[lloeki]

Can't be sure about what GP meant but over here many small biz (restaurants, bars, shops...) online presence is a FB page + booking/inquiry/support via Messenger (which has specific support for that on biz pages)

> If you feel that using Facebook is wrong, the solution is not to use Facebook and complain about it.

Do that and they could care less. The only one you'll impact is you, as the needle will barely move. You could say if enough people do that and talk enough about it things will change, but in practice they don't as it's very far from reaching critical mass. And yes I've tried! But the network effect is stupidly powerful here.

> The solution is to stay away from it and send a clear signal that Facebook is not the proper channel.

To be fair, many are being pragmatic as Facebook tools for business are useful, as in they solve a real use case in an easy enough way. So people use it, which means events, news, communication, end up happening via Facebook for a huge proportion of local life. Displacing that is capital H Hard.

[rglullis]

I present you example #23 of "The law of unintended consequences", or what I prefer to call "Why all bureaucrats deserve to go to hell"...

Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

[corrral]

> Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

Pure, absolute, grade A bullshit. The trend predates the GDPR and is widespread among US small business and organizations that I guarantee you have never heard of that law. It's not a factor at all. They use Facebook because it's as close to zero set-up and maintenance as it gets, it's free, they already know how to use it, and "everyone" has it anyway.

[rglullis]

> US small business and organizations that I guarantee you have never heard of that law

Please, read the conversation in the proper context before hurling your opinion and creating a strawman. We were talking about businesses in Europe.

The trend started before it, but GDPR accelerated it.

[corrral]

But the transfer of local business and organization websites to Facebook is all but complete in the US, and the GDPR had little to nothing to do with it—convenience, cost, familiarity, and going where the customers are, were plenty of motivation. Why would Europe have been different?

[rglullis]

There are plenty of business in industries that already had their sites and solutions and had no need to go to Facebook.

Sure, it could it be that they would end in Facebook anyway. But there is no denying that the GDPR was a catalyst.

[heartbeats]

Do you have any proof of this claim?

You say that there "is no denying that the GDPR was a catalyst". Well, in what way did it catalyze it? Static pages do not need any GDPR compliance anyway.

[Kbelicius]

> Do you know who we should thank for all businesses killing their own online presence and migrating to Facebook? I'll give you 4 letters to guess: G.D.P.R

Business started killing their own presence before GDPR. If GDPR did contribute to this, I doubt it, the only reason I could think of would be businesses not understanding GDPR.

In your opinion what, specifically, about GDPR drove businesses to facebook?

[rglullis]

> only reason I could think of would be businesses not understanding GDPR.

Yes, that was reason enough. They were scared of lawyers knocking on their doors and shake them with the threat of lawsuits over "GDPR violations". They had zero interest in spending more money on their websites to ensure they are compliant and Facebook made it convenient for them to outsource all of this unnecessary headache.

I don't want to get into a tangent, but I'm yet to see a better example of how regulatory capture works in favor of Big Corporations, and how I distressingly frustrating it is to see how often people throw around the "Government needs to regulate X" without thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

[Kbelicius]

> Yes, that was reason enough. They were scared of lawyers knocking on their doors and shake them with the threat of lawsuits over "GDPR violations". They had zero interest in spending more money on their websites to ensure they are compliant and Facebook made it convenient for them to outsource all of this unnecessary headache.

So it isn't the fault of GDPR but of stupid business owners? That is according to you. You can't think of any other reason why businesses would kill their own online presence?

> I don't want to get into a tangent, but I'm yet to see a better example of how regulatory capture works in favor of Big Corporations

What, specifically, about GDPR favors big corporations? Considering that it is the best example that you can thing of I'm sure that won't be hard to answer.

[rglullis]

There is nothing stupid about the behavior of business owners. When facing a bunch of uncertainty with something that is not critical to their business, the most natural reaction is to simply step away from it and outsource it.

Blaming business owners for being scared from the lack of clarity of the law is ridiculous.

> What, specifically, about GDPR favors big corporations?

If regulations were truly harmful to Facebook in any way, why would Zuckerberg be calling for it?

Big corporations have armies of lawyers and can deal with all the requirements from complex pieces of legislation. They use that as a barrier against smaller sites who might try to compete with them on specific niches and use it as a protection racket against their own consumers. Thanks to GDPR, Facebook can go around the internet saying "Nice community site you have there, would be a pity if the government did anything to it..."

[Kbelicius]

> There is nothing stupid about the behavior of business owners. When facing a bunch of uncertainty with something that is not critical to their business, the most natural reaction is to simply step away from it and outsource it.

If it is not critical to their business then there is nothing to worry about. Even if a business breaks GDPR they don't automatically get a fine but a warning and instructions on how to comply with it. Following that we can only conclude that destroying their online presence because of GDPR is a stupid move. While there is some uncertainty non of it really touches companies whose main business isn't collecting PII.

> Big corporations have armies of lawyers and can handle with all the requirements. They use that as a barrier against smaller sites who might try to compete with them on specific niches and use it as a protection racket against their own consumers. Thanks to GDPR, Facebook can go around the internet saying "Nice community site you have there, would be a pity if the government did anything to it..."

Can you explain how this scenario is in any way beneficial to big corps? I mean, you are saying that big corps need to hire an army of lawyers, spend resources on catching their competitors breaking the law and then informing them of it so that they could fix the issues. Nothing you wrote here makes sense.

You did not write anything specific about GDPR that favors big corporations. Do you know anything about GDPR so that you can answer that simple question or are you just some libertarian/ancap who rages against regulation without actually knowing anything about it?

[Macha]

Except GDPR came into effect in 2018, and local businesses started substituting small websites with Facebook pages since like... 2010. At least here it feels like the rate of that has actually decreased since GDPR, though that's likely largely due to the coincidental timing of Facebook's decline in popularity.

[bombcar]

You can usually weasel your way in to see the basic business page, I even got a way to get the posts, but it is really freaking annoying. I hate it (and learned that my local government posts to FB and not to their own website sometimes).