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Comment by mahmoudimus | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is that regulation always has unexpected side effects, some of which can be abused to actually do the perverse inverse of what they're intended to protect against.

This is intuitive because regulation + law can really put a competitive barrier for established incumbents who (and arguably, they would be the target for lawsuits here) have resources to implement and comply with these regulations.

The law does sound great as a consumer, but I think the question is still up in the air about how will it be enforced and what will be the unexpected side effects?

Definitely something to watch for.

P.S. We've been working on a developer-friendly SaaS that helps companies automatically comply with jurisdictional controls + data security / privacy controls. Feel free to email me: mahmoud - @ - https://verygoodsecurity.com and I can dive deeper to answer any questions.

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On the flip side, the downsides of regulations don’t outweigh their utility.

We don’t scrap seatbelt and airbag regulations just because they’ve had some unintended side effects.

Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known.

Or, well, maybe I sound too idealistic. But...I think most of us can all agree that consumer data protections are highly lacking.

The US scrapped alcohol prohibition due to its unintended side effects, and is increasingly scrapping marijuana prohibitions.

Often the downsides do outweigh their utility.

"Someone passed a bad law once, therefore all laws are bad."

Guess we don't need food safety laws anymore, prohibition was bad!

Surely you can understand the difference between prohibition and consumer-protection laws? They aren't even like, the same field of laws.

No, the point is that it's important to address and control for all of the consequences of policy - including the unintended ones.

Sure, but then you need to demonstrate real (not just imagined) harm. GDPR doesn't seem to have caused the world to end. Vanishingly few people actually followed through on the whining and quit serving the EU.

From the perspective of ordinary users, GDPR was a pretty successful law with no real downsides. Businesses have to be more careful with data, that's about it.

In regards to the GDPR, I imagine most people continue to ignore the laws of jurisdictions they have no presence in. If they have an EU presence they will follow EU laws, same as if they had a presence in China or North Korea.

Odd way to paraphrase my argument.

Did you miss the part where the individual you responded to said "Regulations aren’t set in stone forever, either, and a functional legislative body can always modify and update them as their effects become more well known."?

There is over regulation in some areas, but lets be real: it's already extremely difficult to break into existing sectors, just as a result of industrialization, brand recognition, etc. The idea of the scrappy upstart is overwhelmingly a fantasy. This regulation won't prevent any businesses worth forming from getting underway, in my opinion.

> Often the downsides do outweigh their utility.

More like, "almost never do the down sides outweigh their utility, because they aren't designed by idiots".

I live in Washington and this is the last year I'll have to do emissions testing for my vehicle registration. I'm still kind of amazed (my default is pessimism) that this was put into motion in 2005 and nothing seems to be in the way of stopping the removal of the requirement next year: https://ecology.wa.gov/Air-Climate/Air-quality/Vehicle-emiss...

My only point is to support your case that it's not always idealistic to believe that some regulations, even ones that have been in place for decades, even with today's questionably functional government, can go away.

I was also surprised by this when I first saw it, but if you read the reasoning behind the ending of the program, it kind of makes sense. It sounds like they are just switching their focus.

The emissions check program is aimed at carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate pollution. Properly functioning emissions systems ensure a vehicle operates efficiently, but the effect on a car or truck's overall greenhouse gas emissions is fairly small - and it is greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) that are driving climate change.

Vehicles are still the largest source of carbon pollution in Washington. We are working to change that by making sure new cars are more efficient than old ones, supporting zero-emission vehicles and cleaner fuels, and advancing transit, ridesharing and other alternatives to single occupancy vehicles.

we expect air quality to continue to improve as older vehicles are replaced with newer, cleaner cars. Ecology will continue to monitor air quality conditions throughout Washington. If we see any reasons for concern, we will certainly take action.

Carbon isn’t pollution. Particulates and smog are. This is ridiculous that they end testing for pollution that can actually kill people in favor of focusing on CO2 which is necessary for life on earth to survive.

> But...I think most of us can all agree that consumer data protections are highly lacking.

Yup. Especially here in the U.S.

> On the flip side, the downsides of regulations don’t outweigh their utility.

Often times, they do. Often regulations don't even achieve their own goals. Sometimes they even result in the opposite.

Please show your work. I see lots of very successful regulation, and very few examples of regulation we'd be better without.

Wrt the laws benefiting incumbents with more resources: in this case I think it’s simple. If you don’t have the resources, just don’t collect the data! If your business model absolutely depends on it, then you should have the resources to do it correctly anyway, so the extra burden of this law shouldn’t be too much on top of that. This is definitely a simplified view, but I think it’s worth noting that following these regulations may actually be easier and cheaper than breaking them (which isn’t the case for, say, some finance and trade regulation).

I disagree with this so much. Data is used for far more than ads. If you can't collect data but your competition can, they'll run a more efficient business, offer better products and be more adaptive to change.

I totally agree. You should definitely be able to A/B test features, for instance, but if that's the point where the business is, you can run focus groups and do similar studies without running up against these regulations. My point is just that the business may need to succeed to some level before these regulations really become an issue. An analogous situation may be a small business being burdened by complex tax laws, but not until they acquire sufficiently sophisticated internal structure and revenue streams.

My point is that this can be factored into the growth of the company, rather than seen strictly as a barrier to entry, as suggested by the comment above. Are there really fresh startups that really need to worry about this kind of data gathering out of the gate? I'm imagining they're going to be spending a lot more time engineering features and interfacing with important clients to get data to improve their product directly. I often see business/marketing folks wanting user data for what amounts to very premature optimization.

I think the idea is that regulation always has unexpected side effects

So does a lack of regulation. That's how we ended up here.

The status quo has unintended side effects.

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