After years of staring down the world’s biggest tech companies and setting the bar for tough regulation worldwide, Europe has blinked. Under intense pressure from industry and the US government, Brussels is stripping protections from its flagship General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — including simplifying its infamous cookie permission pop-ups — and relaxing or delaying landmark AI rules in an effort to cut red tape and revive sluggish economic growth.
2025-11-1914:419701155www.theverge.com
The EU folds under Big Tech’s pressure.
The changes, proposed by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, changes core elements of the GDPR, making it easier for companies to share anonymized and pseudonymized personal datasets. They would allow AI companies to legally use personal data to train AI models, so long as that training complies with other GDPR requirements.
The proposal also waters down a key part of Europe’s sweeping artificial intelligence rules, the AI Act, which came into force in 2024 but had many elements that would only come into effect later. The change extends the grace period for rules governing high-risk AI systems that pose “serious risks” to health, safety, or fundamental rights, which were due to come into effect next summer. The rules will now only apply once it’s confirmed that “the needed standards and support tools are available” to AI companies.
One change that’s likely to please almost everyone is a reduction in Europe’s ubiquitous cookie banners and pop-ups. Under the new proposal, some “non-risk” cookies won’t trigger pop-ups at all, and users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly.
Other amendments in the new Digital Omnibus include simplified AI documentation requirements for smaller companies, a unified interface for companies to report cybersecurity incidents, and centralizing oversight of AI into the bloc’s AI Office.
“This is being done in the European way.”
“We have all the ingredients in the EU to succeed. But our companies, especially our start-ups and small businesses, are often held back by layers of rigid rules,” said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty at the European Commission. “By cutting red tape, simplifying EU laws, opening access to data and introducing a common European Business Wallet we are giving space for innovation to happen and to be marketed in Europe. This is being done in the European way: by making sure that fundamental rights of users remain fully protected.”
The proposal now heads to the European Parliament and the EU’s 27 member states — where it will need a qualified majority — for approval, a process that could drag on for months and potentially introduce significant changes.
The proposed overhaul won’t land quietly in Brussels, and if the development of the GDPR and AI Act are anything to go by, a political and lobbying firestorm is on its way. The GDPR is a cornerstone of Europe’s tech strategy and as close to sacred as a policy can be. Leaked drafts have already provoked outrage among civil rights groups and politicians, who have accused the Commission of weakening fundamental safeguards and bowing to pressure from Big Tech.
The decision follows months of intense pressure from Big Tech and Donald Trump — as well as high-profile internal figures like ex-Italian prime minister and former head of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi — urging the bloc to weaken burdensome tech regulation. The Commission has sought to frame the changes as simplifying the EU’s tech laws, not weakening them – a way of soothing growing fears in Brussels that its tough rules are hampering its ability to compete globally. With very few exceptions, Europe doesn’t have any credible competitors in the global AI race, which is dominated by US and Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Google, and OpenAI.
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Comments
I get that too many regulations is a bad thing. But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white. When I see a stupid cookie banner I search for "Reject all". There's no some data that companies can collect and process without my consent, they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in. Business never respects anything, but profits. Seeing news about relaxing these laws with the "AI" going after this leaves a bitter taste. And with them also trying to push the Chat Control thing, it gets even worse.
I've stopped thinking of regulations as a single dial, where more regulations is bad or less regulations is bad. It entirely depends on what is being regulated and how. Some areas need more regulations, some areas need less. Some areas need altered regulation. Some areas have just the right regulations. Most regulations can be improved, some more than others.
I strongly agree with this position. This is basically the foundation of Control Theory!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
This is like arguing if "heater on" or "AC on" is better, which is a pointless argument. That entirely depends on what the temperature is!
> This is like arguing if "heater on" or "AC on" is better, which is a pointless argument. That entirely depends on what the temperature is!
I think the problem here is more that _some_ people want the heater to be on and _other_ people want the heater to be off.
And when it comes to privacy, consumer advocate types and privacy wonks (I include myself in this group) want the heater to be on, and technology companies and advertising companies and all of their hangers-on want the heater to be off.
One group has a lot more money, power, and influence than the other.
By asyncze 2025-11-2013:05 [dead]
By SoftTalker 2025-11-203:32 And, at least in your example, sometimes you need both at the same time!
By mk89 2025-11-203:07 Reminds me of the book Thinking in Systems.
Thanks for the link.
It is the perfect and correct antidote to any slippery slope argument. If the consequences of the law turns out to be as bad as you say they will be then we adjust the law.
> they will be then we adjust the law.
Bizarrely horrible approach. A lot of damage would already be done, most importantly changing the status quo is inherently much harder than doing nothing. So going back won’t necessarily be straightforward.
Claiming that “slippery slope” is always a fallacy is a gross misconception and misinterpretation. It varies case by case, very often it can be a perfectly rational argument.
“Let’s restrict democracy and individual freedoms just a bit, maybe an authoritarian strongman is just what we need to get us out of this mess, we can always go back later..”
“Let’s try scanning all personal communication in a non intrusive way, if it doesn’t solve CSAM problems we can always adjust the law”, right.. as if that was ever going to happen.
Some lines need to be drawn that can never be crossed regardless of any good and well reasoned intentions.
By miki123211 2025-11-2010:121 reply > Bizarrely horrible approach
I very heavily disagree here, we aren't doing as much of this as we should be.
Society is too complex of a system to predict what consequences a law will have. Badly written laws slip through. Loopholes are discovered after the fact. Incentives do what incentives do, and people eventually figure out how to game them to their own benefit. First order effects cause second order effects, which cause third order effects. Technology changes. We can't predict all of that in advance.
Trying to write a perfect law is like trying to write a perfect program on your first try, with no testing and verification, just reasoning about it in a notebook. If the code or law is of any complexity, it just can't be done. Programmers have figured this out and came up with ways to mitigate the problem, from unit testing and formal verification to canaries, feature flags, blue-green deployments and slow rollouts. Lawmakers could learn those same lessons (and use very similar strategies), but that is very rarely done.
By bjourne 2025-11-2022:23 That's exactly what I meant. Well explained!
By Sankozi 2025-11-2012:41 In the same post you are arguing for and against "slippery slope".
Either it is possible to easy change law to make it worse ("slippery slope" is valid objection) or changing law is "much harder than doing nothing"("slippery slope" is a fallacy).
By jack_tripper 2025-11-209:141 reply >Some lines need to be drawn that can never be crossed regardless of any good and well reasoned intentions.
Too late. We already let the government cross the lines during Covid with freedom of movement and freedom of speech restrictions, and they got away with it because it was "for your protection". Now a lot of EU countries are crossing them even more also "for your protection" due to "Russian misinformation" and "far right/hate speech" scaremongering, which at this point is a label applied loosely to anyone speaking against unpopular government policies or exposing their corruption.
And the snowball effect continues. Governments are only increasing their grip on power(looking enviously at what China has achieved), not loosening it back. And worse, not only are they more authoritarian, but they're also practicing selective enforcement of said strict rules with the justification that it's OK because we're doing it to the "bad guys". I'm afraid we aren't gonna go back to the levels of freedom we had in 2014- 2019, that ship has long sailed.
