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> Creating a youtube clone is much simpler than creating a youtube clone that doesn't brake any existing laws and regulations. Every additional regulation is ma

by ardy42 6y ago

> Creating a youtube clone is much simpler than creating a youtube clone that doesn't brake any existing laws and regulations. Every additional regulation is making it harder. Though, that's an exceedingly narrow perspective, judging things exclusively on the effect on startup costs and ignoring everything else. An increase in startup costs often is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve other goals. For instance, environmental regulations definitely make it more expensive and difficult to spin up many kinds of industrial plants (e.g. plant builders need to buy pollution control equipment and use more expensive processes that create less pollution), but it means less unhealthy air and rivers that can support life and don't catch on fire [1]. All the competition in the world won't achieve that. I think it's pretty useless to talk about "regulations" generically. It's really only helpful to talk about the costs and benefits of particular regulations, since that's the only context where you can figure out if the regulation is a net good or not. [1] https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire > Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years with thousand of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not have time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high, I shut it down. And of course the law was to protect users privacy from big evil companies. Guess who had money and resources to make sure they follow it. While that may have been a negative to you personally, the alternative is to allow those big companies to violate users' privacy in ways the law forbids, which is worse. Also, I'm a little skeptical that the GDPR would actually placed much if any burden on site such as yours.

comboy 6y ago
Environmental regulations are a good counterpoint and analogy. That shifts my perspective a bit, thanks. I admit food/safety/env regulations occupied a different pocket in my head and maybe it's less far away from this topic that I considered it to be. I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed. Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away. And wow, I think what we currently consider to be a polluted river is pretty clean in historical context.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed. But you can't connect abstract "regulations" to any kind of bigger context for a cost/benefit analysis. You can for a particular regulation or a particular set of regulations, though. I believed stuff like "regulations are only added never removed" and "government always grows, never shrinks," but that's empirically false. I read all about how the ICC's regulatory regime was awful in Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, but it turns out by that time it had already been abolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission.... I don't think it's a bad thing to periodically revisit regulations and revise/abolish them if they're no longer needed or can be improved. However, I think it a lot of cases, regulation is actually a set of solutions to problems, and repealing the regulation will just unsolve those problems. > Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away. IIRC, I think they do, but from my employer's GDPR training, all you'd have to do is not use the emails you collected for a purpose other than what you obtained consent for. E.g. if you collected them for account maintenance notifications, you can't turn around and build a marketing list from them without getting additional consent from the user.

by ardy42 6y ago

comboy 6y ago

Environmental regulations are a good counterpoint and analogy. That shifts my perspective a bit, thanks. I admit food/safety/env regulations occupied a different pocket in my head and maybe it's less far away from this topic that I considered it to be. I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed. Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away. And wow, I think what we currently consider to be a polluted river is pretty clean in historical context.

ardy42 6y ago
> I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed. But you can't connect abstract "regulations" to any kind of bigger context for a cost/benefit analysis. You can for a particular regulation or a particular set of regulations, though. I believed stuff like "regulations are only added never removed" and "government always grows, never shrinks," but that's empirically false. I read all about how the ICC's regulatory regime was awful in Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, but it turns out by that time it had already been abolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission.... I don't think it's a bad thing to periodically revisit regulations and revise/abolish them if they're no longer needed or can be improved. However, I think it a lot of cases, regulation is actually a set of solutions to problems, and repealing the regulation will just unsolve those problems. > Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away. IIRC, I think they do, but from my employer's GDPR training, all you'd have to do is not use the emails you collected for a purpose other than what you obtained consent for. E.g. if you collected them for account maintenance notifications, you can't turn around and build a marketing list from them without getting additional consent from the user.