[ThrustVectoring]

You need to talk about both costs and benefits when discussing public policy. Otherwise, you end up with a ton of terrible policy that looks good due to an obvious tangible benefit, but nets out to more harm than good.

For example, minimum bedroom sizes for rental units. Seems nice to have enough space to live comfortably, right? End result though is the $20M apartment complex has 35 units instead of 40, and is only built later when rents have gone up to make the project make sense financially, exacerbating a housing shortage.

[dmitriid]

Let’s look at the cost, shall we?

Invasive and pervasive surveillance. Private and sensitive data sold wholesale not even to the highest bidder, but to anyone.

Hell, when news about NSA surveillance broke, it was a huge scandal that was the focus of attention of all media for more than a year. Now Facebook alone is reported to have the same level of maliciousness and willfull ignorance on a monthly basis, and it’s business as usual.

So yes, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the “poor developers” who couldn’t get their shit together and provide privacy and security to the common people. And who now pretend they are being unfairly punished by governments.

And yes, I’m a developer myself.

[ThrustVectoring]

"these costs fall on people who I feel deserve it" isn't a good reason to completely ignore the size of the costs being imposed. Especially since these costs are sublinear with respect to organization size, causing the tech behemoths you complain about to get a free competitive advantage against upstarts threatening their business model.