By pfdietz 2025-11-2012:02 The libertarian approach to COVID would be that infecting someone is assault and you are justified in shooting someone who is trying to do that.
Nothing is more permanent in politics than temporary solution. As a Norwegian, for example, I am still paying a temporary 25% on all spending that was enacted as a "temporary" measure over 100 years ago.
Control Theory does not work (in the general) for politics for the simple reason that incentives are misaligned. That is to say that control theory itself obviosuly works, but for it to be a good solution in some political context you must additionally prove the existance of some Nash equilibrium where it is being correctly applied.
Edit: See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs (CGP Grey - Why Do All Governments Work the Same Way?)
By throw9018 2025-11-2014:40 As a counterpoint to the selectorate theory, see Thorsen's PhD dissertation, "Only In It for Power and Wealth?", https://politica.dk/fileadmin/politica/Dokumenter/Afhandling...
The thesis argues that dictators regularly both harm groups clearly inside the winning coalition, and please groups clearly outside of it. A common, but not the only reason, is ideology.
One has to be careful when using game-theory models on messy human entities. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's hard to determine just at what point the model breaks down. At least without empirical research.
(Another example is that actual negotiation outcomes rarely end up at the minimax or Nash product equilibria that game theory sequential negotiation concepts would suggest.)
By close04 2025-11-208:13 > If the consequences of the law turns out to be as bad
This is the usual "the market will regulate itself" argument. It works when the imbalance arises organically, not so much when it's intentional on the side with more power and part of their larger roadmap.
The conflict of interest needs to be accounted for. Consequences for whom? Think of initiatives like any generic backdooring of encrypted communication but legislators are exempt. If legislators aren't truly dogfooding the results of that law then there's no real "market pressure" to fix anything. There's only "deployment strategy", roll out the changes slowly enough that the people have time to acclimate.
Control theory doesn't apply all that well to dynamical systems made entirely of human beings. You need psychohistory for that.
So, you do think “useCase.regulation” being a single dial. It’s a pretty reductive framework. I have an easier framework where in 90% of cases current law was already good enough and we don’t need to tweak that dial
By adi_kurian 2025-11-206:141 reply Is the road to nowhere paved with "perfect"?
Perhaps not when it comes to matters like these.
By TylerE 2025-11-2023:14 That’s why you aim for at least actually good or even excellent, not mediocrity.
By littlestymaar 2025-11-207:421 reply It's a funny thing to say because the popular saying you're modifying says the exact opposite.
By TylerE 2025-11-2017:16 In practice, “good enough” is rarely actually good enough.
Regulations are like lines of code in a software project. They're good if well written, bad if not, and what matters more is how well they fit into the entire solution
A major difference with regulations is there’s no guaranteed executor of those metaphorical lines of code. If the law gets enforced, then yes, but if nobody enforces it, it loses meaning.
There's a reason we call them judges. Selective enforcement is there for a reason. Lawmakers can't anticipated everything. Just look at how bad of an idea zero tolerance policies in schools have been with thinks like getting expelled for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun.
The world isn't black and white. Flexibility, including selective enforcement, is necessary in a just system.
The reason that selective enforcement exists is that it is very hard to avoid having rules selectively enforced.
But the history of selective enforcement strongly suggests that it does not usually lead to just results. It is often instead something that unaccountable officials find themselves easily able to exploit for questionable purposes.
For a notable example, witness how selective enforcement during the War on Drugs was used to justify mass incarceration of blacks, even though actual rates of drug usage were similar in black and white communities.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-209:082 reply You’re arguing that the mass incarceration of more people would have been better?
By ponow 2025-11-209:57 Yes, I would argue that it would be better for more to have been incarcerated, for that would bring greater focus to injustice and the law would be changed. Selective enforcement interferes with the feedback mechanism that would otherwise make the law work better.
If a law were to mass incarcerate people from affluent white neighborhoods it would be quickly repealed
By btilly 2025-11-2013:16 Actually it would have never been passed. Nixon started it as a way to put blacks in their place.
Any instance of selective enforcement being necessary is ipso facto evidence of a bad law. This is completely orthogonal to the matter of the world not being black and white - you're right, it's not, but a good law recognizes that fact, and laws can also be amended as needed.
By dragonwriter 2025-11-2119:01 > Any instance of selective enforcement being necessary is ipso facto evidence of a bad law.
All laws are in some degree bad; perfect laws do not exist.
Some laws are useful and produce more good than harm in the concrete situation in which they exist.
Should laws be improved where possible? Yes. Does the need for selective enforcement indicate a problem? Yes. Does it provide sufficient information to determine the precise form of a better law to replace the one it shows a problem with? Very rarely.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:101 reply > Any instance of selective enforcement being necessary is ipso facto evidence of a bad law.
By that measure every law is a bad law.
By ponow 2025-11-2010:03 Legislation is much worse than organically derived common law, for the common law comprises decisions that apply to particular conditions with all their details while the former are mere idealizations.
> Any instance of selective enforcement being necessary is ipso facto evidence of a bad law.
Yep, and while we fix that bad law we need judges to be able to say "I won't apply that" or "I won't sentence you to jail for this". That's kinda the point.
By int_19h 2025-11-2118:57 That's what jury nullification is for, in principle.
Allowing judges to not enforce bad laws turns them into unelected legislators. It's also worse from a corruption perspective because a single bought judge in the right place is much more cost effective than having to buy a new randomly selected jury at every trial.
By pbh101 2025-11-2013:41 Not only in the executive/enforcement, but in the actual impact of the regulation in practice as applied by millions in a distributed system. Regulations influence decision paths as opposed to encoding deterministic code paths.
By estimator7292 2025-11-1922:492 reply If the law is code, then law enforcement is a JITter
(joke)
By dijit 2025-11-1923:00 Optimised compiler makes sense though.
Unenforceable laws go unenforced, undefined behaviour is undefined and varies based on compiler (law enforcement agency or officer).
A jitter is like a lawyer on retainer. Law enforcement is more like the OS that segfaults you when you fail to follow the lawyers advice.
By KPGv2 2025-11-204:13 Law enforcement is more like a toddler holding a glass of water over your CPU and saying "stop transistoring!"
The problem with laws that both the enforcer and the subject (enforcee?) agree are bad, is that enforcement is variable. And that leads to corruption. Every damn time.
The fix for corruption is vote the bums out of office. It is not to go whole hog into blind application of the law.
Think about how hard it is to write code that has no bugs. Now imagine you're using English and working with a system with so many parameters and side effects that you can't possibly anticipate all eventualities.
And now you want to rigidly apply your operators to this parameter space?
Selective enforcement is necessary for justice, because no law is perfectly just, and selective enforcement helps move toward justice.
It unfortunately also means there is the eventuality of corruption. So you just have to keep vigilant. Because a rigid system with no selective enforcement has no fix for injustice other than "live with it."
By nandomrumber 2025-11-209:20 > The fix for corruption is vote the bums out of office.
That doesn’t seem to be working.
I argue there’s an acceptable level of corruption, only the particular flavours change from time to time.
Come out of government better off than when you when in. Fine, good on ya. No need to tells us about how you’re going about it while you’re going about it.
Learn to be at least a little bit discreet, and at least do something occasionally that comes across as good for the average person.
