[runarberg]

Labor laws are not set to satisfy everyone, they are set such that a company cannot use it’s outsized power to exploit their workers, and that workers have fair chance at negotiating a fair deal, despite holding less power.

Similarly consumer protection laws—which the cookie banners are—are not set to satisfy everyone, they are set such that companies cannot use their outsized power to exploit their customers. A good consumer protection law will simply ban harmful behavior regardless of whether companies which engage in said harmful behavior want are satisfied with that ban or not. A good consumer protection law, will satisfy the user (or rather the general public) but it may satisfy the companies.

[AnthonyMouse]

Good consumer protection laws are things like disclosure requirements or anti-tying rules that address information asymmetries or enable rather than restrict customer choice.

Bad consumer protection laws try to pretend that trade offs don't exist. You don't want to see ads, that's fine, but now you either need to self-host that thing or pay someone else money to do it because they're no longer getting money from ads.

There is no point in having an opt in for tracking. If the user can be deprived of something for not opting in (i.e. you can't use the service) then it's useless, and if they can't then the number of people who would purposely opt in is entirely negligible and you ought to stop beating around the bush and do a tracking ban. But don't pretend that's not going to mean less "free stuff".

The problem is legislators are self-serving. They want to be seen doing something without actually forcing the trade off that would annihilate all of these companies, so instead they implement something compromised to claim they've done something even though they haven't actually done any good. Hence obnoxious cookie banners.

[chowells]

That whole argument assumes that you as a consumer can always find a product with exactly the features you want. Because that's a laughable fiction, there need to be laws with teeth to punish bad behaviors that nearly every product would indulge in otherwise. That means things like requiring sites to get permission to track, and punishing those that track users without permission. It's a good policy in theory, but it needs to be paired with good enforcement, and that's where things are currently lacking.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That's whole argument assumes that you as a consumer can always find a product with exactly the features you want. Because that's a laughable fiction

There are very many industries where this is exactly what happens. If you want a stack of lumber or a bag of oranges, it's a fungible commodity and there is no seller who can prevent you from buying the same thing from someone else if you don't like their terms.

If this is ever not the case, the thing you should be addressing is that, instead of trying to coerce an oligopoly that shouldn't exist into behaving under the threat of government penalties rather than competitive pressure. Because an uncompetitive market can screw you in ten thousand different ways regardless of whether you've made a dozen of them illegal.

> That means things like requiring sites to get permission to track, and punishing those that track users without permission. It's a good policy in theory, but it needs to be paired with good enforcement, and that's where things are currently lacking.

It's not a good policy in theory because the theory is ridiculous. If you have to consent to being tracked in exchange for nothing, nobody is going to do that. If you want a ban on tracking then call it what it is instead of trying to pretend that it isn't a ban on the "free services in exchange for tracking data" business model.

[runarberg]

I think you might be misunderstanding the purpose of consumer protection. It is not about consumer choice, but rather it is about protecting consumer from the inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers. If there is no way to doing a service for free without harming the customers, this service should be regulated such that no vendor is able to provide this service for free. It may seem punishing for the customers, but it is not. It protects the general public from this harmful behavior.

I actually agree with you that cookie banners are a bad policy, but for a different reason. As I understand it there are already requirements that the same service should also be available to opt-out users, however as your parent noted, enforcement is an issue. I, however, think that tracking users is extremely consumer hostile, and I think a much better policy would be a simple ban on targeted advertising.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I think you might be misunderstanding the purpose of consumer protection. It is not about consumer choice, but rather it is about protecting consumer from the inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers.

There isn't an inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers, when there is consumer choice. Which is why regulations that restrict rather than expand consumer choice are ill-conceived.

> If there is no way to doing a service for free without harming the customers, this service should be regulated such that no vendor is able to provide this service for free.

But that isn't what those regulations do, because legislators want to pretend to do something while not actually forcing the trade off inherent in really doing the thing they're only pretending to do.

> I, however, think that tracking users is extremely consumer hostile, and I think a much better policy would be a simple ban on targeted advertising.

Which is a misunderstanding of the problem.

What's actually happening in these markets is that we a) have laws that create a strong network effect (e.g. adversarial interoperability is constrained rather than required) which means that b) the largest networks win, and the networks available for free then becomes the largest.

Which in turn means you don't have a choice, because Facebook is tracking everyone but everybody else is using Facebook, which means you're stuck using Facebook.

If you ban the tracking while leaving Facebook as the incumbent, two things happen. First, those laws are extremely difficult to enforce because neither you nor the government can easily tell what they do with the information they inherently get from the use of a centralized service, so they aren't effective. And second, they come up with some other business model -- which will still be abusive because they still have market power from the network effect -- and then get to blame the new cash extraction scheme on the law.

Whereas if you do what you ought to do and facilitate adversarial interoperability, that still sinks their business model, because then people are accessing everything via user agents that block tracking and ads, but it does it while also breaking their network effect by opening up the networks so they can't use their market power to swap in some new abusive business model.

[runarberg]

I am not a legislator, nor an expert in consumer law, and there is no way I could think of a regulation against targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. I think claiming it to be impossible demonstrate a lack of imagination. And I would even think some consumer protection, or privacy advocacy groups have already drafted some legislation outlines for regulating targeted ads (as I said, I’m not an expert, and wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for one [maybe the EFF?]).

> There isn't an inherent power imbalance that exists between the company and their customers

That is very simplistic, and maybe idealistic from an unrealistic view of free-market capitalism. But there is certainly an inherent power imbalance. Before leaded gasoline was banned, it was extremely hard for environmentally conscious consumer to make the ethical choice and buy unleaded gasoline. Before seatbelts were required, a safety aware consumer might still have bought a car without one simply because the cars with seatbelts were either unavailable or unaffordable. Those aren’t real choices, but rather choices which are forced onto the consumer as a result of the competitive environment where the consumer hostile option generates much more revenue for the company.