Good job, EU! Squelch your citizenry in the interest of the copyright industry. Content filtering is draconian and fundamentally opposed to a free and open society.
One example: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/image002.p...
Seems more true than ever that big regulations create big business moats that big businesses can easily absorb, but which demolish smaller businesses.
As for demolishing small businesses, small businesses aren't an universal, unquestionable good. In this particular case, we need less adtech business in general. It's like dumping toxic waste into rivers - not only lots of small polluters aren't better than few big ones, the desirable thing is just having less polluters.
There really is more than just an ocean between America and Europe, the culture is so dramatically different.
How can one honestly believe that a Google data monopoly is better for privacy and innovation? It seems to fly in the face of every lesson learned by every monopoly in history.
Implicit in my post was that I don't want to support healthy competition in adtech, or any competition at all. I want this industry to disappear entirely. I have no tears for the small adtech businesses whose market got scooped up by Google; I only hope that by presenting a bigger target, Google's adtech activities will be easier to regulate.
Ad tech was extremely profitable before personalisation and wholesale trading of private data.
That was the era when marketers were dumb, drank the internet look aid and were taken for a ride by the industry. That's not quite true anymore.
I can understand the emotional intent, but it's important to ensure that routes we take actually get us to the outcomes we want.
I actually think the Google reorganization under Alphabet was done in no small part to prepare for anti-trust activity and the breakup of the Google monster.
Question because I don't know European anti-cartel history, do European regulators have a history of big bust-ups like Ma Bell?
It seems like Europeans just try fining them and letting them be.
2) When your country hasn't done something in over a generation, you need to stop touting it as something your country is good at. Just like we don't continue to criticize Germany for some terrible things they did 75 years ago, we need to stop thinking we're so great because we managed to land some people on the moon 50 years ago.
Source?
Outside of tech there are a lot of anti-competitive practices that have been left to grow while the cops been off the beat - I'd love to see the Pharma industry shaken up especially with PBM & Manufacturer relationships... additionally, Walmart.
Yeah I'm sure not letting companies sell all the data about you to the highest bidder is somehow "draconian". Poor them
You're right about the market capture, though it seems to me the ad market is in a bubble and that massive retargeting and trying to sell people things they already own is going to get old soon.
Good contextualized marketing is less dependant on the profiles and more on what it's being shown right now.
Besides, GDPR is an extension of similar laws that have existed for years.
* I didn't say that imploding ad business means privacy regulation is bad for small business, but I did demonstrate that big regulation chokes out small business and strongly correlates with big business success
But that's the business you chose for your illustration.
> I didn't say that imploding ad business means privacy regulation is bad for small business, but ...
... you specifically talked about ad business alone and drew the conclusion that "big regulations create big business moats ... which demolish smaller businesses."
It's a good thing that GDPR destroyed ad business that existed only by selling user data without consent. And there's nothing big about GDPR. It's very small and easy to comply with.
If your business is built upon selling and profiting from user data without user's consent, good riddance. If not, GDPR doesn't affect you in the slightest.
(With the US government, it isn't just behemoth corporations; there's big incentives for some small firms too, so there's a bunch of tiny companies that are highly specialized in milking that gravy train.)
Working the system yields better profit than doing the actual work.
An additional anecdote: we experimentally tried a smaller German ad exchange (used by quite some big-name sites here). Profits went way up compared to AdSense. What also went way up was the amount of stupid, low effort clickbait-bullshit (which as a non-lawyer I sometimes questioned the legality off considering some told outright lies). We stopped using them shortly afterward.
If stringent government regulation got you here, maybe it will be less of that, not more, that gets you out.
Yeah, we see how fantastically that one worked with the Boeing corporation and their newest flagship plane, The 737MAX.
The only reason this same issue didn't happen to Airbus is because the plane was high enough to give the pilots time to troubleshoot:
> The Alpha Protection activated forcing the aircraft to pitch down, which could not be corrected even by full back stick input. The crew eventually disconnected the related Air Data Units and was able to recover the aircraft.[1]
Specifically it was created to comply with regulations surrounding a flight manoeuvre that would never actually occur on a real flight.
> Engineers determined that on the MAX, the force the pilots feel in the control column as they execute this maneuver would not smoothly and continuously increase. Pilots who pull back forcefully on the column — sometimes called the stick — might suddenly feel a slackening of resistance. An FAA rule requires that the plane handle with smoothly changing stick forces.