By erikerikson 2025-11-205:101 reply Bad law enforced perfectly is also undesirable.
I'm not convinced. Perfect enforcement would be a great signal exposing bad law much more clearly, so it can be rewritten/scrapped.
Sure, but what about those who got hit by that bad law in the meantime?
By amanaplanacanal 2025-11-2010:39 Usually laws are created because of the people being harmed because the law doesn't exist. So it could go either way.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-209:14 Until a bad law takes your friends and family out of the gene pool.
By aallaall 2025-11-2011:50 Just put all code on one line then. Statements (or tokens) is what matters.
By samdoesnothing 2025-11-1921:593 reply In general you want as few as possible of both.
By econ 2025-11-1922:10 You could also optimize everything for future updates that optimize things even further for even more updates...
Humm.. that was supposed to be a joke but our law making dev team isn't all that productive to put it mildly. Perhaps some of that bloat would be a good thing until we are brave enough to do the full rewrite.
By banana_sandwich 2025-11-1922:55 this is wrong for the same reason using single letter variable names to keep things concise is usually wrong.
i’d rather something a bit more verbose and clear than cryptic and confusing. there are many actors in the world with different brains.
By AceJohnny2 2025-11-1922:121 reply that's right. This is the reason all my code looks like an entry to PerlGolf. /s
The world's complicated. "Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, and wrong"
Simplicity is a laudable goal, but it's not always the one thing to optimize for.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-11-1922:242 reply Ah, but "simplicity" is not necessarily "fewest lines of code".
Code is first and foremost for human consumption. The compiler's job is to worry about appeasing the machine.
(Of course, that's the normative ideal. In practice, the limits of compilers sometimes requires us to appease the architectural peculiarities of the machine, but this should be seen as an unfortunate deviation and should be documented for human readers when it occurs.)
By array_key_first 2025-11-200:562 reply This is just a belief about code, and one of many. Another belief is that code and computer systems are inseparable, and the most straightforward and simple code is code that leverages and makes sense for it's hardware.
As in, you can pretend hardware doesn't exist but that doesn't actually change anything about the hardware. So, you are then forced to design around the hardware without knowing that's necessarily what you're doing.
Exhibit A: distributed systems. Why do people keep building distributed systems? Monoliths running on one big machine are much simpler to handle.
People keep building distributed systems because they don't understand, and don't want to understand, hardware. They want to abstract everything, have everything in it's own little world. A nice goal.
But in actuality, abstracting everything is very hard. And the hardware doesn't just poof disappear. You still need network calls. And now everything is a network call. And now you're coordinating 101 dalmatians. And coordination is hard. And caching is hard. And source of truth is hard. And recovery is hard. All these problems are hard, and you're choosing to do them, because computer hardware is scary and we'd rather program for some container somewhere and string, like, 50 containers together.
By necovek 2025-11-204:22 As soon as you start developing web sites/applications, you are entering distributed systems.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-11-2018:52 > code and computer systems are inseparable and the most straightforward and simple code is code that leverages and makes sense for it's hardware
You're missing the point. Code is separable from hardware per se, even if practically they typically co-occur and practical concerns about the latter leak into the former. The hardware is in the service of our code, not our code in service of the hardware. Targeting hardware is not, in fact, the most straightforward option, because you're destroying portability and obscuring the code's meaning with tangential architectural minutiae and concerns that are distracting.
> you can pretend hardware doesn't exist but that doesn't actually change anything about the hardware
You're mischaracterizing my claim. I didn't say hardware doesn't matter. Tools matter - and their particular limitations are sometimes felt by devs acutely - but they're not the primary focus.
My claim was that code is PRIMARILY for human consumption, and it is. It is written to be read by a person first and foremost. Unreadable, but functioning code is worthless. Otherwise, why have programming languages at all? Even C is preposterously high-level if code isn't for human consumption. Heck, even assembly semantics is full of concepts that have no objective reality in the hardware, or concepts with no direct counterpart in hardware. Hardware concerns only enter the picture secondarily, because the code must be run on it. Hardware concerns are a practical concession to the instrument.
So, in practice, you may need to be concerned with the performance/memory characteristics of your compiled code on a particular architecture (which is actually knowledge of the compiler and how well it targets the hardware in question with respect to your implementation). Compilers generally outperform human optimizations, of course, and at best, you will only be using a general knowledge of your architecture when deciding how to structure your implementation. And you will be doing this indirectly via the operational semantics of the language you're using, as that is as much control as you will have over how the hardware is used in that language.
> Exhibit A: distributed systems. Why do people keep building distributed systems? Monoliths running on one big machine are much simpler to handle.
In principle, you can write your code as a monolith, and your language's compiler can handle the details of distributing computation. This is up to the language's semantics. Think of Erlang for inspiration.
> People keep building distributed systems because they don't understand, and don't want to understand, hardware.
Unless you're talking about people who misuse "Big Data" tech when all they need is a reasonably fast bash script, that's not why good developers build distributed systems. Even then, it's not some special ignorance of hardware that leads to use of distributed systems when they're not necessary, but some kind of ignorance of their complexity and an ignorance of the domain the dev is operating in and whether it benefits from a distributed design.
> But in actuality, abstracting everything is very hard. And the hardware doesn't just poof disappear. You still need network calls. And now everything is a network call. And now you're coordinating 101 dalmatians. And coordination is hard. And caching is hard. And source of truth is hard. And recovery is hard. All these problems are hard, and you're choosing to do them, because computer hardware is scary and we'd rather program for some container somewhere and string, like, 50 containers together.
This is neither here nor there. Not only are "network calls" and "caching" and so on abstractions, they're not hardware concerns. Hardware allows us to simulate these abstractions, but whatever limits the hardware imposes are - you guessed it - reflected in the abstractions of your language and your libraries. And more importantly, none of this has any relevance to my claim.
By AceJohnny2 2025-11-1923:181 reply > Code is first and foremost for human consumption. The compiler's job is to worry about appeasing the machine.
Tangentially, it continues to frustrate me that C code organization directly impacts performance. Want to factorize that code? Pay the cost of a new stack frame and potentially non-local jump (bye, ICache!). Want it to not do that? Add more keywords ('inline') and hope the compiler applies them.
(I kind of understand the reason for this. Code Bloat is a thing, and if everything was inlined the resulting binary would be 100x bigger)
`inline` in C has very little to do with inlining these days. You most certainly don't need to actually use it to have functions in the same translation units inlined, and LTO will inline across units as well. The heuristics for either generally don't care if the function is marked as `inline` or not, only how complex it is. If you actually want to reliably control inlining, you use stuff like `__forceinline` or `[[gnu:always_inline]]`.
Regarding code size, it's not just that binary becomes larger, it's that overly aggressive inlining can actually have a detrimental effect on performance for a number of reasons.
By aallaall 2025-11-2011:55 Modern cpus are optimized for calling functions. Spaghetti code with gotos is actually slower.
By l5870uoo9y 2025-11-1920:425 reply I disagree with this otherwise seemingly reasonable position. Draghi's latest report pointed out that overregulation is a major problem in the EU and costs EU companies the equivalent of a 50% tariff (if I remember correctly). Of course, Draghi's report has led to nothing more than a few headlines.
