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It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but ac

by maccard 11mo ago

It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with. The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges. EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to. Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use. On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.

NedF 11mo ago
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croon 11mo ago
Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
- throwaway48476 11mo ago
  A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
- maccard 11mo ago
  I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar. > I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
  - pasc1878 11mo ago
    Isn't that bad lawyers rather than bad rules?
    - maccard 11mo ago
      That’s the “you’re holding it wrong” defense. Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed. Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
    - whstl 11mo ago
      It definitely is. My experience with GDPR lawyers is that they treat every "cookie" as requiring consent purely because of lack of information and difficulty in fully assessing the full picture. In every other field, lawyers have to work together with experts. Technical experts must engage with the lawyers. This here is a failure from both sides.
    - cm2012 11mo ago
      If the rules are so opaque even professional lawyers are confused, thats a bad law.
jmward01 11mo ago
!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  > 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had the same but race-based. This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out. And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was necessary for safety or whatever else. There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like tax on windows. Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather than replaced or improved.
  - PxldLtd 11mo ago
    I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right regulation may be less in some cases.
    - maccard 11mo ago
      https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity I think this section on complexity sums it up really well whether you’re talking about code or laws
deleted 11mo ago
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graemep 11mo ago
> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges. Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc. Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price. One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.
- phatfish 11mo ago
  The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though. eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
  - immibis 11mo ago
    The fixed allowance is the same within the EU. It's not "no roaming charges", but it is that you must not be charged for occasional fair-use roaming (which is quite a lot of roaming). They can still ban you from roaming if you are living in a different country from your contract provider - you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark.
    - Nextgrid 11mo ago
      > you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark. You'd be surprised: I picked up a French SIM when I was on holiday there years ago on a very competitive package (including on roaming)... it's still working and I have been living full-time abroad. Is it "allowed"? Probably not. What are they gonna do about it, cut me off? Well godspeed and thanks for the years of cheap data.
bayindirh 11mo ago
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever. While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement. On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases. Even this is a win.
- 7bit 11mo ago
  > On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases. They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
  - troupo 11mo ago
    And thise settings originally were all toggled on because ads industry doesn't care
    - 7bit 11mo ago
      You're completely missing the point...
  - bayindirh 11mo ago
    Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been honored".
    - 11mo ago
dmpk2k 11mo ago
Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees. At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high. Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.
- cassepipe 11mo ago
  It reminds of the "The optimal amount of Fraud is non-zero" that once ended up on HN frontpage : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 I wonder, is there a legal principle to call-out someone who is trying to exploit the word of the law against the spirit of the law ?
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    That's called Lawful Evil in tabletop gaming circles. exploiting the law to your benefit, even if it goes against the original intent.
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  The textbook ideal regulation is zero in the same way that a textbook ideal operating system costs no ram, takes no cpu cycles, or consumes and disk space. Reality is more complicated. And once you incur the cost of reality there's probably some things that you should bundle with it for convenience and consistency.
  - bavell 11mo ago
    Beware the spherical cow-shaped orb of regulations!
immibis 11mo ago
I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad, which people who profit from deregulation would like you to think.
- roenxi 11mo ago
  > but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad Over-regulation implies that there is an optimal level of regulation that is non-zero. It just happens in practice that people don't complain when the level is pretty good and it is unusual for something to be under-regulated because the regulators are eager beavers for regulating things. The default state when there is a regulatory problem is usually over-regulation. Like when the thread ancestor tried to find an example of a situation moving to under-regulated the first thing that leapt to mind was roaming charges which it must be admitted is a pretty minor problem. But the first thing that leaps to mind for over-regulation is things like the article where the cost of something expensive doubled and a potentially good idea struggles to be born into the world.
- inglor_cz 11mo ago
  The Lower Thames Crossing project in the UK already generated 360000 pages of paper in the planing phase: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-crossing-timeline-of-the-proposed-uks-longest-road-tunnel-08-10-2024 https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-crossin... The Works in Progress magazine says that, in comparison, environmental assessment for an extension of a line of the Madrid metro, had only 19 pages. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-... Granted, this is not completely the same, but 360 000 pages is a LOT. Most civilizational infrastructure around the world was built using orders of magnitude less bureaucracy. That is overregulation for me, and I don't think this pushes any agenda except "360 000 pages for a tunnel is freaking insane".
