9 ms·

That's one way of paying taxes ...

by neals 5y ago

AmericanChopper 5y ago
In reality, it’s one way of implementing a tariff.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  As long as fines are priced into the cost of doing shady business they'll be paid. Hopefully they will rise enough so that it's no longer profitable to risk them - we'll see then if the 'tariffs' as you call them will continue or will they stop
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    They will never stop, because the regulations are written so broadly that essentially any business could be found in breach of them. The EU’s service sector is massively uncompetitive, and most of its regulation of this sector has been designed as either a tariff or just a general barrier to trade. In every GDPR related thread people complain that the law is not achieving its objectives (which you’re almost doing here also, with your “maybe it will eventually work” comment), but the law is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s implementing trade barriers (a generally unpopular type of policy), and generating popular support for them (by dressing them up as privacy regulations).
    - ithinkso 5y ago
      > In every GDPR related thread people complain that the law is not achieving its objectives (which you’re almost doing here also, with your “maybe it will eventually work” comment), but the law is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. I think you might be misinterpreting those comments. It's not that hard to follow GDPR, what's hard is to work around it. If you want to do exactly what you did before but you want to weasel your way around GDPR it's not impossible, unfortunately, but harder. And people are complaining about it not achieving its objectives precisely because you can weasel your way around and that's why we have those stupid 'Accept all cookies' huge buttons and 'Change settings' small ones, that later change to another big 'Accept all' and even smaller 'reject'. Stop selling user's data without their consent and GDPR is a breeze to be complaint with. Try still selling it, eliciting the consent via dark patters, and complain how hard and complicated it is.
      - AmericanChopper 5y ago
        > Stop selling user's data without their consent and GDPR is a breeze to be complaint with. Try to still sell that, eliciting the consent via dark patters, and complain how hard and complicated it is. So it should be safe to entirely dismiss your comment on the basis that Amazon in this case hasn’t even been accused of providing data to a 3rd party, let alone selling it?
        ithinkso 5y ago
        Selling/collecting - I'm glad that GDPR seems to treat them at almost equal footing, even harder to prosecute if you leave a huge backdoor It's my data - fuck off, I'm interested in the business you're offering, not increasing your bottom-line at the expense of my privacy and especially I don't want to have a profile of me created just because you can. If I haven't consented to it, you won't do that - simple as that
        AmericanChopper 5y ago
        It hasn’t been accused of the wrongful collection of data either. Not that hard to follow for sure…
    - frockington1 5y ago
      The EU's service sector will continue its downward spiral as these regulations increase. They are building an ever widening mote for US Tech giants and calling it a win for the people
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
Ironically, you may not realize how accurate that is because the amount that will end up being paid is far far less after all the bribing and court cases and buying off/buttering up politicians and judges, etc. It would be worth it for some government accountability group to track just how much the difference is between the fine levied and the amount paid. It's literally never the amount published so the people are assuaged.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  > you may not realize how accurate that is because the amount that will end up being paid is far far less after all the bribing Sources? (Actually curious if there is some published statistics) Bureaucracy with all it's faults still has quite a lot of checks and balances that have to add up so I wonder how many appeal results are there that are not as interesting as the first fines reported
yourenotsmart 5y ago
While from purely monetary perspective this seems like it tips the scales more to a balance, from systematic perspective, this is more corruption on top of corruption. You have politicians colluding with businesses to save them a billion in taxes, contrary to the intent of the law. Then you have the same politicians colluding to basically go pirate and surprise fine the same business a billion for some semi-arbitrary violation out of nowhere. There's no system here, no law, just both sides one-upping themselves in being absolute fucking assholes. The result is instability and environment not conductive to businesses or the people that makes them up. Think about it, how come everything is fine, and then out of the blue you get sued for a billion? Was there a warning? Was there a grace period, a chance to rectify things? No. This is not law enforcement, this is law abuse. It's like the US cops that stop random cars, and if the driver carries cash, they just take it under bullshit pretense. We're moving towards an anarchy, under the guise of justice.
- ectopod 5y ago
  Do you think Amazon wasn't using personal data contrary to European data protection law?
  - saddlerustle 5y ago
    Do you think European data protection law actually prevents much tangible consumer harm?
    - chopin 5y ago
      The law presumably would if it was properly enforced.
      - yourenotsmart 5y ago
        Do you know what the phrase "throw the book at them" means. It means you have a rich set of laws, which punish various offenses which look fine on paper, but in practice everyone violates just to do their regular job, so they're widely not enforced. But if you want to fuck someone in particular, you can easily find them in violation of a dozen or two of them, and put them in jail for a long time or fine them substantial amounts. You threw the book at them. This is basically what most of EU's data privacy, cookie and so on laws are about, in practice. It's interesting how you can take a collection of seemingly or genuinely good-intentioned rules and use them to basically rule as a king, but there you go. And it's not a good thing.
amelius 5y ago
> That's one way of paying taxes ... But the EU hasn't figured out how to apply this technique to Apple yet ...