That 50% figure seems extremely dubious. I'd expect either methodological failures, or a definition of "costs" that I disagree with (e.g. fair-competition regulations preventing price-hikes, "costing" EU companies the profit they could obtain from a cartel). However, skimming the report (https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...), I can't find the 50% figure.
By l5870uoo9y 2025-11-1921:032 reply > Mario Draghi has argued that the EU's internal barriers, which are equivalent to a high tariff rate, cost more than external tariffs. He has cited IMF estimates that show these internal barriers are equivalent to a \(45\%\) tariff on manufactured goods and a \(110\%\) tariff on services. These internal market restrictions, which include regulatory hurdles and bureaucracy, hinder cross-border competition and have a significant negative impact on the EU's economy.
Source: https://iep.unibocconi.eu/europes-internal-tariffs-why-imfs-...
Sure, someone argues something. Who knows if it's right or wrong? It's not a hard science.
How do you estimate the cost of regulations on businesses? You ask businesses. Businesses have absolutely zero incentive to say that regulations are not bad. "Just in case", they will say it hurts them.
That is, until there is a de facto monopoly and they can't compete anymore, and at that point they start lobbying like crazy for... more regulations. Look at the drone industry: a chinese company, DJI, is light-years ahead of everybody else. What have US drone companies been doing in the last 5+ years? Begging for regulations.
All that to say, it is pretty clear that no regulations is bad, and infinitely many regulations is bad. Now what's extremely difficult is to know what amount of regulation is good. And even that is simplistic: it's not about an amount of regulation, it depends on each one. The cookie hell is not a problem of regulations, it's a problem of businesses being arseholes. They know it sucks, they know they don't do anything with those cookies, but they still decide that their website will start with a goddamn cookie popup because... well because the sum of all those good humans working in those businesses results in businesses that are, themselves, big arseholes.
By Y_Y 2025-11-208:53 > Businesses have absolutely zero incentive to say that regulations are not bad.
Your overall point is solid, but I'd like to what I think is another reason that businesses could desire regulation. You're right that a dominant business can use its political power to "regulatory capture" its market and prevent new entrants, but I believe this isn't limited to uncompetitive markets.
Regulation can also prevent "arms races" by acting like explicit collusion. A straightforward example is competitive advertising in a saturated market, like cigarettes. Under the rough assumption that cigarettes are all equivalent and most potential smokers already smoke, then competitve advertising cuts into the profit margin, and companies have to participate or lose out. If you ban advertising then it's as if the bosses all got together and agreed not to compete like that. See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31547234/
The number of regulations is not as important as the quality of those regulations.
Shame we can’t regulate the quality of regulations.
The US actually has done this very thing since Reagan: https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_Executive_Order_12291_(...
That's an executive order (regulation) requiring proposed regulations undergo a cost-benefit analysis before being promulgated.
It's why we got mandated backup cameras in cars: the cost-benefit analysis revealed the cost to have these in every new car was dwarfed by the cost in human lives of all the kids who were being run over in driveways bc they weren't visible behind cars.
By tech2 2025-11-209:15 Right, but that's a follow on to regulations about increased rear and side still heights for occupant protection, and that's a follow on from increased vehicle sizes, and that's a follow on from commercial vehicles being sold to the general public instead of regular passenger vehicles due to tax breaks, etc.
By Y_Y 2025-11-208:57 That's actually pretty cool.
I was somewhat disappointed, however, to aee that this applies only to "major rules" from "executive agencies" and as such doesn't seem to apply to an executive order. There would have been some recursive satisfaction to see EO12291 itself tested by its own standard.
That article does contain the correct answer, so thank you very much for finding it, although the passage you've quoted is ChatGPT gibberish not in the source given.
Per https://iep.unibocconi.eu/europes-internal-tariffs-why-imfs-..., the model treats shopping local as evidence of the existence of a trade barrier, as opposed to a rational preference based on cultural and environmental considerations. This is why the numbers are ridiculously high. (Is there a 120% implicit tariff for textiles? Or do people just prefer warm clothes in the north and breezy clothes in the Mediterranean?)
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-205:071 reply > Is there a 120% implicit tariff for textiles? Or do people just prefer warm clothes in the north and breezy clothes in the Mediterranean?
There's no reason to expect the warm clothes to be made in the north and the cool clothes to be made in the south.
By snovv_crash 2025-11-206:121 reply At scale, no. But when very small there is a reason that people from Norway made rain jackets, and the brand cachet follows that too.
European people also still have a much stronger national identity than a European identity, especially compared to the US with state vs. country level.
By disgruntledphd2 2025-11-207:221 reply Languages are the biggest trade barrier in the EU.
Where? When there's not a more obvious choice trade is done in English, packaging usually has multiple languages (which are often mutually comprehensible with other nearby languages) and your instruction booklets and regulations are given in the 24 official languages. Sure not every country has a good standard of English, but even France seems to be able to get by.
The translation infrastructure is huge, and reasonable-quality machine translation⁰ has been freely available for years now.
I don't mean to refute your experience, but I am suprised by the claim, because it's really not what I've seen here. Could you give some more detail on what you mean.
⁰ EU procedure means there are some notable absences in the list, but it's pretty comprehensive once you include citizens' second languages. See https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
By disgruntledphd2 2025-11-209:211 reply > Where? When there's not a more obvious choice trade is done in English, packaging usually has multiple languages (which are often mutually comprehensible with other nearby languages) and your instruction booklets and regulations are given in the 24 official languages. Sure not every country has a good standard of English, but even France seems to be able to get by.
All of this is correct, and that's why the single market for goods (except for booze and tobacco) has been such a massive success. However, lots of growth (particularly in the US) comes from services, and for this, languages matter a lot more.
Sure, lots of continental Europeans speak multiple languages, but the vast discrepancies in languages and regulations (insolvency, capital markets etc) means that there are dis-economies of scale in the EU. Like, there's a reason that companies start selling in their home market and then move directly to the US.
A common language can't be assumed across the EU, while other large blocs (China, US) can make this assumption which is important for services trades in particular, as well as bespoke goods trade.
Ah, you're absolutely right. Only when reading your comment did I realise that I'll often go to the UK for some human-mediated service I need in English.
(This despite Ireland and Malta having it as an official language, and the Nordics often having better English skills than natives.)
By disgruntledphd2 2025-11-2013:101 reply > go to the UK for some human-mediated service I need in English.
Come to Ireland, we have Guinness!
By disgruntledphd2 2025-11-2014:391 reply I mean, clearly Beamish is actually superior (mind you, I'm from Cork so I'm legally required to make this distinction ;) ).
By mnau 2025-11-2012:53 Seems pretty real. E.g. CRA official impact assessment estimates one-time (in addition to ongoing costs) compliance cost at €500K per one product. That is enough for 10 man years per product.
And that is just one of many new regulations.
By tick_tock_tick 2025-11-200:011 reply I agree if we look at what has happened to the EU over the last 2 decades the costs have to be much higher. 50% seems optimistic at best for how far behind the EU has gotten.
By 8note 2025-11-205:30 should you filter out the covid era from that?
coats have gotten higher, but across the board for different countries
I’m not saying the following regarding Draghi’s report or particular regulation in mind:
If an unethical business gets started due to underregulation and it generates revenue and contributes to GDP, is that a good thing?
