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Comment by MiddleEndian | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, not really a fan. Youtube can attempt to ads. I can attempt to block those ads (and have succeeded without interruption so far lol). No need to get the govt involved.

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> No need to get the govt involved.

Well, states are already involved in the EU due to the GDPR, e-privacy directive, and other things. But the case is interesting from a legal perspective. Note that the complainant refers to Irish criminal law, but there is also Directive 2013/40/EU, which contains rather similar mandates.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex%3A...

So in terms of pro-privacy, yes, happy for the govt to get involved, possibly even if it's to the point where all internet users end up with the same privacy rights as under-13s. Although even then, have to be vigilant, with the EU and the US periodically trying to mandate "backdoors" into encrypted communications.

My concern for govt choosing what can be displayed in terms of ads is a concern that the govt would then move into choosing what must be displayed, once some sort of agreement on what is "fair" to display is reached. I'd prefer the antagonistic free-for-all to continue, as it's pretty easy to block ads everywhere at the moment.

Google is a monopolist. Why shouldn't we regulate it differently than we regulate other companies?

Because sometimes legislation can end up with regulatory capture.

If the govt reaches some sort of agreement with tech companies that results in some things (that we can already block) becoming illegal to display on their end, but other things now becoming illegal to block, that would be a worse result than the govt just doing nothing. Historically, when the govt gets involved, this is the result. Back when cable TV was relevant, Tivo lost a lawsuit filed against them for auto-skipping ads on recorded content.

Although looking at the article, it just says "A privacy consultant based in Ireland says he is in the process of filing a criminal complaint against YouTube for alleged unlawful surveillance" so I would be surprised if anything came of this anyway.

Regulatory capture sounds like a criminal activity to me.

I'm concerned with the mindet that we shouldn't punish criminal activity because the response from the criminals may be more criminal activity.

I think that if we put criminals in jail they will have less opporunity to commit crime, both while they're in jail, and afterwards when they are released and still have a criminal record.

Criminals should go to jail for criminal activities is not a controversial opinion.

Currently they have not broken any laws while detecting ad blockers, besides what some guy declared. And historically, laws in this area have not been favorable to consumers.

As far as data protection laws go, those could always be stricter and are a much better area of focus.

EU is all about over regulation, this is just what they do.

It's the EU, of course they have to get involved. How else are they going to justify the salaries of those unelected officials?

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