lopis 11mo ago
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever. Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not strong specially for small companies, basically any company could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough. It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2 buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to block European traffic.
- chemotaxis 11mo ago
  > Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. The question here isn't if it cost companies money. It did. It's whether it was a good law. It wasn't, because compliance generated no benefit to anyone. You seem to be saying that it was a good law because it could have been a good law if written differently.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >because compliance generated no benefit to anyone. if you don't value privacy over an extra click or two, then I can see why you'd think that. But if that's the case we wouldn't also be so adamant against mass surveillance. Which is it?
    - bavell 11mo ago
      Was any privacy actually gained?
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields You absolutely can, though, as long as you leave everything exactly the way you found it and don't actually walk right through my garden. You can in fact actually walk right through my garden if you ask first and get permission, but that holds true anywhere.
- maccard 11mo ago
  I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat their land and access by default. They could provide gates and come after people for not respecting their land, but instead they (usually) provide alternative access which actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam. I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field that you accessed it kept a bull in that field. [0] https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-shut-at-iconic-landmark-fanads-great-arch/ https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-shut-...
- thebruce87m 11mo ago
  Take only pictures, leave only footprints and jobbies.
  - ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
    Aha, the North Coast 500 Motorhome mentality. Don't buy a thing, do 15mph regardless of how many cars are behind you, tip your chemical toilet right outside people's houses. Next year we're going to have fully restored WW2 gun emplacements along it.
HenriTEL 11mo ago
About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a regulation issue. For >90% of the websites the "reject all" option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.
- DrewADesign 11mo ago
  Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those are really the only user experience things that would be obvious in most instances — everything else is just pure data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the choices, but that’s not the normal behavior.
  - HenriTEL 11mo ago
    Login fall under the strictly necessary category and does not require consent for cookie storage under GDPR.
- whatevaa 11mo ago
  Cookie banners usually refer to pre GDPR, where there is no reject, just info that site uses cookies. Useless info.
prophesi 11mo ago
Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing. IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
- sophrosyne42 11mo ago
  Those decades were an era that followed massive airline deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation being less regulation.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is due to the practices adopted within that regulatory environment. If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I guarantee with absolute, utter certainty, that aviation's safety performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
      I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
      - ryandrake 11mo ago
        I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a burden when it comes to bringing new technology to market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down without regulation, but on the balance, would all the other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines, manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result in increased safety overall? I'm not going to live 100 years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that it won't given how every other business in every other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for the sake of profits.
cassepipe 11mo ago
I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than overregulation ? To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for medical devices/complements ?
Frost1x 11mo ago
Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on. Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive. That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical. I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.
- SubiculumCode 11mo ago
  It also allows corps to lock out competitors who cannot afford to wade through regulatory hell.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    It's a double edged sword. It creates a floor but also lowers the ceiling so a company can't lock out competitors through brute force. it's best to introduce such regulation before we have to worry about monopolies, though.
- 11mo ago
gjsman-1000 11mo ago
> It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation. A distinction without almost any practical difference. If this isn’t overregulation, how would you define it? What law would you ever look at and say, “that’s overregulation”?
quotemstr 11mo ago
So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good regulations either 1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's immediate personal interest to do X), or 2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the valley between (which corporations won't do on their own). I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g. let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state control anyway. Doesn't help. The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the cookies. Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates. Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it. Credit where it's due for finding their gonads. The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal. You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost all the time! In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal, resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more vulnerable. The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social desirability bias in particular. Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some way. All regulations should have - automatic sunsets, - public comment periods, - judicial and legislative review mechanisms, - variance and exception mechanisms, and - the lightest possible touch. Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.