That depends, are the people who are negatively impacted aware, and able to do anything about it?
There are some "mosquito" businesses that imho provide no net value and we'd be better off if they didn't exist (c.f. Bastiat's window breaker⁰). For example; payday loans, gadget insurance, MLMs, f2p games. The trouble is that there is an apparent need they're meeting, and nobody wants to "destroy jobs" or even worry too hard about exploiting the vulnerable.
Even if I were emperor and believed hese businesses were unjustifiably bad, I'd be worried about the authoritarian consequences of shutting down the less egregious ones. I'd also hope to have the humility to entertain the idea that I don't understand their full benefits.
In conclusion I think it's bad to have unethical businesses, and that even if they make the indicator go up, they are probably a net negative on the economy and society. However, I don't know what's to be done about it.
⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Pay day loans are generally good _for the borrower_ - they aren't just window breaking. The consequences of missing an important payment can be way worse than the high interest on the pay day loan, e.g. if you don't pay for a course in time, they disenroll you and you no longer get to take the course; if you don't pay rent in time, you might get eviction proceedings filed against you; if you don't pay for your car repairs the garage will not return your car and you will lose time every day taking public transport.
By Y_Y 2025-11-2018:11 I won't argue that the availability of payloans (or any other product) is a net positive for the rational consumer. I'd still be willing to bet that (ceteris paribus) a society like the ones we live in is better off without them than with.
(Coda: You might say that's impossible, and local loan sharks will spring up to meet the need. That's probably true, but at least those guys merely break your legs, rather than advertising incessantly on daytime tv.)
By Ferret7446 2025-11-203:191 reply If the net social cost is less than the cost from overregulation, yes
Lmao you can’t be serious. This is something that can only be said if you can’t/won’t quantify social cost.
Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals. Repealing Glass—Steagall led to a global financial crisis. Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers by the thousands through self employment loopholes. We have insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry. Worst of all is that we’ve likely doomed the entire planet based on what is effectively too little environmental regulation.
By jack_tripper 2025-11-208:061 reply >Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals.
Yes, but gambling and all vices for that matter, are a centuries old issue that's well studied and well understood by everyone, while AI(hate that term in this case) LLMs are only an issue since November 2022, while most influential politicians are dumbass boomers who don't understand how a PC or the internet works let alone how LLMs work but yet are expected to make critical decisions on these topics.
So then it's safe to assume that the politicians will either fudge up the regulations due to sheer cluelessness, or they will just make decisions based on what their most influential corporate lobbyists will tell them. Either way it's bad.
ML and other automated systems are not new, and we know enough about automated systems to come up with regulations like "no, you should not use these in a certain set of specific circumstances" or "if you're unleashing this onto the world, you have to show that you understand what you're doing" etc.
By jack_tripper 2025-11-2013:471 reply >ML and other automated systems are not new
Let's not be overly pedantic and overly Pius on petty semantics like that. It was clear from my original comment, the context of what I was talking about.
By troupo 2025-11-2016:42 Even for LLMs the same thinking applies.
E.g. "if a decision cannot be explained by a human, it should bot be done by a machine" applies to them, too.
Basically, if you read the EU AI Act for example, it's hard to find anything you'd disagree with regardless of whether it's about ML, LLMs or three if statements in a trench coat.
Of course the industry is up in arms about it (just like GDPR)
> Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers
Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.
> insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry
It's actually regulations deterring competition in telecom who are responsible to those practices.
It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.
> too little environmental regulation
In China. You forgot "in China". That is where most of that planet dooming is happening. Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.
> Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.
Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.
> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.
Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.
> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.
Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.
“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.
As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.
By nickpp 2025-11-2011:08 > Over-regulation being what
One easy example is regulation making it hard to fire people. Then, naturally, firms will hire just as hard. The tradeoff is thus between a healthy, fast, dynamic and competitive job market with plenty of opportunities but with job insecurity and - fewer jobs, smaller salaries but the lazy unproductive bum slowing everybody down is now impossible to get rid of.
Yes, minimum wage is another. In effect it makes people whose work is worth less than the minimum wage - legally unemployable.
> Bell system
Bell system was a monopoly thanks to government regulation in the first place. The government actually passed a law that made illegal to connect a 3rd party telephone to Bell's network!
Yes, you need more regulation when your regulation f'd up a market. In free markets competition keeps market participants honest and even breaks monopolies. This is why one of the first regulation incumbents lobby for is meant to deter competition.
> Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK
I do not live in the UK, but I am willing to bet everything that there is still a ton of regulation stopping building there. Last summer I visited London during a heat wave. We were sweating in our AirBnB, complained to the owner but he answered that he couldn't install an A/C because he wasn't allowed to change the building facade...
By amanaplanacanal 2025-11-2010:45 It's not just China. It's everybody.
The logical extreme there is legalizing murder for hire, human trafficking, and a bunch of other crazy stuff.
Privacy is in a different category altogether, but there's more to think about than just how much things cost companies.
By Ferret7446 2025-11-203:182 reply That's a straight up slippery slope logical fallacy.
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-2014:11 We’ve had “legitimate” for-profit firms supplying authoritarian governments with phone malware that they allegedly used to spy on and sometimes murder their dissidents. The slippery slope isn’t a fallacy, we’ve seen what happens if it isn’t guarded.
By jlarocco 2025-11-2015:20 That's technically true, but I was using it to prove my point that there's more to think about than company profits.
Maybe I should have used dumping waste in a river and paying workers below minimum wage as examples. Profits could go up, but most people would agree it should still be illegal.
>latest report pointed out that overregulation is a major problem in the EU and costs EU companies the equivalent of a 50% tariff (if I remember correctly). Of course.
Normally I'm against overrgulation, but when it comes to privacy more fine for big corp is need if ANY violation is found. Rather NOT have AI than compromise on privacy.
By ta20240528 2025-11-2010:041 reply "I'm against overrgulation, but when it comes to privacy"
Our ancestors survived perfectly fine with telephone directories dropped at every house for free which contained everyone's name and address.
Are you sure someone knowing your address is that bad?
By troupo 2025-11-2013:43 How about "we store your precise geolocation with all associated device ids, travel and purchasing habits across all areas of your life for a decade and sell it/share it with thousands of other entities"? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
It's bo longer just "your home address".
Interesting that you have privacy so high on your list of priorities. The general public usually considers other small thing like "cost" and "convenience" when thinking about privacy.
Most of us actually don't mind losing a little privacy to read a news article when faced with the alternative of paying money or that news website ceasing to exist at all.
But, hey, keep pushing your warped privacy sense onto all of us, I am sure you are right.
Define "small amount of privacy". Is this a small amount: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45992452?
BTW, when presented with clear non-dark-pattern choice 96% of people opt-out of "losing a little privacy": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
> Define "small amount of privacy".
There is no universal measure for that, only each individual can answer the question for herself. GDPR is robbing people of that chance though.
> Is this a small amount
For me, yes. I already have a device in my pocket reporting my exact location to a private company at all times and I accepted that a long time ago.
> 96% of people opt-out
I bet they would chose very differently when the alternative is to pay or stop using the product. Just look how many people use privacy-destroying fidelity cards in supermarkets for some measly discounts.
