GDPR is significant because for the first time in this history of the Internet an (EU) user no longer has a marginal cost of zero.
The cost to write an application to be GDPR compliant is high and frankly will not be worth it for many entepreurs developing an MVP.
GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
171–180 of 680 posts
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#172On one hand I can understand why some orgs are having trouble with GDPR. On the other hand it’s pretty clear the actions of more than a few have gotten GDPR to where it is. My takeaway at the moment is something along the lines of this is why we can’t have nice things.
As someone else is pointing out, a business needs to have a positive reason to follow this regulation. If the very vast majority of my business is from US readers/customers and practically no money comes in from European readers why would I put any effort in at all to comply rather than just block. The only scenario where this would happen is of compliance was cheaper than blocking.
Because bitter HN users will call you shady if you don’t fully comply with their pet law, no matter how ambiguous or onerous :)
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#173They claim that everyone had a lot of time, but what about the 1-3 person startup that’s been around for 4-5 years who is just getting by and didn’t have the resources to re-engineer their entire application or to write up a complex privacy policy or hire an EU Representative (Yes, apparently that is required as well). If the EU does clamp down on forced consent I think the long tail of small startups and publication…
A sometimes unintentional and often intentional side-effect of regulation is helping the big guys fend off competition from the scrappy upstarts.
What seems like something aimed to protect the consumer may have unintended consequences further consolidating information into the hands of a few large behemoths.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#174"""
USA Today stops tracking EU citizens.
Americans/others are still fair game.
When it comes to privacy, Americans are now formally 2nd-class world citizens. """
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#175Alternatively there's this: https://eu.usatoday.com/ No ads, no tracking, no cookies, not even Javascript. Just plain HTML+CSS and JPEG images. The whole front page is around 650 KByte, and by far most of this is in the image files. As a result the page looks very clean and loads very fast. This is what all news web sites should look like, not just for EU readers (although I fear that this is just a temporary solutio…
And how can be a business sustainable in this way?
Probably not sustainable as an ad supported business. We may see a bigger push to a subscription based model—-one many people have come to hate, but was one twenty years ago people paid $10-30, mo. for the subs to their favorite daily.
Now sure those prices were subsidized by ads. But they can still use utargeted ads, in addition, cost of the “medium” and distribution is much lower.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US and EU have a good relationship. The EU can (probably will) use international law to hold you accountable and the US is likely to comply. EDIT: you is the hypothetical you. If the EU targets you then they will use international law to do so.
Enforcement in practice is almost certain to be "at the edge" with things like payment processors and ad networks that have direct business operations in the EU and are easy to demand third-party compliance from. If you literally don't do any business with EU entities, even at arm's length, enforcement is going to be impractical and unlikely.
I also believe this. If you run a side project by yourself and you don't target EU users directly, but might have a few, it most likely won't be worth the effort to actually follow through on enforcement.
However, that seems like a very arbitrary line and governments love to waste money.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#177Business don't comply with regulations because it is easy, but because it's needed to do business. If a service didn't had a big user base in Europe, most countries don't speak English, it may be cheaper to remove the service. The New York Times or The New Yorker that even have physical copies available in Europe work as usual. I work in a gambling company and this is our day to day business. To enter a new market me…
Regulations tend to favor incumbents, decreasing competition, and thereby increase monopoly and creating central hubs of systemic risk. There is no free lunch with one-size-fits-all rule making. Unfortunately regulators think there is.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#178Honest hypothetical question... my website is in the US, my servers in the US, why would I care about the GDPR?
Does your website serve users from EU region or do you intend to block incoming traffic form EU? If you serve them then you might want to collect some data points about them. It is like being on the internet you are by default given a chance to operate business (website in this case) in whatever country a user access your website from. You are not going to open a franchise in Germany and not abide by their local laws…
So, you're saying if someone from Saudi Arabia sees a German website that shows a woman's bare knees, that the German site will have to pay Saudi fines?
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#179GDPR is significant because for the first time in this history of the Internet an (EU) user no longer has a marginal cost of zero. The cost to write an application to be GDPR compliant is high and frankly will not be worth it for many entepreurs developing an MVP.
That's not true at all. It's really easy to build an MVP that complies with GDPR.
Re: GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules
#180Honest hypothetical question... my website is in the US, my servers in the US, why would I care about the GDPR?
Look at it this way: "my website is in the EU, my servers are in the EU, why would I care about DMCA?" The truth is that if a company had a way to discriminate their EU users without any possibility of failure they could only apply these things to them but that approach has proven to not be cost effective.
I'm not aware of all the details, but is the answer to your question "you wouldn't"?