The EU Goes Too Far
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
No, these popups are only regulatory-required when you're collecting data unnecessary to provide the experience.
So it’s okay to collect IP addresses for load balancing but not targeting adverts.
This “essential usage” is where things get dicey with whether it’s okay to collect info for logs, customer support, fraud prevention, law enforcement cooperations etc
I've worked with four separate GDPR legal teams over my career and none have ever agreed that there is was any such use case as "essential-only" data.
Github.com, free.fr, 42.fr probably a lot of others as those are 3 of the first 4 fqdn I thought about when asking myself 'which website does not need advertising or tracking)'.
They also use an internal analytics system which eliminates the need for a tracking cookie, though they are still able to track website activity.
Visiting free.fr prompts a cookie banner for me, as does 42.fr. Analyzing their websites, they use Didomi and Axeptio as their cookie consent systems - respectively.
> It is the cases above, though, that are thieving like the German publishers: it is one thing to regulate a market; it is another to straight up take a product or service on your terms, enabled by a company’s loyalty to its existing userbase. I might disagree with a lot of E.U. regulations, but I respect them and their right to make them; dictating business models or forcing a company to provide services for free, though, crosses the line from regulation to theft.
His broader point isn't that these regulations are bad - but that regulators are using "privacy" to sell generally anti-tech regulations to rent seek or enrich their own local special interest groups. Actual consumers are being treated as a bargaining chip.
Which is false and not at all in line with the DMA and the bigger framework of legislation and policy it belongs to (which nobody talks about because it doesn't make for bombastic and reactionary titles).
So you are ok with websites sharing your data wih 800+ others that you don't know how are going to use it, all for the annoyance of the pop-up alert? I think this might be the dumbest thing I have read in the last six months.
How many completely impartial and well-respected tech journalists have to call out the EU before they finally leave poor Apple alone!
Yes, when you're vertically integrated and dominate a market (in practice have some kind of monopoly) it's fair you need to open up certain things to everyone. Unless you believe in a completely free market without any regulation.
A fair bit of research supports that stance btw. (That free markets needs to be regulated)
I would ask the author to ask average Americans how they feel about their lightly regulated internet providers, airline operators and health care providers.
You can book a cheap flight directly through Google without having to set up an account and never have to deal with popups or consent forms.
What? Google won't pop up a form, but the airline site it directs you to in order to purchase your tickets absolutely will. Most sites do. Americans complain about cookie consent forms all the time, this isn't an EU-specific problem, though it does stem from EU and California regulations.
Even when being directed to Delta or Alaska to purchase flights, I usually have the option of an expedited sign in or account creation through Oauth, which is largely what the author was trying to point out.
> What was different this time is that, for the first time in a while, I was traveling as a tourist with my family, and thus visiting things like museums, making restaurant reservations, etc.; what stood out to me was just how much information all of these entities wanted: seemingly every entity required me to make an account, share my mailing address, often my passport information, etc., just to buy a ticket or secure a table. It felt bizarrely old-fashioned, as if services like OpenTable or Resy didn’t exist, or even niceties like “Sign In With Google”; what exactly is a museum or individual restaurant going to do with so much of my personal information — I just want to see a famous painting or grab a meal!
For context, I grew up in Europe and now live in the US. One major difference in the US is that people are often very critical of the general direction of the country. In many cases this is the key mechanism by which positive change is made. For example, in the US many of us are critical of the healthcare system's poor accessibility for lower income people. That criticism has been channeled towards some non-trivial positive change (Obamacare on the federal level, many other thing locally).
Imagine instead that Americans took the European attitude towards this issue. As soon as anyone criticized American healthcare they would get defensive, dig their heals in, refuse to listen, and insist that the American healthcare system is fine. This would be really bad for the US! We would never have made any positive change because we would have been in denial about there being a problem in the first place.
Of course some people in the US do this. But I feel for Europe the standard response to any criticism of Europe is to dismiss it out of hand and retreat to this attitude that Europe is superior to everywhere else.
For those of us who value Apple's approach, please let us choose the phone that works best for us, and stop supporting bad politicians who want to regulate our choices away.
I do agree that my comment is too broad in implicating most Europeans. I do think the standard European response on HN is how I described it, but presumably most Europeans on HN don't actually contribute to these discussions and it's misleading to extend the point to them.
In EU GDPR vs. Google/Facebook/Apple, I'm very comfortable with the concept that the EU is at least trying to protect consumers from what has been decades of clear overreach by the ad industry.
I do think though that there's a relation between attitudes and policy that gets enacted. So I agree many people do think that the US healthcare system is the "best in the world" - but if everyone thought that, we would never have had Obamacare, and Medicare for All wouldn't be a thing. I think these policies being enacted/seriously discussed is evidence that there's a non-trivial number of people questioning the status quo.
Anyway, my overall point was that questioning the status quo is good for your country and reflexively defending it is bad, because then you don't find ways to improve it.