> GDPR is robbing people of that chance though
How exactly? GDPR is quite literally "you can ask people for their consent to give you their data".
> I already have a device in my pocket reporting my exact location to a private company at all times and I accepted that a long time ago.
There's a difference between "one company" and "thousands of companies". And yes, there's an expectation that the company doesn't sell that location data which even in the US results in lawsuits: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-court-upholds-ve...
> I bet they would chose very differently when the alternative is to pay or stop using the product.
False dichotomy. You don't need 24/7 suveilance to show ads or monetise products.
> How exactly? GDPR is quite literally "you can ask people for their consent to give you their data".
Patently untrue. Under GDPR you are not allowed to withhold your services from users refusing to give you "their" data. Their opt-out costs them nothing.
By troupo 2025-11-2020:27 Nope.
This is what you pretend to care about: "There is no universal measure for [what small amount of privacy constitutes], only each individual can answer the question for herself."
What you actually want (and what is actually happens): "users are not given no privacy whatsoever and every single scrap o user data has to siphoned off and sold to the highest bidder, and the false alternative should be for users to pay to preserve their privacy". That is basically what Facebook is arguing.
So. First you define what "small amount of privacy" is, and put a price on that. And then present users with a choice. Or skip the pretence.
Ok let’s take this at face value. Not being able to use child labor is a 40%+ tariff.
What have we gained by framing it as such other than an extremely biased take pro unregulated business?
Such unhinged takes are one of the reasons EU has fallen behind so much. Nobody is arguing for child labor. We are just fighting for the right to build startups without worrying about reading hundred-page regulation manuals and having to hire "compliance officers" before even turning a profit.
Yeah, regulation generally tries to do good but that is going to be little consolation when EU's economy will go broke because all products and services we consume are build in less-regulated territories (USA and China to be specific).
> We are just fighting for the right to build startups without worrying about reading hundred-page regulation manuals and having to hire "compliance officers" before even turning a profit.
Oh no. How are you going to build your new ChatGPT wrapper without selling user data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners"?
GDPR (and a very small number of other applicable regulations) are somewhere between place 1000 and 1500 of things that hinder startups. And unless you are a complete moron those regulations will maybe apply to you when you reach 10 million+ users.
> GDPR [...] somewhere between place 1000 and 1500 of things that hinder startups.
No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation. You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages. User data was said to be "toxic". You touch it, you better know what you are doing or else.
This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder. Countless web-startups were never created because the most common monetization model (ads) became basically illegal (for European startups only, US/Chinese competitors kept enjoying full freedom).
> and a very small number of other applicable regulations
But it's not a small number. And regulations have a cumulative effect. See, startups are like distance running. You know it's a hard thing, but you believe you can try to do it. But then regulations are like potholes. You run around a few, but the more potholes to avoid the harder the run, until your main job turns from running to avoiding potholes. Then you simply say "why bother" and give up.
The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups, the fewer young people choose the entrepreneur path and decide to just get some bureaucratic job instead.
This is the tragedy we are living in the EU right now, in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
> No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation.
Bullshit
> You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages.
Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations without telling me
> This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder.
A moron who gets their advice from ads industry, sensationalist headlines and HN? Perhaps.
> But it's not a small number.
It is.
> The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups
GDPR is not an obstacle. It quite literally is "do not scrape user data and sell it to third parties without user consent".
> in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
Yeah, "entrepreneurs" complain about a lot, and then make a surprised pikachu face when they are told in no uncertain terms that no, sending precise geolocation data to third parties to store for 12 years is not okay: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
> Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations
As a matter of fact, I am the founder&owner of a small ISV (nothing ad, privacy, crypto or AI-related) in the Eastern EU. Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
How about you?
By troupo 2025-11-2019:51 (long time no reply due to hitting HN's rate limit)
> Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
Strange that you then spew absolute bullshit about GDPR.
> How about you?
I've worked in large multinational corporations (banking, streaming) that were "hit" with GDPR and spent several years making sure they are compliant. Not because GDPR is bad, but because no one really cared about the data collected, and where it ended up. [1]
Startups had it and have it easy since they can just not siphon all the data. Especially now, when you have all the tools to handle data properly. Hell, a decade ago you couldn't even get privacy-preserving analytics. Now you're drowning in them.
We're also preparing to launch a few (admittedly small scale) projects with friends, and what do you know? GDPR is the absolute last thing that even bothers us. You know why? We know what data to collect and for how long to store it, and we're not sending that data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners".
"Company-destroying fines" boogeyman or whatever other "chilling effect" bullshit belongs in the mind of children and morons. Hell, I've seen banking regulators come, list issues, and give a deadline to fix them. Much less GDPR.
[1] That's not entirely true. Payment and payment-adjacent regulations are significantly more stringent than GDPR, so everything related to that was and is extremely serious. As anything related to things like "data of persons under state protection". It's never black and white.
However, in big companies, especially at the time, you would eventually end up with a lot of data duplicated across many systems, often barely connected. 10 years ago cleaning up that mess required companies to reverse engineer and document 10-15 years of bad/hasty/adhoc decisions and assumptions. Surprisingly often that resulted in just retiring certain internal microservices wholesale (they just were no longer needed) and/or significantly reducing bandwidth and storage requirements in certain cases (because you no longer cary and store heavy duplicate objects around).
So the main opposition to GDPR came not from "poor chilled startups", but from companies like Facebook and Google who rely on 24/7 surveillance exclusively, ad industry, and large corporations who didn't want to deal with cleaning up internal messes.
By nickdothutton 2025-11-2010:471 reply One of the problems with regulation is that politicians "understand" complex systems like computers or software or "the platforms" almost entirely by way of analogy. Yet at the point of actually introducing rules about (for example) tracking or what happens to your data, you need to throw away analogy entirely and start talking and thinking (and implementing) not an analogy but what the thing _actually_ is. Rarely do they resolve down to this last stage where you move from analogy to how things really work, or might work. I see this everywhere I have touched government and regulation over many years.
By johndhi 2025-11-2012:23 But how do you actually do that?
By mattlutze 2025-11-2010:09 When we let the market bubble-up protective conditions through buyer behavior, we advantage innovation at the cost of accepting more harms, because the market response is always reactive instead of proactive, and the reaction can sometimes take decades or more (like GHG emissions and global warming).
When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.
Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.
By winstonewert 2025-11-200:38 I think the real question has to be: how do we determine what the regulations should be. Today, regulations are typically the product of dysfunctional political processes, and, no surprise, a lot of those regulations are unhelpful and a lot of helpful regulations are absent.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-210:27 I like this post. I was recently talking to a friend about using surveillance to improve recycling rates. The purpose of the discussion was not to advocate for more state-sponsored surveillance, but rather to imagine beneficial uses of surveillance. More to your point "more regulations is bad or less regulations is bad": Holy shit: Look at environmental protection laws. Consider the developed world in 1960 to today. The environment is night and day. It is so much cleaner and safer than ever. And, yes, most of those changes came about from regulations. I don't want to go back to a world where I come home from work in New York City and wipe my face clean in the mirror, and the tissue/towel comes away smudged with black & brown from soot in the air. (That is a true story that my mother told me from living in NYC in the 1970s.)