cowpig 11mo ago
A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government. So many of these SV entrepreneurs are great at designing systems and processes, and great at finding creative solutions to complex problems. If we all thought of `designing great regulation` as something to aspire to, then we'd see a bunch of interesting HN discussions around the details of new policy, predictions around their effects, etc. Instead you get these extremely shallow articles that read like a sullen teenager complaining about how they didn't get what they wanted and a comment section discussing whether or not `regulations==bad`. I'm dying to find a community of engineers who have good-faith, informed discussions about policy. If anyone knows of such a group or place, please let me know.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  > A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government. This is strongly aided by plenty of examples of regulations that just get in the way of people who know how to do something.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    And I think the winds are changing when seeing examples of deregulation that instead make the people's lives worse instead of better. The people who "know how to do something" sure aren't using it for the public good.
- sophrosyne42 11mo ago
  Whether it's propaganda or not, it is a good heuristic supported by nuanced policy analysis. The switch to more knee-jerk sympathy towards regulation, on the other hand, has much more to do with propaganda than with any kind of credible analysis.
claw-el 11mo ago
A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A regulation that was good when created could change to bad due to circumstances or new innovation introduced. Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for introducing the innovation to the market. The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.
sophrosyne42 11mo ago
All regulation increases costs. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad. And if you consider it good, recall that there can be too much of a good thing.
mrighele 11mo ago
Every regulation has a cost, even the good ones. The biggest cost is that they slow down the ability of people and companies to do business, which come out as a lower economic growth. Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence. Some regulation is fine, but it should be really a fraction of what we currently have in Europe. (Somewhat unrelated, but the EU's situation reminds me of "The End of Eternity" by Asimov, sans the time traveling)
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence. Meamwhile, US's GDP exploded and the bust cycles are more or less screwing over 2 generations from such gains. GDP is completely divorced from how the people are doing these days.
phendrenad2 11mo ago
Tomato, tomato. I think the problem is, much like Google engineers get promoted by shipping features (even if no one uses them), politicians get ahead by shipping laws, even if they're ineffective or cause more harm than good, so long as they can convince enough voters that it was a good thing (hence the proliferation of bills with names like Ultra-Triple-Plus-Good-For-The-Children-Act").
maerF0x0 11mo ago
> Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. You missed a key component - Cost. It must not only work, be enforceable, but it also must cost less than alternative options and the value of the externality it's aiming to fix. Solving ProblemA could be agreeable. But if ProblemA causes $100 a year in problems, and the regulated fix is $110 then it's not a good regulation. If the Regulated fix is $110 and there is a market solution for $75, then it's not good regulation. If the regulated fix $100 but it is over-applied into 2x as many scenarios, then it's not good regulation. Often the government loses out not in it having bad ideas, but that they break the flexibility of better options that require nuance and context to see.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
Most regulations are misregulation. Many regulations are malregulation. The people who write regulations, through incompetence or malevolence it matters not which, prefer malregulation. Those that have blind faith in regulation, especially from their favored party, cheer them on and demand more. Humanity yearns to live in a world where the HOA busybody measures their grass with a ruler at 7am on a Sunday morning and noisily knocks on their door to inform them that if they do not get the extra 3/4" mowed within 48 hours a $175/day fine plus interest will apply.
w10-1 11mo ago
"Bad" regulation just raises the question what would be better for all concerned. Sometimes that means reducing the weight and impact of a concern (redefining the problem), but more often it means a different approach or more information. In this case, pumping first-ever possible toxins into the ground could be toxic, destructive, and irreversible, in ways that are hard to test or understand in a field with few experts. The benefit is mainly a new financial quirk, to meet carbon accounting with uncertain gains for the environment. It's not hard to see why there's a delay, which would only be made worse with an oppositional company on a short financial leash pushing the burden back onto regulators. The regulation that needs attention is not the unique weird case, but the slow expansion of under-represented, high-frequency or high-traffic - exactly like the cellular roaming charges or housing permits or cookies. It's all-too-easy to learn to live with small burdens.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever If it was implemented a decade earlier before Web 2.0, it would have been effective suppression given what we know of click through rates. Adding an extra click (even if most agree) would just turn people to the competition. in 2017 though, a lot of the internet already consolidated to a dozen websites, which were too sticky to let a button disrupt them. It wasn't strong enough for the new environment.
georgefrowny 11mo ago
> They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with Without wishing to derail from the main point, they are very easy to comply with, but they have broadly not been complied with. Any site with PII collection where the "deny optional cookies" button isn't right there, and not deemphasized, is conducting illegal data collection. But as the enforcement is carried out by national agencies who appear not to have given any shits for a decade, everyone has been getting away with making users jump though stupid hoops (that not only are not required by the law as the sites imply, but are actually outright forbidden) like navigating a dark pattern minigame or outright cunty behaviour like making the "deny" button hang with a spinner indefinitely.