That's one way of paying taxes ...

by neals 5y ago

That's one way of paying taxes ...

AmericanChopper 5y ago

In reality, it’s one way of implementing a tariff.

ithinkso 5y ago
As long as fines are priced into the cost of doing shady business they'll be paid. Hopefully they will rise enough so that it's no longer profitable to risk them - we'll see then if the 'tariffs' as you call them will continue or will they stop
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  They will never stop, because the regulations are written so broadly that essentially any business could be found in breach of them. The EU’s service sector is massively uncompetitive, and most of its regulation of this sector has been designed as either a tariff or just a general barrier to trade. In every GDPR related thread people complain that the law is not achieving its objectives (which you’re almost doing here also, with your “maybe it will eventually work” comment), but the law is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s implementing trade barriers (a generally unpopular type of policy), and generating popular support for them (by dressing them up as privacy regulations).
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    > In every GDPR related thread people complain that the law is not achieving its objectives (which you’re almost doing here also, with your “maybe it will eventually work” comment), but the law is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. I think you might be misinterpreting those comments. It's not that hard to follow GDPR, what's hard is to work around it. If you want to do exactly what you did before but you want to weasel your way around GDPR it's not impossible, unfortunately, but harder. And people are complaining about it not achieving its objectives precisely because you can weasel your way around and that's why we have those stupid 'Accept all cookies' huge buttons and 'Change settings' small ones, that later change to another big 'Accept all' and even smaller 'reject'. Stop selling user's data without their consent and GDPR is a breeze to be complaint with. Try still selling it, eliciting the consent via dark patters, and complain how hard and complicated it is.
    - AmericanChopper 5y ago
      > Stop selling user's data without their consent and GDPR is a breeze to be complaint with. Try to still sell that, eliciting the consent via dark patters, and complain how hard and complicated it is. So it should be safe to entirely dismiss your comment on the basis that Amazon in this case hasn’t even been accused of providing data to a 3rd party, let alone selling it?
      - ithinkso 5y ago
        Selling/collecting - I'm glad that GDPR seems to treat them at almost equal footing, even harder to prosecute if you leave a huge backdoor It's my data - fuck off, I'm interested in the business you're offering, not increasing your bottom-line at the expense of my privacy and especially I don't want to have a profile of me created just because you can. If I haven't consented to it, you won't do that - simple as that
        AmericanChopper 5y ago
        It hasn’t been accused of the wrongful collection of data either. Not that hard to follow for sure…
  - frockington1 5y ago
    The EU's service sector will continue its downward spiral as these regulations increase. They are building an ever widening mote for US Tech giants and calling it a win for the people

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

Ironically, you may not realize how accurate that is because the amount that will end up being paid is far far less after all the bribing and court cases and buying off/buttering up politicians and judges, etc. It would be worth it for some government accountability group to track just how much the difference is between the fine levied and the amount paid. It's literally never the amount published so the people are assuaged.

ithinkso 5y ago
> you may not realize how accurate that is because the amount that will end up being paid is far far less after all the bribing Sources? (Actually curious if there is some published statistics) Bureaucracy with all it's faults still has quite a lot of checks and balances that have to add up so I wonder how many appeal results are there that are not as interesting as the first fines reported

yourenotsmart 5y ago

While from purely monetary perspective this seems like it tips the scales more to a balance, from systematic perspective, this is more corruption on top of corruption. You have politicians colluding with businesses to save them a billion in taxes, contrary to the intent of the law. Then you have the same politicians colluding to basically go pirate and surprise fine the same business a billion for some semi-arbitrary violation out of nowhere. There's no system here, no law, just both sides one-upping themselves in being absolute fucking assholes. The result is instability and environment not conductive to businesses or the people that makes them up. Think about it, how come everything is fine, and then out of the blue you get sued for a billion? Was there a warning? Was there a grace period, a chance to rectify things? No. This is not law enforcement, this is law abuse. It's like the US cops that stop random cars, and if the driver carries cash, they just take it under bullshit pretense. We're moving towards an anarchy, under the guise of justice.

ectopod 5y ago
Do you think Amazon wasn't using personal data contrary to European data protection law?
- saddlerustle 5y ago
  Do you think European data protection law actually prevents much tangible consumer harm?
  - chopin 5y ago
    The law presumably would if it was properly enforced.
    - yourenotsmart 5y ago
      Do you know what the phrase "throw the book at them" means. It means you have a rich set of laws, which punish various offenses which look fine on paper, but in practice everyone violates just to do their regular job, so they're widely not enforced. But if you want to fuck someone in particular, you can easily find them in violation of a dozen or two of them, and put them in jail for a long time or fine them substantial amounts. You threw the book at them. This is basically what most of EU's data privacy, cookie and so on laws are about, in practice. It's interesting how you can take a collection of seemingly or genuinely good-intentioned rules and use them to basically rule as a king, but there you go. And it's not a good thing.

amelius 5y ago

> That's one way of paying taxes ... But the EU hasn't figured out how to apply this technique to Apple yet ...