By brunojppb 2025-11-208:35 Based take. It is rarely back and white when it comes to social-technical challenges like this.
By raverbashing 2025-11-208:03 I agree
People bemoan bureaucracy (which is a totally fair criticism) without understanding its deeper meaning:
Bureaucracy is how it works
That's it. Digital government is also bureaucracy. Applying to YC is also bureaucracy.
Of course the meaning drifted with the times, but it still means that
First definition here https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bureaucr...
By _heimdall 2025-11-201:52 The challenge with regulation is that its the result of those in charge of a power imbalance being able to decide what is "good" PR "bad."
Yes, some regulations will result in outcomes most might want and others may result in outcomes most don't want. In both cases, though, everyone not in power has to accept that they gave up some level of free will in hopes that those in charge will always wield that power well.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-200:201 reply [flagged]
Stuff like e.g. ChatControl is also regulations, so no, it doesn't follow at all. If in practice the people doing the regulating don't have your interests in mind, more regulations is indeed bad.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-2015:22 I didn't say
"it's a regulation therefore it's good"
I said
"saying 'it's regulation therefore it's bad' is something bootlickers do"
By pa7ch 2025-11-1920:44 The regulation good/bad dichotomy has been very effective reducing the thinking of the constituents of modern neolibs in the US.
On one end we have regulations as part of regulatory capture. Opposite effect of regulations that would help say a small business compete fairly.
Unfortunately politics has become the religion of modernity.
Nuance and sober analysis like you've suggested do not mix well with religious dogma. It's much easier for people to react emotionally to symbols.
For many here, 'GDPR' is a variable that equals 'privacy' in their brain computer. So any criticism of it or its implementation realities, no matter how well argued, will not be met with reasoned response, but instead religious zeal.
>Unfortunately politics has become the religion of modernity.
religion was classically politics. Moses's tablets were Law. the circle of life.
By 1718627440 2025-11-208:47 Because both is trying to create a better society. One by internal, the other one by external motivation.
Most criticism of GDPR on HN is a criticism of bad-faith attempts to pretend to comply, many of which are expressly forbidden by the GDPR. It's a well-written, plain English regulation, and I encourage everyone to read it before criticising it. (At the very least, point to the bits of the regulation you disagree with: it should only take around 5 minutes to look up.)
I would call this the religious zeal response, it's been parroted so many times here that it's become fact, even though this is false.
The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...
And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.
For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."
However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.
To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
By array_key_first 2025-11-201:022 reply Right, but there's also the competing religious zealots who are ideologically opposed to regulation... like as a concept.
What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed.
What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt.
Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
Big enterprises like regulation because it enables them to capture the market and slow startups down: that's why they invest so much in standardization, for instance.
It allows them to force startups to match their (slow) pace of development.
By int_19h 2025-11-203:24 > Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
Have you missed all the large AI companies in US loudly demanding and otherwise lobbying for more regulation?
Regulations can be good for companies when you can make sure that they are written in a way that entrenches them against any new competitors.
> The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long
My feeling is that in 9 years you could read it.
However, I read most of the relevant bits in an afternoon. Most people on HN making preposterous claims about GDPR have never in their life read anything but industry's take on it.
> it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
It's trivial to comply with for the absolute vast majority of companies, you can very easily read it yourself, the bits that are relevant to most businesses shouldn't even take an hour to read.
> Every HN thread about GDPR devolves into this circular argument.
The only reason it devolves into a "circular argument" is that the vast majority of anti-GDPR comments on HN come from people who have never ever read even a single line from the regulation and just parrot the same old "GDPR requires these stupid banners".
> You’ll find zero intelligent engagement here if you bring this up however, because nobody here actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to Europe’s legal patchwork and its kneecapping effect on the private sector that Europe desperately needs to fund its inverted social welfare liability death spiral.
Yup. And this is the other reason: bad faith word soup that doesn't even pretend to be coherent, mixes up everything together, and goes from non-sequitur to non-sequitur.
So. Yes, complying with GDPR is trivial for most companies. No, your yet-another-shitty-startup does not need to sell my precise geolocation data to data brokers to store for 12 years to survive: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541 And no, it's not a burden not to do that.
By blibble 2025-11-2017:46 > So. Yes, complying with GDPR is trivial for most companies. No, your yet-another-shitty-startup does not need to sell my precise geolocation data to data brokers to store for 12 years to survive: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541 And no, it's not a burden not to do that.
this is exactly the attitude of these people
for most legitimate businesses the "pain" of the GDPR consisted of maybe removing Google Analytics from their website
the entire point is to stop the shitty companies (facebook) data harvesting everything they can get their dirty mits on
Hear hear.
My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.
So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear.
I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said).
Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
By vanviegen 2025-11-1923:35 > 87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
That's some serious speed reading! :-)
20 minutes to “read” 87 dense pages of legalese? Perhaps you meant to say “skim over.”
Perhaps they meant 200 minutes.
Or perhaps they also never read the law they are chiding others for not reading.
What is the point of lying about this? Anyone can open up the PDF and see this is an untrue statement.
The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading.
I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
Maybe I have an advantage because I am natively english and learned to read at a young age, idk.
I’m not lying, why would I provide the source if I was?
It is an outright lie that there are “10 sentences per page”. You can open the PDF and see that this is not even a little bit correct. 10 sentences per page would maybe be appropriate for an Early Reader book. It’s certainly not we have here.
You also didn’t read 56k words in 20 minutes. This is nonsense, at 46 words per second.
Maybe “statements” is better than “sentences”, but I meant what I meant..
and yes it took 20 minutes, it’s not the dense legalese you’re implying.
it’s just not. unless the dense one here is not the text.
I could suspend my disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are capable of reading 46 words per second. Sure. You happen to read about 10x faster than the average person at 250-300 words per minute. Congrats.
What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes.
So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time.
On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
clearly, you haven’t tried reading it.
Jesus Christ, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
The amount of effort I’ve spent replying to you is more than was necessary to understand the entire fucking text.
Every statement is very clear what they’re saying, don’t record what you don’t need, how do you define what you need, make sure personal information can be deleted, what constitutes personal information.
It’s really really really fucking easy, like dude; you’re halfway through a sentence you know exactly what they’re getting at. You finish it anyway in case there’s an exception or something, and it’s never the case that there is.
Whatever… you believe whatever the fuck you wanna believe don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
By dpark 2025-11-2021:24 At no point did I say the law was very difficult to read. I said that your claim that it should take 20 minutes to read is absurd.
That the other replies to you said basically the same should clue you in that this is not realistic for others even if it were realistic for you.
> don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
You could have easily just walked your claim back and said “Okay, 20 minutes is an exaggeration but it’s not a hard law to read”. Instead you repeatedly doubled down and backed yourself into a corner where the only possible options are that you are an ultra speed reader at 10x normal pace or you are a liar.
Not my problem if you don’t like those options.
By wizzwizz4 2025-11-201:14 GDPR is not dense legalese. Start on page 33, read the first 3 chapters and then until bored, start again from page 1 until you reach 33 again, and then read from where you left off: it'll make perfect sense.
By LtWorf 2025-11-2023:58 > My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.
Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…
I've never seen anyone here, or elsewhere, displaying a positive opinion on GDPR without readily acknowledging it, or the way it has turned out and is (not) being policed, has many shortcomings.