by maccard 11mo ago

NedF 11mo ago

[dead]

croon 11mo ago

Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.

throwaway48476 11mo ago
A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
maccard 11mo ago
I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar. > I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
- pasc1878 11mo ago
  Isn't that bad lawyers rather than bad rules?
  - maccard 11mo ago
    That’s the “you’re holding it wrong” defense. Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed. Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
  - whstl 11mo ago
    It definitely is. My experience with GDPR lawyers is that they treat every "cookie" as requiring consent purely because of lack of information and difficulty in fully assessing the full picture. In every other field, lawyers have to work together with experts. Technical experts must engage with the lawyers. This here is a failure from both sides.
  - cm2012 11mo ago
    If the rules are so opaque even professional lawyers are confused, thats a bad law.

jmward01 11mo ago

!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.

purple_turtle 11mo ago
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had the same but race-based. This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out. And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was necessary for safety or whatever else. There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like tax on windows. Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather than replaced or improved.
- PxldLtd 11mo ago
  I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right regulation may be less in some cases.
  - maccard 11mo ago
    https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity I think this section on complexity sums it up really well whether you’re talking about code or laws

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

graemep 11mo ago

> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges. Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc. Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price. One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.

phatfish 11mo ago
The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though. eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
- immibis 11mo ago
  The fixed allowance is the same within the EU. It's not "no roaming charges", but it is that you must not be charged for occasional fair-use roaming (which is quite a lot of roaming). They can still ban you from roaming if you are living in a different country from your contract provider - you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark.
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    > you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then move to Denmark. You'd be surprised: I picked up a French SIM when I was on holiday there years ago on a very competitive package (including on roaming)... it's still working and I have been living full-time abroad. Is it "allowed"? Probably not. What are they gonna do about it, cut me off? Well godspeed and thanks for the years of cheap data.

bayindirh 11mo ago

> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever. While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement. On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases. Even this is a win.

7bit 11mo ago
> On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases. They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
- troupo 11mo ago
  And thise settings originally were all toggled on because ads industry doesn't care
  - 7bit 11mo ago
    You're completely missing the point...
- bayindirh 11mo ago
  Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been honored".
  - 11mo ago

dmpk2k 11mo ago

Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees. At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high. Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.

cassepipe 11mo ago
It reminds of the "The optimal amount of Fraud is non-zero" that once ended up on HN frontpage : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 I wonder, is there a legal principle to call-out someone who is trying to exploit the word of the law against the spirit of the law ?
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  That's called Lawful Evil in tabletop gaming circles. exploiting the law to your benefit, even if it goes against the original intent.
potato3732842 11mo ago
The textbook ideal regulation is zero in the same way that a textbook ideal operating system costs no ram, takes no cpu cycles, or consumes and disk space. Reality is more complicated. And once you incur the cost of reality there's probably some things that you should bundle with it for convenience and consistency.
- bavell 11mo ago
  Beware the spherical cow-shaped orb of regulations!

immibis 11mo ago

I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad, which people who profit from deregulation would like you to think.

roenxi 11mo ago
> but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad Over-regulation implies that there is an optimal level of regulation that is non-zero. It just happens in practice that people don't complain when the level is pretty good and it is unusual for something to be under-regulated because the regulators are eager beavers for regulating things. The default state when there is a regulatory problem is usually over-regulation. Like when the thread ancestor tried to find an example of a situation moving to under-regulated the first thing that leapt to mind was roaming charges which it must be admitted is a pretty minor problem. But the first thing that leaps to mind for over-regulation is things like the article where the cost of something expensive doubled and a potentially good idea struggles to be born into the world.
inglor_cz 11mo ago
The Lower Thames Crossing project in the UK already generated 360000 pages of paper in the planing phase: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-crossing-timeline-of-the-proposed-uks-longest-road-tunnel-08-10-2024 https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-crossin... The Works in Progress magazine says that, in comparison, environmental assessment for an extension of a line of the Madrid metro, had only 19 pages. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-cheaply https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-metro-... Granted, this is not completely the same, but 360 000 pages is a LOT. Most civilizational infrastructure around the world was built using orders of magnitude less bureaucracy. That is overregulation for me, and I don't think this pushes any agenda except "360 000 pages for a tunnel is freaking insane".

lopis 11mo ago

> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever. Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not strong specially for small companies, basically any company could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough. It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2 buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to block European traffic.

chemotaxis 11mo ago
> Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. The question here isn't if it cost companies money. It did. It's whether it was a good law. It wasn't, because compliance generated no benefit to anyone. You seem to be saying that it was a good law because it could have been a good law if written differently.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >because compliance generated no benefit to anyone. if you don't value privacy over an extra click or two, then I can see why you'd think that. But if that's the case we wouldn't also be so adamant against mass surveillance. Which is it?
  - bavell 11mo ago
    Was any privacy actually gained?

