> SuperAwesome, the company that commissioned the PWC report, helps technology companies provide services without violating COPPA or European child-privacy legal restrictions against the tracking of children. “YouTube has a huge problem,” said Dylan Collins, chief executive of SuperAwesome. “They clearly have huge amounts of children using the platform, but they can’t acknowledge their presence.”

I'm trying to make my mind up about SuperAwesome's ethical position here. On the one hand, they're investing their own resources into the groundwork for an investigation that could lead to better protections for children; on the other hand, they could benefit massively from a situation where YouTube is forced to use a product like theirs universally, rather than the current situation where they sell their product to individual channels/brands. On the other other hand, SuperAwesome benefiting from this situation makes them more able to protect children on platforms other than YouTube; on the other other other hand, there's something weird about this not-quite-extortion.

Will we see consulting firms in the future offering "we will find your competitors' obscure GDPR violations and help you form nonprofits to report them to authorities and lobby for the prioritization of those cases"? Is this the world we want to live in? In a world where corporations have the power to shut down competitors with regulatory madness, is this the optimal balance of innovation and regulation to maximally increase [insert utility function here]?