So, if those regulations had not existed then MCAS would not have been needed and the planes may not have crashed.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/the...
But here's something else to chew on:
European regulations often benefit me, the individual, instead of corporations.
It guarantees that I don't pay 6$ a minute for a phone call from Tallinn to Tulouse. It ensures that I'm not ripped off 30 Euros for making an intereuropean money transfer, it provides my airline with a pretty good motivation not to bump me for fun and profit and it seems to work a lot better in the food safety department.
Granted, not all regulation is good regulation, but overall it seems more beneficial to society at large than to some scummy ad-tech business specifically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#Criticism
Some commentators have defended the usage of whataboutism and tu quoque in certain contexts. Whataboutism can provide necessary context into whether or not a particular line of critique is relevant or fair. For instance, in international relations, behavior that may be imperfect by international standards may be quite good for a given geopolitical neighborhood, and deserves to be recognized as such.
Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism in Stockholm, argues that the accusation of whataboutism is itself a form of tu quoque fallacy, as it dismisses criticisms of one's own behavior to focus instead on the actions of another, thus creating a double standard. Those who use whataboutism are not necessarily engaging in an empty or cynical deflection of responsibility: whataboutism can be a useful tool to expose contradictions, double standards, and hypocrisy.
Others have criticized the usage of accusations of whataboutism by American news outlets, arguing that the accusation whataboutism has been used to simply "deflect" criticisms of human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States or its allies. They argue that the usage of the term almost exclusively by American outlets is a double standard, and that moral accusations made by powerful countries are merely a pretext to punish their geopolitical rivals in the face of their own wrongdoing.
The scholars Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon posit that mentioning the possible existence of victims of capitalism in popular discourse is often dismissed as 'whataboutism', which they describe as "a term implying that only atrocities perpetrated by communists merit attention." They also argue that such accusations of 'whataboutism' are invalid as the same arguments used against communism can also be used against capitalism.
Good.
Now, I'm not a supporter of current copyright laws as I think they are absolutely ridiculous as is, however, I disagree with your statement. It all depends on who is doing the filtering. Done correctly, content screening is a part of a free and open society. And with some care, sometimes it is required.
I am also going to assume that you are more referring to the entertainment industry than the "copyright industry" since the topic is content instead of, say, logos or toaster design.
If I had children, I'd really want age-appropriate filtering to be available and I understand someone wanting "wholesome" content for themselves. I simply don't want them choosing for me and I am not the one to choose for my spouse. In most cases, as long as I have control over what sorts of content filtering I'm good. I do think society should be free from rhetoric that puts others in danger (anti-vaxx) or that calls for dehumanizing or wiping out others or their religion in most cases (white supremacy, for example). I don't think we should be so open that our brains fall out, in other words.
But more to the point: All of that entertainment that was listed was made by someone. Likely many someones. So was the music people listen to in a store. And the art people look at in restaurants and people's homes.I completely understand people wanting to make money from their own work. When there is absolutely no screening, you get places that steal others work - music, art, entertainment, and so on - and make money from it. This might come in the form of making purses and coffee cups with art or someone getting taking your music and performing it for money. It is a real issue - and the "big industries" are not innocent of this. So yeah, if it is technologically possible for an entity to filter content based on these things, I can understand requiring it. Beethoven might not have been able to stop folks from memorising his music and playing it in a foreign land, but he would have had a chance with today's tech.
Content filtering itself isn't bad - and I post this on a site that filters content to a point - and it doesn't make the "copyright industry" bad. The copyright laws make the copyright stuff bad.
For that is the first point to counter your argument: the copyright industry is not mainly looking out for artists, it is looking out for itself and its benefactors. Ask any musician what percentages of royalties they get from their song, it's a joke at this point. Live performances are the sustenance of musical artists today.
That is not to say that I don't defend the rights of artists to their work; I do. But that isn't what this battle is about, this is a battle against the same industry that finds it pertinent to send out mass blackmail letters to families, to single mothers, to depressed people. It is surely going to be one of those things that we look back on in decades to come and go "what the f--- were we thinking?"
Finally, you have to take a wider view in these matters than saying "there is some configuration of content filtering that I find acceptable," because once you have content filtering laws in place, people who you disagree with can co-opt this into a totalitarian state. You do not know who will have the keys to the kingdom come tomorrow.
A lot of independent artists supported art 13 though, let's see how they like this change