I already get a lot of "We are sorry, but for legal reasons we are prevented from providing this service where you live" when I'm accessing American websites.
Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example.
I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the moment) international Mailchimps than one in EU.
If you flip the scenario around in your mind.. how would you feel if virtually every site or service you visit scoops up your data and sends it to [China|Russia|...] and hosts all your private data on servers operated by the [Chinese|Russians|...] and are subject to [Chinese|Russian|...] rule and disregard whatever laws your country has enacted? How would you feel if you couldn't opt out without virtually opting out of the entire internet, including all the services your friends and family and local associations & companies use for messaging?
That's how the internet has been. That's how I feel about US tech giants getting all my data. They write their privacy policy, they dictate their terms, they follow US laws. I have absolutely no choice or voice or vote, unless one considers "yo dawg just build your own internet" a realistic choice.
I don't feel like the purpose is to drive out foreign competition. I feel like the purpose is to enforce privacy as a right, and I fully support it. I also fully support the right to transmit data across borders as long as the destination country also respects my privacy and rights instead of treating me as an alien and potential terrorist. Is that too much to ask for?
And in general, is following the rules of the country you offer a service in too much to ask for? Local laws apply to brick and mortar business; if Walmart wants to come to my neighborhood, sure go ahead, but please respect our laws. I don't see why internet companies should be above the law either.
GDPR is replacing rules dictated by US corporations with democratically established rules written by our representatives. It's unfortunate that there's now a clash between US laws and EU laws, but it's not the end of the world.
Simple. If you have a free market, I would just use competing services instead of the "Chinese" ones. No one is forced to use TikTok. If people really wanted a privacy focused service, a new one will arrive. DuckDuckGo's success is an example of that.
imo it's just a thinly veiled protectionist law that will fracture the internet all for the sake of propping up EU incumbents who can't innovate.
Yes it's simple in dreams and an economic theory stuck in an era where a potato is a potato and it doesn't matter much whose potato you buy. Unfortunately the free market tends to be a race to the bottom, for complicated reasons. The market is also not effective nor is it rational, nor is it good at displacing entrenched players and natural monopolies, least of all ones that don't give a crap about ethics. It's not effective against deliberate lock-in and network effects, nor against externalities and exploitation. It's not effective where effect requires individual sacrifice multiplied by millions.
If free market were effective, we wouldn't have needed labour laws to keep people from dying in factories where they work 16 hours a day, we wouldn't need laws to make vehicles safe, we wouldn't be desperately looking for agreements to curb pollution and climate change, we wouldn't need laws to protect minorities against discrimination.. hell, I don't think we'd need laws at all because everyone would just rationally and effectively choose good actors & displace bad actors.
I don’t believe your parent is arguing for centralized planning in any shape or form.
Even the US knows rules for markets - it’s never entirely free. European laws just set more rules and give the consumers more rights - something I consider useful where there’s a strong imbalance in knowledge and power between the consumers and the companies offering a service.
TikTok was nearly forced to sell parts of its operation so it could continue operating in the US, in India it's actually banned.
> DuckDuckGo's success is an example of that.
As good as DDG is, it's not that great of an example as all the background tech there still relies on Microsoft's Bing, which means there is very much a US-centric search engine monopoly in place.
> that will fracture the internet
Maybe the Internet needs fracturing, we've reached a point where a handful of US corporations control the vast majority of the web traffic [0], that kind of massive centralization is the absolute antithesis to what the web is supposed to be and presents a massive filter bubble in-itself.
> TikTok was nearly forced to sell parts of its operation so it could continue operating in the US, in India it's actually banned.
Yes, that's a great example of protectionism that was reversed.
> As good as DDG is, it's not that great of an example as all the background tech there still relies on Microsoft's Bing, which means there is very much a US-centric search engine monopoly in place.
DDG is not the only privacy focused search service. There are others with their own homegrown search engines. I believe some of them are French. This also reflects consumer demand. DDG only able to evolve and grow based on how many people want to use the service.
As a counter point - I think it's fair to view the extreme lack of consumer protection laws in the US as protectionism for domestic tech companies. The US has been extremely resistant to roll out consumer protection laws and that's shifted it into being the equivalent of a pacific island nation with extremely lax tax laws - it's the wild west of the internet where all the sane laws don't exist that attracts all the companies that don't want to play by the rules.
