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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

Lawmakers and voters sometimes act as if regulations are free. They think “wouldn’t it be nice” and pass on the costs to businesses.

They aren’t in fact free.

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Correct.

But the axiom is misguided.

Legislation on the safety of cars for instance is not free, but necessary.

You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety.

But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

I’m not an anarchist, I just don’t think people always realize or recognize that there will be downsides as well as upsides to the latest “sounds good” piece of legislation.

Sure. But the way you framed it makes it sound as if the legislation is a net bad thing. But when I get a GDPR block warning I’m actually happy because it means that company can’t operate without mishandling or selling my data. — sure the cost for them is higher, but it’s not unreasonable. I think a lot of people unduly criticise the GDPR because there is an industry building that requires fear mongering to get its way.

> You could argue that the makers of go-karts are being priced out of the market: after all, the free market should make people put a price on their own safety.

> But the issue is often that people don’t really have a good grasp of what it truly means and you can’t put a monetary number on things like that.

Furthermore, here in Europe everyone pays for health care for everyone to some degree so allowing people to do outrageously stupid stuff ends up increasing the tax for everyone.

Of course regulations are not without cost to those being regulated.

Lawmakers and voters would prefer not to have regulations; they would prefer if businesses just did the right thing. But they don't, so they have to be regulated. And nobody wants the cost of that regulation to fall on voters; so it falls on businesses.

Hey, who makes money out of these websites? Voters? Nope. Why should anyone but businesses pay the costs of regulating businesses?

It is magical thinking to believe that a law can impose a cost on businesses and it will come straight out of the pockets of the owners of that business.

There’s an entire sub-field of economics devoted to studying where the incidence of taxes and regulations fall, but voters don’t care to read the literature. If it sounds like we are sticking it to the people that their oversimplified model of the world has decided are bad guys, they are all for it.

That may well be "magical thinking"; but nobody said that costs imposed on businesses don't deplete consumers' wallets, eventually.

There's a libertarian, anti-regulation line of thought to which some USAians seem to be particularly prone.

Europe, and especially the EU, runs on regulations. Without all kinds of regulations, the EU would fall apart. Most people here understand that. They also understand that imposing costs on businesses results in marginally more expensive products (although GDPR compliance isn't expensive, especially if your gesture towards the GDPR is just a cookie wall).

Europeans would rather have the GDPR than be able to read American news sites. American news sites would rather block European readers than comply with the GDPR.

Everything is working as intended, no?

No.

The GDPR requires sites not to discriminate. It is a violation to refuse to serve users because they are in Europe.

King Canute required the waves to stop. How did that work out for him?

To be fair on old Knut, his piece of seaside theatre was meant as a put-down for his flattering courtiers, who had told him he was so great he could stop the tide. He wanted to prove the opposite.

Laws in Europe apply to European subjects only, not the entire world. Europe has no authority to force a non-European company to serve it's subjects.

It certainly has authority to block it from doing business in the EU if they don't comply, and to back that block with legal action against employees or assets inside the region if the company keeps breaking the law.

To extend @bradleyjg's point, businesses often do try and "do the right thing" but don't always get the "voters" support. For instance, you could have no ads or tracking on your site, and just charge people to view the content. And of course the vast majority of people will simply not view it, go find a "free" version that has ads instead. Most companies could go 100% green today and do so by charging 2-10x more for their products -- do you think people in general would pay for it? It works on some scale, but not in general. So its not as simple as the business doing the right thing and business owners paying the costs. Its about forcing all business to adhere to some regulation, and pass the same cost on to customers in the same way, to achieve some hopefully laudable goal. And that's totally fine in my opinion, but it breaks down when people assume there are no costs passed on to customers, and (again to @bradleyjg's ponit) that you can merely make owners pay it without any knock on effect. Recognizing the costs and how policy works helps voters to push for the right ones IMHO.

Words are free.

Stop saying banned customers are great.

This is my argument.

Writing words takes time and effort. Time and effort cost money.

  %s/are important to us/cannot view this content/g

The frustration in the EU is the inability to access the content, not the verbiage of the deny message.

The user here just wants honesty - a "As a local American* media, we cannot afford the additional costs of GDPR compliance. As such, this content is not available to EU/EEA." That's it. Not "We are evaluating options to deliver your favorite [sic] content to EEA." when they already decided to no longer server Europeans.

* "local American media" WTF. Almost all of you are large corporates.

Or maybe they are planning to give you localised [sic] content at some point and just haven't prioritised [sic] it yet?

This is trivially easy for "local american media" to solve: if you can't manage consent, then stop depositing cookies on European computers.

> then stop depositing cookies on European computers.

You've got GDPR super wrong. If you think GDPR was only about cookies, you've got it wrong (but that's where Google et al. focuses your attention to be honest- disinformation about GDPR and focusing on cookies even when cookies is NOT what GDPR is about).

I know how to suck eggs already; I was a GDPR compliance officer at my last firm. It's about privacy and data protection; cookies that don't violate privacy or track users, and are needed for the proper operation of the site, don't need consent.

The subject is silly banners. Those are nearly always about cookies, or "We won't serve you because you're in Europe, and GDPR" (and the latter violates the GDPR).

My view is that these banners are partly because some businesses think that by annoying users enough, they can get European users to reverse the GDPR. Ain't gonna happen.

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