The problem is there's no HN equivalent for tech people in Europe. So they're stuck here, hanging out with a bunch of Americans bragging about how big their salaries are and how Americans in tech are all getting fabulously rich (and they actually are).
Imagine the level of resentment that creates! You're just as competent an engineer, yet instead of financial freedom in <10 years, you get stuck making 1/5th as much in a lifer "IT" job at some lame industrial company running on autopilot just because you were born in the wrong country.
So what do you do? Take a risk and build something of your own? Nahhh. Too much work.
It's much easier to rationalize the discomfort away by recasting yourself as the hero of the story.
"Sure, I have to ask my government for permission to retire at 70 (hopefully), but that's because I'm actually the morally superior one! Those American tech innovations are all evil, and the people who use them are getting duped by a bunch of conmen! LLMs are worthless, I don't need their latest tech fads anyways!" ...And so on, and so on.
Apple's currently trying to see how much open defiance and disdain for the rules they can get away with. We'll see how it pans out.
The DMA seems vague only if you have bad intentions and want to get away with it. Perfectly fine if you want to do the right thing.
Would you mind explaining how the status quo is better without them? I'm confused.
Cowen's point is that while many countries aggressively regulate the price of pharmaceuticals, you ultimately need a profit motive to invest in the massive up-front cost in developing new drugs; that profit comes from the U.S. market. The reason this all works is that the actual production of drugs is similar to technology: once the drug is approved every marginal pill is effectively zero marginal cost; this means that it is worth selling drugs at highly regulated prices, but you still need a reason to develop new drugs as well.
So it is with technology; to take the Meta example above, the company may very well be brought to heel with regards to offering a non-personalized-ads business model: Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are already developed, operations teams already exist, data centers are already built, so maybe a fraction of potential revenue will be worth continuing to offer those services in the E.U. Moreover, there is the matter of network effects: should Meta leave the E.U. it will make its services worse for non-E.U. users by reducing the size of the network on its services.
This comparison is a bridge too far. When person is in hospital fighting for life Zuckerberg's website is nothing more than a useless distraction. Whereas drugs can save life. There is no comparison. If Meta conducts "R&D" on their own cryptocurrency (Libra), the "Metaverse", surveillance glasses, "AI" nonsense or whatever it thinks is "the next big thing", it is not a matter of life or death. No lives depend on the success or failure of these projects. People invested in them will claim they will save lives and much more... someday. Please wait. It is speculation. Life-saving drugs are real, not speculation. In the pharmaceutucal industry it is too expensive to "move fast and break things". Failure costs too much money.
"That's not the only cost that is going up for Apple in particular: part of the implication of the "Core Technology Fee" model is that Apple has put forth a tremendous amount of engineering effort to accomodate its platform to the DMA specifically. Or, to put it another way, Apple has already forked iOS: there is one version for the E.U., and one version for the rest of the world. This too dramatically changes the calculus: yes, every E.U. user comes in at zero marginal cost, but not the E.U. as a whole: Apple isn't just paying the expected value of future fines, but actual real costs in terms of engineering time and overall complexity."
Comparing life-saving drugs to some feature of Apple's BSD-based privatised operating system. This is insane. Computer nerds are going to make computers do stuff whether someone is paying them or not. Computers are toys to these people and they will play for a lifetime; it is not work. Overhead costs for software development are extremely low. Free "features" are "shipped" with alarming frequency, for marketing purposes. Software development is almost entirely unregulated. Whereas development of therapeutics is a highly regulated, costly endeavor that can take a decade. Lab equipment, purpose-built facilities, clinical testing. Experimentation costs money. How much does it cost to play with software. Nothing. Time.
Another thing that costs nothing: Stratechery blog posts.
I didn't even know one could be so in love with the biggest corporations on earth and get enraged at the thought of them not being able to make the largest profit they possibly can.
> every website has a bunch of regulatory-required pop-ups asking for permission to simply operate as normal websites, which means collecting the data necessary to provide whatever experience you are trying to access
is completely false.
Even if his reasoning is off here, it's really a small anecdote at the beginning of a much larger article.
"Ce site utilise des cookies et vous donne le contrôle sur ce que vous souhaitez activer" "OK, tout accepter" "Interdire tous les cookies Personnaliser"
Do you have something blocking it?
To me this feels like the sadly common misconception that every country in the EU is the same. I live in Ireland and have never once had to create an account to book a table in a restaurant. Nor a cinema ticket, nor visits to tourist attractions. And that includes while travelling abroad.
Thompson is either being hyperbolic in the extreme or just had really bad luck (or, went to an EU country where this is actually common - I won't make the mistake of assuming they are all the same).
The EU is a very polarising institution. Unfortunately, loyal supporters of the EU will do anything to protect it from criticism.
Which is one of the reasons it has become such an awful, yet powerful, political experiment. We're not able to openly criticise it.
(watch as my comment gets downvoted / flagged!)