[ApolloFortyNine]

YouTube is a site that pretty much everyone has an account already for (and therefore have already consented), but say you make YouTube 2, you can only make money if people allow personalized ads (they pay 10-20x untargeted ads). 90% less revenue means your business model doesn't work. The government in the area has decided you can't refuse service to customers that cost you money (people who don't consent).

You simply will have to go out of business.

This is also why you see many large companies fighting for more regulation. It's harder for a competitor to emerge if they have to navigate mountains of red tape.

[kalleboo]

What if I want to start a restaurant that can only make money if I use expired ingredients, run the fridge at a higher temperature to save on electricity, and don't waste my employee's time by washing their hands? These food safety laws mean my business model doesn't work.

I simply will have to go out of business.

[ApolloFortyNine]

This is just a strawman, these aren't equivalent and I'm not going to waste time pretending they are. Might as well just compare ads to nuclear weapons at this point.

[kalleboo]

There are enough libertarians out there that believe that the government should not be involved in food safety inspections to establish that regulations like this ARE on a related spectrum. Do you have a right to trust that food you buy is safe or should you get to choose to buy raw milk? Do you have a right to consume online services while retaining privacy? It's a debate society constantly has, and the EU electorate has chosen the side of privacy over a specific business model, just like most developed societies have chosen food safety.

[xp84]

> Do you have a right to consume online services while retaining privacy?

This is the part I don't understand. I'm actually all for regulations like being able to demand they delete the saved data they have on you, restrictions on transferring data to the control of third parties without disclosure/permission, etc.

But if your definition of "privacy" extends to not wanting cookies to work like they were designed to, why can't it be your responsibility to use a browser (a User-Agent) that carries out your intentions?

With services that are mandatory for all of us to use (e.g. government), I can see how being stringent makes sense because the users have no choice. But I can't understand applying the same burdensome requirements to things that people can simply choose to use or not use, such as a restaurant or some random guy's blog. I could be convinced that large platforms (tough to define properly, but things like Amazon, Uber or Meta) may be subjected to additional rules, but the tough rules being applied to even tiny one-person startups does nothing but advantage the giant platforms who have hundreds of lawyers and can devote entire dev teams to building complicated compliance features.