ErroneousBosh 11mo ago

> In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields You absolutely can, though, as long as you leave everything exactly the way you found it and don't actually walk right through my garden. You can in fact actually walk right through my garden if you ask first and get permission, but that holds true anywhere.

maccard 11mo ago
I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat their land and access by default. They could provide gates and come after people for not respecting their land, but instead they (usually) provide alternative access which actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam. I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field that you accessed it kept a bull in that field. [0] https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-shut-at-iconic-landmark-fanads-great-arch/ https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-shut-...
thebruce87m 11mo ago
Take only pictures, leave only footprints and jobbies.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
  Aha, the North Coast 500 Motorhome mentality. Don't buy a thing, do 15mph regardless of how many cars are behind you, tip your chemical toilet right outside people's houses. Next year we're going to have fully restored WW2 gun emplacements along it.

HenriTEL 11mo ago

About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a regulation issue. For >90% of the websites the "reject all" option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.

DrewADesign 11mo ago
Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those are really the only user experience things that would be obvious in most instances — everything else is just pure data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the choices, but that’s not the normal behavior.
- HenriTEL 11mo ago
  Login fall under the strictly necessary category and does not require consent for cookie storage under GDPR.
whatevaa 11mo ago
Cookie banners usually refer to pre GDPR, where there is no reject, just info that site uses cookies. Useless info.

prophesi 11mo ago

Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing. IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.

sophrosyne42 11mo ago
Those decades were an era that followed massive airline deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation being less regulation.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is due to the practices adopted within that regulatory environment. If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I guarantee with absolute, utter certainty, that aviation's safety performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
    I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
    - ryandrake 11mo ago
      I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a burden when it comes to bringing new technology to market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down without regulation, but on the balance, would all the other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines, manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result in increased safety overall? I'm not going to live 100 years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that it won't given how every other business in every other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for the sake of profits.

cassepipe 11mo ago

I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than overregulation ? To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for medical devices/complements ?

Frost1x 11mo ago

Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on. Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive. That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical. I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.

SubiculumCode 11mo ago
It also allows corps to lock out competitors who cannot afford to wade through regulatory hell.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  It's a double edged sword. It creates a floor but also lowers the ceiling so a company can't lock out competitors through brute force. it's best to introduce such regulation before we have to worry about monopolies, though.
11mo ago

gjsman-1000 11mo ago

> It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation. A distinction without almost any practical difference. If this isn’t overregulation, how would you define it? What law would you ever look at and say, “that’s overregulation”?

quotemstr 11mo ago

So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good regulations either 1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's immediate personal interest to do X), or 2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the valley between (which corporations won't do on their own). I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g. let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state control anyway. Doesn't help. The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the cookies. Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates. Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it. Credit where it's due for finding their gonads. The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal. You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost all the time! In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal, resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more vulnerable. The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social desirability bias in particular. Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some way. All regulations should have - automatic sunsets, - public comment periods, - judicial and legislative review mechanisms, - variance and exception mechanisms, and - the lightest possible touch. Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.

cowpig 11mo ago

A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government. So many of these SV entrepreneurs are great at designing systems and processes, and great at finding creative solutions to complex problems. If we all thought of `designing great regulation` as something to aspire to, then we'd see a bunch of interesting HN discussions around the details of new policy, predictions around their effects, etc. Instead you get these extremely shallow articles that read like a sullen teenager complaining about how they didn't get what they wanted and a comment section discussing whether or not `regulations==bad`. I'm dying to find a community of engineers who have good-faith, informed discussions about policy. If anyone knows of such a group or place, please let me know.

