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Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses. They aren’t in fact free.
by bradleyjg 5y ago
Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses.
They aren’t in fact free.
- PennRobotics 5y agoWords are free. Stop saying banned customers are great. This is my argument.
- jsbdk 5y agoWriting words takes time and effort. Time and effort cost money.
- PennRobotics 5y ago%s/are important to us/cannot view this content/g
- koheripbal 5y agoThe frustration in the EU is the inability to access the content, not the verbiage of the deny message.
- zinekeller 5y agoThe user here just wants honesty - a "As a local American* media, we cannot afford the additional costs of GDPR compliance. As such, this content is not available to EU/EEA." That's it. Not "We are evaluating options to deliver your favorite [sic] content to EEA." when they already decided to no longer server Europeans. * "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.
- drstewart 5y agoOr maybe they are planning to give you localised [sic] content at some point and just haven't prioritised [sic] it yet?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- denton-scratch 5y agoThis is trivially easy for "local american media" to solve: if you can't manage consent, then stop depositing cookies on European computers.
- zinekeller 5y ago> then stop depositing cookies on European computers. You've got GDPR super wrong. If you think GDPR was only about cookies, you've got it wrong (but that's where Google et al. focuses your attention to be honest- disinformation about GDPR and focusing on cookies even when cookies is NOT what GDPR is about).
- denton-scratch 5y agoI know how to suck eggs already; I was a GDPR compliance officer at my last firm. It's about privacy and data protection; cookies that don't violate privacy or track users, and are needed for the proper operation of the site, don't need consent. The subject is silly banners. Those are nearly always about cookies, or "We won't serve you because you're in Europe, and GDPR" (and the latter violates the GDPR). My view is that these banners are partly because some businesses think that by annoying users enough, they can get European users to reverse the GDPR. Ain't gonna happen.
- dijit 5y agoCorrect. But the axiom is misguided. Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary. You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety. But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.
- bradleyjg 5y agoI’m not an anarchist, I just don’t think people always realize or recognize that there will be downsides as well as upsides to the latest “sounds good” piece of legislation.
- dijit 5y agoSure. But the way you framed it makes it sound as if the legislation is a net bad thing. But when I get a GDPR block warning I’m actually happy because it means that company can’t operate without mishandling or selling my data. — sure the cost for them is higher, but it’s not unreasonable. I think a lot of people unduly criticise the GDPR because there is an industry building that requires fear mongering to get its way.
- eitland 5y ago> You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety. > But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that. Furthermore, here in Europe everyone pays for health care for everyone to some degree so allowing people to do outrageously stupid stuff ends up increasing the tax for everyone.
- denton-scratch 5y agoOf course regulations are not without cost to those being regulated. Lawmakers and voters would prefer not to have regulations; they would prefer if businesses just did the right thing. But they don't, so they have to be regulated. And nobody wants the cost of that regulation to fall on voters; so it falls on businesses. Hey, who makes money out of these websites? Voters? Nope. Why should anyone but businesses pay the costs of regulating businesses?
- bradleyjg 5y agoIt is magical thinking to believe that a law can impose a cost on businesses and it will come straight out of the pockets of the owners of that business. There’s an entire sub-field of economics devoted to studying where the incidence of taxes and regulations fall, but voters don’t care to read the literature. If it sounds like we are sticking it to the people that their oversimplified model of the world has decided are bad guys, they are all for it.
- denton-scratch 5y agoThat may well be "magical thinking"; but nobody said that costs imposed on businesses don't deplete consumers' wallets, eventually. There's a libertarian, anti-regulation line of thought to which some USAians seem to be particularly prone. Europe, and especially the EU, runs on regulations. Without all kinds of regulations, the EU would fall apart. Most people here understand that. They also understand that imposing costs on businesses results in marginally more expensive products (although GDPR compliance isn't expensive, especially if your gesture towards the GDPR is just a cookie wall).
- bradleyjg 5y agoEuropeans would rather have the GDPR than be able to read American news sites. American news sites would rather block European readers than comply with the GDPR. Everything is working as intended, no?
- 5y ago