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[Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz] Sorry for taking so long to reply, I was personally trying to dig some information about this. An additional disclaimer: not a lawyer either. Honestly, I have little idea of how this law affects search engines. What I can say is that we are no paying anything, as AFAIK we do not know anyone who is. Moreover, if some publisher would complain, even one in Burda, we would stop crawling by domain, there is no technical issue here, properties are known by the imprint. We have no say on what the investors do but I can assure you that we have no pressure. For instance, our ad-blocker works everywhere, regardless if the sites are from Burda or not. On a general level, assuming that what you say is factually correct, I must personally agree that regulation is a bitch. It's typically designed fro big companies to control other big companies, but small ones get negatively affected if only because of the lack of resources. We recently had to suffer all the overhead of GDPR, which consumed a fair amount of our time, relatively we paid a higher price that Google. Personally, I cannot respond for all the decisions made by the people funding Cliqz, I do not even think I can judge it either. They might be complaining and lobbying, no idea. But they are also putting good money to build a privacy-preserving search engine and a browser, something that no-one else is doing, so on my account they are on the positive side. |