Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

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> do you enjoy [...] consolidation of goods/services into larger and larger corporations?

I mean, it seems the US has completely abandoned their policy of breaking anti-competitive companies in favor of what essentially looks like surveillance mercantilism.

In that context, your question is ambiguous: are you, as often happens here, arguing that EU attempts at regulation entrench monopolies, or are you arguing that the EU should take significant actions to break US tech monopolies' presence in Europe?

In the first case, I believe there is ample evidence that anti competitive behaviour by tech companies is widespread enough that regulation doesn't significantly improve their position.

As for the second argument, the US government has always vigourously pushed back against any EU attempt at unfavourable regulation.

Neither actually. My question is more about downstream impacts on smaller companies.

For example, Apple rolls out privacy controls in iOS 14. The story is about big adtech vs Apple privacy, but the downstream impact is that smaller businesses can no longer target effectively.

GDPR and similar privacy moves in Europe have the same impact.

The result is that smaller companies either evaporate or move to marketplaces because they can no longer acquire customers at acceptable rates.

> The result is that smaller companies either evaporate or move to marketplaces because they can no longer acquire customers at acceptable rates.

I am a bit stuck here, what do you call smaller businesses? Rolling out effective targeted advertising is hard in the first place. It's even more so in an environment like Europe where potential buyers are fragmented across countries with different languages, cultures, and so on.

If anything, effective privacy laws levels the playing field. That's good for companies that can't afford a large marketing budget.

Let’s say companies with revenue between 500K and 5M Euro in annual income, but certainly smaller businesses can stand up targeted ads even if they’re just going self-serve.

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