While ultimately a ban on sharing personal information for commercial reasons would be good in the long term, in the short term (many years, certainly, maybe fo

While ultimately a ban on sharing personal information for commercial reasons would be good in the long term, in the short term (many years, certainly, maybe forever) it would serve to entrench existing big tech companies. Google, for example, doesn’t directly share personal information with advertisers. Where side-channels exist that would enable advertisers to extract data from Google, Google has the scale and the resources to create technical solutions like having advertisers send their entire software stack to run in Google datacenters so that Google can ensure nothing is being logged, and force advertisers to comply. Facebook, Amazon, and Apple likely have the resources and scale to pull of the same feats. Anybody else would be put out of business. Hardly a mandate that would make sense in the context of encouraging competition.