71–80 of 223 posts
Also this link tax reminds me that I think browser vendors should provide better privacy options for removing the referer header from link requests to prevent tracking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I don't necessarily agree but the immediate downvotes anyone receives for questioning the EU's pure intentions is interesting. People are either extremely trusting of huge global governments or we're being brigaded.
Playing devil’s advocate: What if the link tax will replace advertising as the main source or revenue for publishers? Wouldn’t that be a Good Thing (TM)?
Coming up next: European publishers discover that search engines preferentially link non-European publishers due to the link tax. Coming up after that: More unexpected effects.
As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are we losing more than we are gaining? Everything has a price and free markets are the only mechanism for determining that price. But regulations overwrite that price with one determined by politics and lobby and populism. This new price is paid by all no matter if we w…
This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and r…
It's not just that though. There are good and bad regulations in the sense that the law against murder is good and DMCA 1201 is bad, but there are also compliance costs for any regulation, even good ones.
Economic transactions have a certain amount of surplus. The value of doing something is $100 and the cost of doing it is $20, so we do it and gain $80 worth of surplus.
Compliance costs consume part of the surplus. Maybe it costs $5 more but we gain $10 in positive externalities, so it's worth it from a societal perspective. (But not from the perspective of the parties or we wouldn't need a regulation to get them to do it.)
The problem comes when you start stacking them. $25 is still less than $100. $50 is less than $100. $90 is less than $100. But at $101 people stop participating in the transaction and you lose the whole stack. All the benefits of the transaction, to everyone, including the positive externalities the regulations were intended to provide, are lost.
This is true even if every regulation is individually justifiable. There comes a point when the compliance costs exceed the economic surplus available to cover them. It doesn't matter if the regulations have nothing to do with each other, they can still conspire to destroy the thing they were supposed to be improving.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link tax is one thing, but I would say GDPR actually aids in price discovery, because without GDPR one side of the transaction has no idea what price they're paying.
0. The price anyone paid when their data was used was 0. There are 0 real-world negative consequences on anybody's personal lives due to their information being used by advertisers. They benefited for free.
Knowledge of who you associated with and what you do when no one you know is watching might not seem dangerous to you now in the western world living through the longest period of peace in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, but that shit gets people killed. You don't have to look far back. You don't have to look far away either, shit happens today. How many people lost their lives in communist/fascist revolutions over the past century even, if only because "they associated with the enemy"? Can you imagine what the SS could have done with the kind of data that modern ad companies have?
If the sites don't want the traffic from links that drive their revenue then why don't they identify the servers which are prefetching content and IP ban them and file abuse complaints. They probably have very identifiable User-Agent strings. Also this link tax reminds me that I think browser vendors should provide better privacy options for removing the referer header from link requests to prevent tracking.
Yes. Because bots never change or spoof their user agents.
GDPR and the proposed copyright laws will break the internet irrecoverably. The start-up industry will be a long forgotten dream. These old b@$%%%s will turn the internet into cable television. Scumbags would want to go back to a world of slavery, colonisation and wealth locked up as gold in personal treasuries. I hope all the other countries follow suit and then the only thing we will be able to aim for is a job in…
As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are we losing more than we are gaining? Everything has a price and free markets are the only mechanism for determining that price. But regulations overwrite that price with one determined by politics and lobby and populism. This new price is paid by all no matter if we w…
The link tax is one thing, but I would say GDPR actually aids in price discovery, because without GDPR one side of the transaction has no idea what price they're paying.
As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are we losing more than we are gaining? Everything has a price and free markets are the only mechanism for determining that price. But regulations overwrite that price with one determined by politics and lobby and populism. This new price is paid by all no matter if we w…
This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDPR and the proposed copyright laws will break the internet irrecoverably. Yeah but there's nothing wrong with that per se. It's the EU's choice to return to the stone age. There are Amish communities in the US where nobody has computers and their primary form of transportation is horses and buggies [1]. The rest of the world will simply move on, and like Amish communities, those in the EU that wish to participate i…
I'd argue the EU is "moving fast and breaking things" because the industry was incapable of self-regulating.
I assure you the majority would rather have free services than self righteous lack there of.
The majority do not want nor really care about Privacy to such an extent. The majority do not see themselves as easily manipulated, and do not see the harm.
I happen to agree and think the EU has killed the economy in the name of something no one really wants.