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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

You really want mandatory data retention laws? Think about the side effects of this.

First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses. Small companies will find it harder to comply than large ones. The cost to Google would be trivial but for a small startup it might kill them, especially if retaining data isn't important to their business.

Secondly, there are privacy implications. It's sometimes good when data is purged.

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In general, this point is absolutely correct, and regulatory capture as a mechanism to stifle smaller competitors is shockingly common.

But in the case of requiring brokers of political advertising to maintain transparency about the reach of that advertising - that seems far more palatable and far more in the public interest. If you want to play in that specific sandbox, you owe accountability to the public at a level where dynamics across election cycles can be analyzed.

Of course, all this is just a thought exercise, since the background of the original post is that Google is removing its archive because its response to the EU regulatory environment has been to pull out of the political ads market entirely on a go-forward basis. Regulations did not require it to maintain any historical archives, apparently, and so the natural consequence would be that Google had no reason to air its historical dirty laundry with no benefit to them at all.

"Brokers of political advertising" is just speech.

"just speech" is just speech too, right?

I seem to be missing the point here. Are you claiming that this term can not be applied categorically in a realistic fashion? I think that's wrong.

All communications are speech in one way, but whether this should be considered equivalent (from a regulatory perspective) to an individual's speech was not apparent to 4 out of 9 Supreme Court justices in the US in 2010 during Citizen's United - and, certainly, this opinion does not bind (or speak for) the entire world's description of speech.

I agree with what you said here.

I do think that with a slight modification, OP's statement can be improved in a practical way.

"Regulations that allow consumers to export their data should be more comprehensive and standardized."

I'll also note that many of these big services do allow you to export user data fairly easily.

For political advertisement via the internet? I absolute want mandatory data retention and transparency. It must be clear what was published using which targeting criteria by whom and when. 100%. Our societies are in grave danger.

What are the privacy implications in a database of advertising, an activity specifically intended to make information as public as possible?

Pretty sure GP was being sarcastic. But in any case, there's no reason we can't recognize that Google and other such massively-influential companies are hugely different from a small business and act accordingly.

>First of all, any such regulation is a regressive tax on small businesses.

your first argument is that it harms small businesses

it's really not an issue to set up laws such that small businesses do not have to follow them. the DMA is a perfect example

your second argument is that there are privacy implications

okay then require the data to be anonymised

I think your comment exemplifies why people have an issue with "just regulate it" because there are endless nitpicks and carve-outs that seem arbitrary and will likely have unintended consequences. It's easy to go "then just do this" but in reality the government and private sector can only deal with so much from an enforcement and compliance perspective.

We need to start working on the premise that large corporations are different beasts than small businesses. I mean as a people of the world as a whole.

There is a tipping point somewhere and that is definitely up for conversation but we need to pick a point and start making sure regulation hits where it does good.

Frankly, the outcomes of both "regulate it" and "don't regulate it" have already both been captured by the biggest offenders to use as they wish.

saying "businesses over a certain size must comply" and "data must be anonymised" are not endless nitpicks, they're simple rules that can be and are regularly enforced the world over. I think your comment exemplifies why people have so much distaste for the corporate sphere and its disingenuous ideology in general

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