Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mseebach 3051 days ago
> the GDPR seems fine, as well as quite defensible.

So, that's the thing. Either, it's fine and defensible, and the Facebooks of the world will just comply, and so won't be a trade barrier, or it's not. It can't be both.

And also, don't wish for a "trade barrier" for this purpose, import substitution has been demonstrated over and over again to be really just awful policy.
2 comments
loup-vaillant 3051 days ago
I was hypothesising Facebook being unreasonable. And their business model could very well be incompatible with GDPR. They're an ad company that feeds on personal data. I'm not sure they can get the informed consent of most of their users for this.

Simply put, GDPR could be reasonable and sue Facebook to death (at least within its borders).

link
madez 3051 days ago
Facebook can be compliant with the GDPR and be profitable. They must change, however.
link
mseebach 3051 days ago
But that would not be a politically acceptable outcome. There will be so unbelievably many free votes for the "Bring Facebook back" party that they will barely need to campaign.

Also, by the way, this won't bring about the development of "our own" alternatives. Being European doesn't confer any particular skills required to build a GDPR-compatible Facebook, if Facebook itself can't even build it themselves.

link
loup-vaillant 3051 days ago
> There will be so unbelievably many free votes for the "Bring Facebook back" party that they will barely need to campaign.

Hence my predicting that traditional media would gang up against Facebook. It wouldn't be the first time there's a disconnect between television and the people. (Who's right is a separate issue.)

link
tripzilch 3050 days ago
> And also, don't wish for a "trade barrier" for this purpose, import substitution has been demonstrated over and over again to be really just awful policy.

That's a very different kind of "trade barrier" than is being discussed here.

The barrier being thrown up here is in fact not so much about trade but about privacy values. I see that as a very different thing, if a business wants to draw the line for privacy ethics elsewhere, but that line happens to be subject to regulations which reflect our values, then that is indeed a barrier, but I don't see much wrong with it. Unless you want to argue that US values on privacy are somehow more right than the ones we decide on in the EU.

link