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Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

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Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#11

Post by mrpopo »

Meekro wrote: post #6

Back when the GDPR was still pending, the consensus on HN was that there was nothing to fear because European regulators emphasize the spirit of the law, rather than beating people over the head with the letter of the law like American regulators do. Anyway, the law went into effect and some guy got fined just over $2000 for using CC instead of BCC on his personal mailing list of 150 people. There are a bunch more ex…

> Anyway, the law went into effect and some guy got fined just over $2000 for using CC instead of BCC on his personal mailing list of 150 people. There are a bunch more examples just like that [1].

> Details on the 2k€ fine; the guy used his mailing list for harassment, the 2k€ fine would likely have also been issued prior to the GDPR as german privacy law is fairly strict.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#12

Post by raverbashing »

Meekro wrote: post #6

Back when the GDPR was still pending, the consensus on HN was that there was nothing to fear because European regulators emphasize the spirit of the law, rather than beating people over the head with the letter of the law like American regulators do. Anyway, the law went into effect and some guy got fined just over $2000 for using CC instead of BCC on his personal mailing list of 150 people. There are a bunch more ex…

I'm not sure this is directly related to GDPR as the regulations in Germany are more strict

"using CC instead of BCC... newsletter of 150 people in Germany... between July and September 2018"

But spirit of the law or not, if you're CCing me in your newsletter several times, I'd be pretty annoyed

Edit: people might want to check the actual link provided to get the details 1) he was a repeated offender 2) this mailing list was being used for harassment

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#13

Post by raverbashing »

carboi wrote: post #2

a typical example of a big company trying to put up barriers to entry by using politicians who want to please the public with worthless (and damaging) regulations and policies.

And may I add: politicians that don't understand anything about the internet

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#14

Post by qtplatypus »

optimiz3 wrote: post #4

Depending on the regulation, IMO a sensible middle ground is to phase in regulations based on company size as measured by revenue and/or employee count. This avoids crushing upstarts while regulating companies large enough to matter.

If you have regulations by revenue/employee count then the companies will restructure themselves to be below those thresholds.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#15

Post by jakelazaroff »

I’m glad to see a case made against anticompetitive lobbying. But I’m disappointed in the use of the GDPR as a straw man.

There are many reasons that could explain why ad network market concentration increased after the GDPR took effect, and not all of them are bad. For example, if some significant percentage of companies depended on exploitative behavior outlawed by the law, we should expect to see concentration increase as those companies leave the market. That’s not a negative side effect; it’s the law working as intended.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#16

Post by blunderkid »

There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#17

Post by plutonicks »

qtplatypus wrote: post #14
optimiz3 wrote: post #4

Depending on the regulation, IMO a sensible middle ground is to phase in regulations based on company size as measured by revenue and/or employee count. This avoids crushing upstarts while regulating companies large enough to matter.

If you have regulations by revenue/employee count then the companies will restructure themselves to be below those thresholds.

While true it is harder for companies to manipulate those 2 measures.

E.g. could Facebook run with 20 staff? Would Facebook and its shareholders be satisfied with 20m in annual revenue.

This scenario requires trade offs. My opinion is that monopoly, political and market dominance is a sub-optimal outcome

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#18

Post by ce4 »

new_here wrote: post #8

Anyone else notice that after you accept TechCrunch’s cookie consent pop-up that the site blocks you from tapping back on your browser to get back to HN?

Try a longpress on the back button and there you should see the hn=>techcrunch=>guce.advertising=>techcrunch redirect chain. Hitting back will go back to guce which immediately forwards you to techcrunch again. Select hn instead

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#19

Post by AnthonyMouse »

qtplatypus wrote: post #14
optimiz3 wrote: post #4

Depending on the regulation, IMO a sensible middle ground is to phase in regulations based on company size as measured by revenue and/or employee count. This avoids crushing upstarts while regulating companies large enough to matter.

If you have regulations by revenue/employee count then the companies will restructure themselves to be below those thresholds.

That's easy to fix, just apply the rules only to companies having more than a hundred shareholders, and count shareholders of the parent for any subsidiary. Then you can't restructure Facebook to have less than a hundred shareholders because the number of shareholders is independent of the internal corporate structure.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#20

Post by cryptica »

The problem is that there are too many influential people financially invested in Facebook and other monopolies. It creates perverse incentives for governments and other companies.

People these days are using the stock market as a giant collaborative money laundering machine; all small businesses exist only to take bank loans which go straight to paying these big corporations for whatever useless services they provide. The small businesses then go bankrupt and new ones spawn up in their place with fresh new loans for the corporations to feed on. That's what our fiat financial system is all about; the big mega corps feed on the bankrupted corpses of small business and let the rest of society foot the bill through inflation. The main sport for the elites is to move around this inflation to parts of the economy that are not being monitored so that it doesn't show up in the CPI.

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