Some good points, though most of the problems are pretty well known, so it would be more helpful to try coming up with solutions. I think the real insight is in

Some good points, though most of the problems are pretty well known, so it would be more helpful to try coming up with solutions. I think the real insight is in the first section: > ...so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate. Advertising is basically a moloch trap, so it probably has to be solved by regulation to fix the incentives. Solving these kinds of problems well is pretty hard, so I think it shouldn't be surprising that they are not solved yet. > GDPR is doing an excellent job destroying some of the most privacy-invasive practices of the adtech industry I disagree pretty strongly. I plan to write a bit more detail about this at some point but shortly I think GDPR is a net negative. It places too much burden on the user, while the burden should be on the adtech companies. I also don't like how it bundles all the surveilance stuff under a single consent (per company). This is giving the user a choice to accept what they hardly know the real consequences of and also giving the companies a strong incentive to manipulate the user to get that consent. In terms of fixing incentives, GDPR did pretty much the opposite. It's also incredibly vague, so it's a nightmare to develop around, and limits legitimate use cases. The end result is that we still get surveilled, but we now also have to click through cookie banners and consent forms and small businesses have to spend enormous resources to deal with it even though it was supposed to be a measure to tackle big tech companies. Worse than that, walled gardens like Facebook and Google have advantage over normal websites, because they have to ask for consent only once during registration.