121–130 of 171 posts
What the EU should really do is fine / tax monopolists like Google and Facebook into submission then invest that money into the EU-based startup ecosystem.
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can't google just threaten to pull out like they did in australia?
That could indeed potentially create a little bit of friction for a few weeks before everyone had replaced their services with different solutions.
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The technical solution wasn't even tried, I will agree with you after that fails. Also for example subsidy for Firefox and other independent browsers (of Google/MS/...) could be tried. Law should be the last resort.
I'm curious what the technical solution is you're proposing. I was considering OP's context of a technical solution that's "clearing your cookies regularly". Surely that's both not sufficient (not by a long shot) and being tried at some scale [1]? So probably you mean something else, but I'm not sure what. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing
What the EU should really do is fine / tax monopolists like Google and Facebook into submission then invest that money into the EU-based startup ecosystem.
Targeting taxes directly towards specific companies seems overly aggressive. I hope they will find and implement more generic rules to achieve what it is they want to achieve which, if I'm not completely mistaken, is to protect me from invasive tracking.
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How could I prove my blog doesn't track you?
Allow experts to audit your blog, including the code running on the servers. Hosts should submit to similar audits.
No, thank you, I don't want to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy when I just want to publish my side-project blog on the web. If you want to discourage people from building and publishing their personal projects and making them easily accessible to the public, that's how you do it.
However, I am absolutely ok with EU doing this, given they seem to be hellbent on running their local tech industry into the ground. Truly great founders from EU will either manage to make their companies succeed despite EU or eventually end up creating their companies in the US, and both of those scenarios sound like a win-win to me (from the perspective of the US; from the perspective of the EU, I guess they are doing all of this knowingly, so they get what they wanted, which would count as a win in a way too).
At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only purpose of tracking me, from most websites of the internet.
What the EU should really do is fine / tax monopolists like Google and Facebook into submission then invest that money into the EU-based startup ecosystem.
Cool, maybe the US should also add some protections against German exports.
However, to respond to your snarky tone, does Germany have a monopoly on the world auto industry and use that to abuse the rights of citizens while squashing all competition? If so, absolutely, tax the hell out of them! My ‘99 VW Jetta was a piece of junk and I sold it at a major loss after a year.
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Would you pay, say, $120/year? What if it wasn't nearly as good as Google yet?
Yes I would. Based on the really, really crappy results that google gaves me out lately (I have actually quit using it), $12 a year seems more than reasonable (you have market of millions of users, charging $10 / month is ripoff). Under condition that it is not some ads company under disguise (like google), that they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads fr…
People on Hacker News seem to think Google's results have gotten worse over time. Maybe they have for the narrow set of interests and requirements of this crowd, but I'm very confident they've gotten better for the vast majority of other users (users who I bet are less likely to use an ad blocker too).
> That they eliminate all SEO crap (i dont want those results anywhere near the 100th page of results) and ads from my results and serve me relevant content.
This is an extremely difficult engineering problem. Google doesn't make a conscious decision to include low/middling quality SEO'd content. That content is optimized to appear relevant and high quality. Google does a better job than say Bing at telling the difference, but it's still obviously an unsolved problem.
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Allow experts to audit your blog, including the code running on the servers. Hosts should submit to similar audits.
Never thought I would see the day when people on HN would enthusiastically support making it much more difficult for anyone to publish their stuff on the web. All while, in the same breath, clamoring for the "good old days" of the web when publishing something was as easy as just uploading a folder with your HTML/CSS to your host. No, thank you, I don't want to go through audits and deal with bureaucracy when I just…
If all you did was publish an HTML+CSS page, your innocence is self-evident. Anyone can look at your page's source and confirm it. If you link to Google's javascripts though, that should put you into a completely different category of suspicion.
At this point honestly I just wish for a general ban on tracking ads of any kind. Just give me good old contextual ads and remove some MBs of js, with the only purpose of tracking me, from most websites of the internet.