bluGill 11mo ago
> A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the government. This is strongly aided by plenty of examples of regulations that just get in the way of people who know how to do something.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  And I think the winds are changing when seeing examples of deregulation that instead make the people's lives worse instead of better. The people who "know how to do something" sure aren't using it for the public good.
sophrosyne42 11mo ago
Whether it's propaganda or not, it is a good heuristic supported by nuanced policy analysis. The switch to more knee-jerk sympathy towards regulation, on the other hand, has much more to do with propaganda than with any kind of credible analysis.

claw-el 11mo ago

A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A regulation that was good when created could change to bad due to circumstances or new innovation introduced. Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for introducing the innovation to the market. The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.

sophrosyne42 11mo ago

All regulation increases costs. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad. And if you consider it good, recall that there can be too much of a good thing.

mrighele 11mo ago

Every regulation has a cost, even the good ones. The biggest cost is that they slow down the ability of people and companies to do business, which come out as a lower economic growth. Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence. Some regulation is fine, but it should be really a fraction of what we currently have in Europe. (Somewhat unrelated, but the EU's situation reminds me of "The End of Eternity" by Asimov, sans the time traveling)

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence. Meamwhile, US's GDP exploded and the bust cycles are more or less screwing over 2 generations from such gains. GDP is completely divorced from how the people are doing these days.

phendrenad2 11mo ago

Tomato, tomato. I think the problem is, much like Google engineers get promoted by shipping features (even if no one uses them), politicians get ahead by shipping laws, even if they're ineffective or cause more harm than good, so long as they can convince enough voters that it was a good thing (hence the proliferation of bills with names like Ultra-Triple-Plus-Good-For-The-Children-Act").

maerF0x0 11mo ago

> Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. You missed a key component - Cost. It must not only work, be enforceable, but it also must cost less than alternative options and the value of the externality it's aiming to fix. Solving ProblemA could be agreeable. But if ProblemA causes $100 a year in problems, and the regulated fix is $110 then it's not a good regulation. If the Regulated fix is $110 and there is a market solution for $75, then it's not good regulation. If the regulated fix $100 but it is over-applied into 2x as many scenarios, then it's not good regulation. Often the government loses out not in it having bad ideas, but that they break the flexibility of better options that require nuance and context to see.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago

Most regulations are misregulation. Many regulations are malregulation. The people who write regulations, through incompetence or malevolence it matters not which, prefer malregulation. Those that have blind faith in regulation, especially from their favored party, cheer them on and demand more. Humanity yearns to live in a world where the HOA busybody measures their grass with a ruler at 7am on a Sunday morning and noisily knocks on their door to inform them that if they do not get the extra 3/4" mowed within 48 hours a $175/day fine plus interest will apply.

w10-1 11mo ago

"Bad" regulation just raises the question what would be better for all concerned. Sometimes that means reducing the weight and impact of a concern (redefining the problem), but more often it means a different approach or more information. In this case, pumping first-ever possible toxins into the ground could be toxic, destructive, and irreversible, in ways that are hard to test or understand in a field with few experts. The benefit is mainly a new financial quirk, to meet carbon accounting with uncertain gains for the environment. It's not hard to see why there's a delay, which would only be made worse with an oppositional company on a short financial leash pushing the burden back onto regulators. The regulation that needs attention is not the unique weird case, but the slow expansion of under-represented, high-frequency or high-traffic - exactly like the cellular roaming charges or housing permits or cookies. It's all-too-easy to learn to live with small burdens.

johnnyanmac 11mo ago

>They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever If it was implemented a decade earlier before Web 2.0, it would have been effective suppression given what we know of click through rates. Adding an extra click (even if most agree) would just turn people to the competition. in 2017 though, a lot of the internet already consolidated to a dozen websites, which were too sticky to let a button disrupt them. It wasn't strong enough for the new environment.

georgefrowny 11mo ago

> They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with Without wishing to derail from the main point, they are very easy to comply with, but they have broadly not been complied with. Any site with PII collection where the "deny optional cookies" button isn't right there, and not deemphasized, is conducting illegal data collection. But as the enforcement is carried out by national agencies who appear not to have given any shits for a decade, everyone has been getting away with making users jump though stupid hoops (that not only are not required by the law as the sites imply, but are actually outright forbidden) like navigating a dark pattern minigame or outright cunty behaviour like making the "deny" button hang with a spinner indefinitely.