GDPR: US news sites unavailable to EU users over data protection rules

>I was thinking about getting in to the car market but all these pesky requirements that I sell a car with airbags and seatbelts and fuel efficiency compliance are just there to protect existing incumbents.

I think by going to cars to prove your point proves how ridiculous regulation for websites are. For some reason there exists a group of people that believe that websites like facebook need regulations that are as strict as those required for developing cars.

People die from cars that are badly designed. People don't die from facebook (yes I'm sure you can find some contrived example.)

Unrelated but something that further adds to the irony of using cars as an example is that companies such as VW haven't even been fined for cheating on their emissions test.

I doubt a country like Germany would ever consider allowing the EU to fine 4% of Vws global revenue even though they broke the law in a way that has resulted in people's deaths.

Glad you can tell how regulation affects a market after less than one day of being active law, and zero enforcement actions or cases suggesting how courts/regulators are going to interpret the rules.

GDPR is significant but not for the reasons you mention. If you want to have European users you have to comply with European laws. That was the case before GDPR as well.

This is, I think, a great illustration of the problems with a lot of economic reasoning.

Sure, maybe that's exactly what would happen, but changing one variable in a toy model is not proof that it will.

There are successful news sites that do just fine without becoming relentless clickbait optimization mills - and in fact, those are exactly the sites I tend to read. Two examples, so we're talking about something specific: talkingpointsmemo.com and techdirt.com are both daily reads for me.

TPM is, for want of a better term, the more advertiser-friendly of the two, but it intentionally works fine with ad blockers. Techdirt is probably well-known to most folks here.

The other commonality is that both of them work hard to not be enslaved by the adtech surveillance machine - they both have non-ad revenue streams.

And I think that is the real trick missed by overly simple reasoning - even when it is correct (and it is, frequently), it obscures more than it helps. And somewhat more nebulously, I think it trains people into a way of thinking that blinds them to options. After all, if you "know" you can't reduce your surveillance metrics below industry-average intrusiveness, you won't look at possibilities involving doing so. Instead, you'd look at additional non-ad revenue as "more and better" and do both - thereby losing me as a potential customer.

Is that a good tradeoff? I don't know - and that's the point. These are much more complicated questions than econ 101 will guide you through.

From the same site:

""" Under the GDPR, you must appoint a DPO if:

you are a public authority (except for courts acting in their judicial capacity); your core activities require large scale, regular and systematic monitoring of individuals (for example, online behaviour tracking); or your core activities consist of large scale processing of special categories of data or data relating to criminal convictions and offences. """

So if you're not doing 'large scale behaviour tracking', you would not need one. A simple company that sells a subscription service should not need one, unless they are also selling targeted ads, and maybe if they are doing identifiable tracking of how a given user uses the service. Aggregated metrics with no identifiable data do not count (This feature has been used X times). If you are, then it becomes a question of what is 'large scale' in terms of the GDPR.