What the GDPR does do, quite successfully, is build a moat around Google so wide and deep as to minimize competition with them, because they're one of the few firms that can both (a) afford the engineers with the technical expertise to comply with the law while accomplishing their goals and (b) afford the lawyers to address the issue when they fail at the former.
Google is in breach of the GDPR as it stands, so no.
> afford the lawyers to address the issue when they fail at the former
Potentially, though again a clear-cut breach like theirs should result in a fine regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.
As far as building a moat, I'm not sure. Whether it's Google or a one-man shop, neither can accurately track users without being in breach. There is no moat that I can see, you either break the law or you don't.
I don't believe that is true. What is your source?
They were fined in Jan 2019, but are they still out of compliance? If yes, why are they not being continuously fined?
> you either break the law or you don't.
That's the result on the other side of a trial, sure.
Which is why good lawyers are so important.
They were fined on one specific thing and they maybe fixed it (or silently replaced with an equivalent, non-compliant thing once they went out of the spotlight), however they are plenty of other things they do that are in breach and those are not being investigated nor fined which is why we're discussing the lack of enforcement.
> Which is why good lawyers are so important.
True, but a good law should be one that you can't lawyer your way out of and so far the GDPR outcome of that is inconclusive given there is barely any enforcement at all.
Hell, at least around 2017, there were voices from Google that they considered ads to be unsustainable long term and sought to diversificate income streams.
The fun thing is, GDPR didn't actually introduce much change in law. It just gave, for the first time in history, existing laws a real set of teeth, even if they are still baby teeth.
So yeah, all that data companies had been vacuuming for no sensible purpose? It was always illegal
It literally is, by definition. Any business success has to happen within the legal context it exists in.
> The lawmakers made them fail and they either knew it was going to happen or were incompetent.
I could reword this as "the elected representatives of the people decided that certain business models were undesirable and anti-consumer, so legislated against them".
Yes, and they had business success until the rules were changed from under them.
>I could reword this as "the elected representatives of the people decided that certain business models were undesirable and anti-consumer, so legislated against them".
And I could reword this as "lobbying groups have bought our politicians and use them to enact laws to put our competitors out of business".
I'd say my rewording is closer to reality, because of course the two biggest ad networks increased in size while the smaller ones decreased as a result of this regulation.
it doesn't appear, 2 years in, GDPR passes that test. If the goal was to minimize "privacy violation" by FB and Google, it's failing. FB and Google are stronger than ever, but their competitors are starved out of the market trying to comply with an onerous suite of policies.
It's such a ladder-pulling set of laws it's surprising Google and Facebook didn't craft it.
> Good law doesn't "let companies opt-out;" it is crafted with consideration for what is already happening and the consequences of the law.
And sometimes the outcome of that consideration is "stop doing that".
Would you say that anti-violence laws are ill-conceived because they go against cartels/mobs' business models of extorting money from people under threat of violence?