiences in many places in the world. If someone with parts of their audience in Europe wants to share a news story, will they choose an article on GDPR-blocking site, or on a GDPR-compliant one?
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Not necessarily, since complying would likely yield only like 2% (number made up) extra returns on whatever their revenue already is. The most important factor is still if your newspaper is any good.

ucaetano 8y ago

> On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The EU cares.

vladd 8y ago
I don't think EU will be special in the grand scheme of things. US legislation is already pending under draft form ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-privacy/prison-time-hefty-fines-for-data-privacy-violations-draft-u-s-senate-bill-idUSKCN1N65U2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-privacy/pris... ). To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?
- ucaetano 8y ago
  If sharing won't generate enough revenue to pay for the cost, why would you? You can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't pass regulations and then complain people don't want to do business with you.
  - vladd 8y ago
    > If sharing won't generate enough revenue to pay for the cost, why would you? Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit. Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.
    - mrep 8y ago
      1. There is a time value of money so if those costs are high enough, the meager returns can be less than they can get elsewhere and thus they shouldn't do it. 2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.