Hacker News Reader

Comment by morphics | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness for that. Countless hours have been lost debating how best to implement this pointless law, and the amount of business lost due to unsightly and confusing consent banners must have been huge.

View on HN

I think it might have been Derek Sivers who wrote a great essay about how in business the best policy is often just to ignore silly rules and regulations (except the really serious ones) until someone pulls you up on it. I took that to heart, and that was ultimately the best policy with this.

The ICO had dropped enough hints that they'd be lenient and go after the big boys and most evil violators first that 99% of sites were wasting their time panicking about implementing this stuff.. yet panic they did.

yes given that my employer a FTSE 100 publisher must have spent a huge amount time and money on this stupid law - can we claim this back against our tax bill.

Well, yes. Generally and imprecisely speaking, expenses are deducted from revenues and the net is what's taxable. Your employer will end up paying a little less corporation tax because of it. Whether it's a net loss for the government is another matter, as what isn't paid in corporation tax might be paid in national insurance and individual income taxes.

Could your employer sue the government for their compliance costs? Almost certainly not.

Yes very cute but that only gets a $TAXRATE percentage refund on the wasted money. The rest is gone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com