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Comment by nannePOPI | Hacker News Reader

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GDPR is not about stopping the spread of free information. its about personal data. You are completely mis-characterising the nature of the GDPR legislation.

Regulators are not enemies. Regulators are the enemies of established companies, and operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight, and are imposed to create oversight over entities who are not equilibriating in favour of wider society. They are anti monopolist.

Your response is really strange in this regard. Freedom of information is not an absolute. You have a right to privacy as an individual. If you hold certain digital assets like domain names, you are losing some of that privacy to have a WHOIS record, and GDPR is restoring some of it. If you browse web pages and entities hold onto your cookies and create value by integrating over sets of cookies at different websites GDPR is returning to you, the individual, some control over that.

That sort of democratic heroism is far from certain. "Regulators" and legislation are just as likely (or perhaps more) to be captured by and/or favor large incumbents as to combat them. By its very nature regulation favors established companies, who can afford better to pay for the burden.

And yet, the result of our regulatory system has been net positive to an extreme degree - you argument is trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. The very nature of political development in the western world has, for the last few centuries, been as much about how to put the "right" people and systems in positions of power. Let's continue to focus on that instead of giving up.

To use an analogy: if you love to travel the world but keep getting sick from preventable infectious diseases, the solution is to buy bottled water, mosquito repellent, and vaccinations, not stop traveling all together.

> operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight..

Subject to oversight? Have you EVER heard of a French civil servant being fired? It's as rare as a baseball game in Paris.

The cookie regs seem largely a moot effort given the pervasiveness of cookie usage, GDPR though I think is actually a generally good idea. The "nightmare scenario" that certain articles have detailed might be overburdening for companies, but in general having the right to be forgotten and know how your data is being distributed are large advancements in personal data rights.

This new reg to me is just bewildering however - not even allowing media sources to opt out of it? That just makes no sense to me and comes off as an attempt to destroy smaller / independent outlets. Hopefully it dies on the vine.

On something of a tangent I suspect that large parts of the GDPR will be comparably moot.

Many companies including Twillo and Delta have rolled out their tracking controls behind feature flags. If you decide that you'd rather not be tracked they make you stare at a spinner for ~100 seconds while your privacy settings are "being applied".

Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.

> Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.

To some extent, this risks running afoul of GDPR and getting hit with a big fine. But no doubt companies will try to find the sweet spot of being as annoying as possible while still being technically compliant.

Let HHGTG be your guide.

"The information was on display on Alpha Centauri for at least 20 years".

I.e. if they make a GDPR request put them on the waiting line with rest of customers. Press 1 for account related matter, Press 2 for account information, please enter your account number. Please enter your account number to confirm. Press 3 for privacy related information. Press 4 for information regarding GDPR. Please enter account information. Please verify account number. Redirecting to customer support. Please press 9 to continue. Please press 2 for verifying you are EU citizen. Enter verification data.

With this proposal they want to impede freedom of information while at the same time get some of that sweet tax money in the pockets of their allies.

This sounds plausible but do you have evidence that it is actually true?

An equally plausible reason for the proposed change is that European leaders see what media consolidation leads too. Too many people relying on too few sources for information. Perhaps this legislation is an ill thought out way to try to counteract the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica controversy.

Newspapers, and magazines are dying. They are no longer able to do the sort of investigative journalism like in the past. Consolidation has led to a degradation of quality and has caused too few people to control too much information. Witness the shenanigans of Sinclair Broadcasting recently.

I don't know the merits of the legislation in question but without evidence it's a hard sell to ascribe its passing to what you claim.

These kind of laws make it much more difficult to spread content and therefore they consolidate informations in few player, often loved by the governments and their puppeteers.

We used to be able to put a website online, gather emails to send newsletters, offer services to our users, etc without any help from the government. Now, every time I put a new website online I have to fill pages of pages with stupid policies and I know I'm not even fully compliant because honestly it's impossible to really be since it's all about how it's interpreted by the current bureaucrat. These kind of laws don't deserve a place in Europe.

You need people to be able to be naturally compliant, so that they can promote their stuff wihout being scared of persecution if they say something the government doesn't like. Today you don't make a website and say controversial stuff, otherwise you know that when the government will notice it will uses the broad interpretations that stupid laws like the cookie law or GPDR give them to drag you into court and destroy you. By government of course I mean bureaucrats, political figures and your bigger competitors.

These kind of laws, like the GDPR, where they say "we will use them for good, don't worry, we will ony use them on big companies" are those that freedom-minded people should be mostly scared about. Of course the proposal in OP is much worse and makes no sense.

That may be a consequence of such laws but do you have evidence that this is the consequence that the people making this law want? What evidence do you have for the motivations for the people making this law.

It's almost irrelevant whether the people proposing this law have good or bad intentions. The current establishment may mean well, but the road to hell us paved with good intentions. There is no guarantee that a regime in 30 years won't abuse these regulations.

What's stopping a regime to enact these regulations in 30 years, if it feels it needs them?

That argument works against things like data retention laws (the new regime may find 'new uses' for data already retained) but if anything, GDPR discourages data retention

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