The US could coordinate and work with the EU to try and craft laws that span both regions in a unified manner so that businesses can operate more freely but instead they're choosing to subsidize a protectionist agenda by levying a cost on the privacy information of its residents.
> The US could coordinate and work with the EU to try and craft laws that span both regions in a unified manner so that businesses can operate more freely
I love your wording. Regulation mixed with "operating more freely" is oxymoronic. The same can be said with your argument of "subsidizing a protectionist agenda" when you're referring to the lack of regulation and legislation.
> As a counter point - I think it's fair to view the extreme lack of consumer protection laws in the US as protectionism for domestic tech companies. T
The spat between US tech companies and France's ancient media companies is not new. It's very disingenuous to pretend that the purpose of these laws is just to protect consumers.
To be honest, it's really only oxymoronic in a very limited slice of America. It has come up a few times on HN that the definition of freedom varies wildly in different parts of the world. As an example, take healthcare: in the US market driven healthcare might be the freest freedom that ever freedomed - but elsewhere social safeties that allow residents to live the best quality of life they could are considered to be the highest freedom you can achieve. While health issues are a regrettable part of the human condition, a society might want to strive to minimize the amount of stress spent by individuals on particularly bad die rolls by their bodies and fate allowing individuals the freedom to spend their time more according to their wills. Even "free market" US healthcare comes with a number of regulations - I'm not certain if you were alive (and paying insurance) before pre-existing condition coverage was guaranteed but a lot of people ended up unable to even secure insurance in that world, it was awful.
Regulation is a firm requirement to a free market, without regulation of any kind you will pretty quickly descend into authoritarianism as whoever has the biggest stick will just take everyone else's stick. While there definitely are dangers at the other end of the spectrum if you're fanatically at either end you've got to ignore a whole bunch of pretty well known issues.
It’s oxymoronic everywhere based on the definition of the terms, and not just in “limited parts of the US”. It’s Orwellian doublspeak. No amount of mental gymnastics changes that.
> Regulation is a firm requirement to a free market, without regulation of any kind
I agree, but there are lines that when crossed either negates or greatly lessens the overall benefit for most people outside of vested interests.
> you will pretty quickly descend into authoritarianism
Moreover, historically speaking - centralized economic planning tends into devolve into tyranny vs systems with primarily free markets.
This is also much less about protecting consumers than it is about protecting old French incumbents who are unable to evolve.
> Regulation mixed with "operating more freely" is oxymoronic
Common regulation between jurisdictions allows businesses subjected to the regulatory oversight of multiple involve jurisdictions to operate more freely than if the jurisdictions did not coordinate and instead adopted regulations where it was impossible to comply with one without violating the other.
You shouldn't just pick one word from one part of a statement and a two-word phrase in another part and ignore the rest of the statement in order to create your own argument to respond to.
You’re just cherry picking an even worse example of regulation. The core definition of regulation is the limitation of what an entity can and cannot do ie operating less freely. Your argument doesn’t change that
> You’re just cherry picking an even worse example of regulation
No, I’m pointing to the exact subject of discussion, the suggestion that the US and EU, who currently do regulate and do so independently, could coordinate regulation.
Yes, that's the overall discussion, but that's not this specific sub-thread is about. This subthread was about addressing the strange, oxymoronic doublespeak being used by someone responding to one of my comments. Maybe you meant to respond to a different comment?
It actually isn't oxymoronic though - I like being alive and my freedom to remain alive relies on the regulations and laws that discourage people from murdering me. Regulations aren't the opposite of freedom except in an extremely narrow view - regulations often help to make free markets more free.
This isn't a case of doublespeak at all - it's just that the world isn't a simple place.
This is not a "all regulations are bad or all regulations are good" argument. This is about an oxymoronic statement. I feel that you and previous commenter have trouble differentiating the two.
> regulations often help to make free markets more free.
No. They do not. That's nonsensical. The whole point of regulation is to exert control over something for better or for worse, depending on the situation. That's the exact opposite of freedom regardless of the consequences.
Your analogy is poor because it doesn't mirror the original quote. A better analogy that mirrored the original quote would be, "We need to murder people in order to save their lives." It makes about as much Orwellian sense as saying, "There's freedom in slavery."
It’s not a non sequitur. It’s a response to a nonsensical argument ie “regulation makes markets more free” It’s oxymoronic.
There are many good arguments in favor of regulation, but that is not one of them, despite all the mental gymnastics being done to pretend that it’s a good argument.
Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example.
I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the moment) international Mailchimps than one in EU.