I have seen people that are fanatical on privacy. Cheers to them!
By mh- 2025-11-201:54 Well, I see multiple in this thread, one of which is currently adjacent to your comment.
By 1718627440 2025-11-208:491 reply > displaying a positive opinion on GDPR
Ok. I hereby do. The only complaint I have is that it isn't enforced automatically and that we often don't have a way to force the worst offenders, because they have the military we rely on on their side.
Thanks for confirming my point with regard to acknowledging shortcomings. :-)
By 1718627440 2025-11-2014:52 Then I don't get your point at all. You think when I like a law that much, that I say it should be used more, it is a drawback of the law?
By Razengan 2025-11-201:05 Seems like only AI could possibly keep track of all the practically countless variables involved in running human civilization now and keeping everyone happy.
>I've stopped thinking of automobile repair as a single dial, where more automobile repair is bad or less automobile repair is bad. It entirely depends on what is being repaired and how. Some areas need more automobile repair, some areas need less. Some areas need altered automobile repairs. Some areas have just the right amount of automobile repair. Most automobile repairs can be improved, some more than others.
you didn't really say anything
By array_key_first 2025-11-200:511 reply Well you can't just replace a word with a different word and then act like things are the same. If you do choose to do that, you, at the very least, have to explain how 'automobile repair' and 'regulations' are analogous.
Because in my mind, they are not. There are many, many people ideologically opposed to regulation. I've never met anyone ideologically opposed to auto repair, or even just opposed in general.
i could have chosen anything, you choose and do it. he didn't say anything at all.
"i no longer consider these issues to be black and white [riffing on another comment], i now see it more nuanced, where some things need more of something and others need less of that thing. deep, no?"
By array_key_first 2025-11-201:25 Well he is saying something here, because as pointed out, many people approach this from an ideological place.
By ranger_danger 2025-11-200:541 reply By rfrey 2025-11-202:28 Your midbrow dismissal only makes sense if there is nobody who denies that regulation is nuanced. In fact, the entire political landscape is set up around a "regulation is GOOD" vs "regulation is BAD" worldview.
There is an infinitely more effective and trustworthy solution: an adblocker that blocks trackers. You don't have to spend minutes daily on dark-pattern banners. You don't risk the broken implementations that still track you no matter what you click, that regulators can't oversee on billions of websites.
They should just keep the thing that lets you request full deletion of your account and data, the rest is total security theater. The EU's top #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 priority right now should be achieving digital sovereignty and getting a strong homegrown tech industry (ban American social media and force local alternatives?) so the US can't coerce it. That'll require some additional, different regulations, and that's the kind they should focus all efforts on for the foreseeable future. They put the cart before the horse.
Look at the sanctioned ICC judges (EU-based). Can't use any credit/debit cards (all American). Can't do any online e-commerce (there's a US entity somewhere in the flow). No Google/Apple accounts (how useful is your iPhone without the App Store?). "Regulate" foreign companies all you want, ultimately you still have no power over them. Cart before the horse.
By tcfhgj 2025-11-2013:28 > There is an infinitely more effective and trustworthy solution: an adblocker that blocks trackers. You don't have to spend minutes daily on dark-pattern banners. You don't risk the broken implementations that still track you no matter what you click, that regulators can't oversee on billions of websites.
try untangling the tracking code from the rest of the javascript code which is required for the sites to work - simply unrealistic.
By IanCal 2025-11-2012:41 It's not more effective and trustworthy, particularly as you can do both. The laws also cover dramatically more than tracking scripts and cookies.
> They should just keep the thing that lets you request full deletion of your account and data, the rest is total security theater.
Then large law abiding sites can still do enormous amounts of tracking, and can do lots with my data that they currently are not doing.
By LtWorf 2025-11-210:03 > ultimately you still have no power over them
You have the immense power of denying them access to your money, which turns out is a very compelling argument :)
The problems are in the details: why are news organizations exempt from this rule in Europe? You can’t read news websites unless you accept all cookies or pay to read.
Who decides these things? How is such a rule in favor of privacy? Why is my site where I regularly post news not eligible? Who decides which sites are eligible?
It’s these kind of moral double standards and cognitive dissonances that people have to endure. I wish it was black and white. But reality simply isn’t.
By qwertox 2025-11-209:09 > You can’t read news websites unless you accept all cookies or pay to read.
You can't even read news websites when you accept all the cookies, and then, oh surprise, you'd have to pay. But they installed the cookies nonetheless, those scammers.
It seems there were lawsuits but "pay to reject" is apparently legal as long as the pay is reasonable. I despise it personally.
By jamiecurle 2025-11-209:27 If you're under UK law the ICO guidance on "pay to reject" can be found here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
By x0x0 2025-11-2017:44 > why are news organizations exempt from this rule in Europe?
In the main, because the GDPR is an attack on advertising-supported services. You cannot build a business on context-free ads given they pay somewhere between 1/100 and 1/10000 as much as ads that profile.
Thus news orgs basically told regulators that the options were no free news (or realistically, the mess America is in, where real news orgs charge and the free ones are propaganda arms) or being allowed to do consent or pay. Because a paywall complies with all laws but has negative societal effects.
Are you sure they are exempt? I was always under the impression that their practice is pretty obviously illegal. I just did a quick google search and didn't find anything about exemption. So they are as exempt from the GDPR as much as Al Capone was exempt from taxes ;)
What they seem to be exempt from is getting consent if they require the data for journalistic purposes.
IANAL, but I think they are simply not following the law and waiting for a definitive decision by a court.
ed: So I kept reading and from my understanding it's TBD whether the practice is lawful. The European Data Protection Board has issued an opinion against it a year ago.
By x0x0 2025-11-2017:48 the edpb did not. that was explicitly -- in the very first paragraph -- under the DSA, not GDPR:
> The scope of this opinion is indeed limited to the implementation by large online platforms
Separately, in the first couple of paragraphs, they basically complain that they don't like the alternative that platforms can legally implement of paywalls for all. :shrug: Which they may not like, but is legal. So consent or pay is essentially a realpolitik deal to not implement paywalls.
More regulation, or stronger regulation, as in less wiggle room for businesses, may be a good thing. Case in point: a regulation requiring to disclose the ingredients of food.
Too many regulations is almost always a bad thing: numerous pieces of regulation rarely fit together seamlessly. It becomes easier to miss some obscure piece, or to encounter a contradiction, or to find a loophole. The cost of compliance also grows, and that disproportionately favors big established players.
> The cost of compliance also grows, and that disproportionately favors big established players.
Not true at all. Most of the harsher regulations only come into effect when the company hits a specific size. Examples from Australia (my country):
- Online shops that operate overseas, and import to Australia have to collect sales tax... but only if they make more than $75,000 from Australia per annum.
- Social media has to ban Australians under 16... but only if they make more than a billion per annum.
By xondono 2025-11-207:42 > Most of the harsher regulations only come into effect when the company hits a specific size.
That’s very market and country specific. Spain makes more than 1k tweaks to it’s food regulations each year, which would kill lots of restaurants if they were to be in compliance.
The result is that everyone tries to make as much money as they can and build a “inspection fund”, because you’re guaranteed to get a fine if inspected.
By novok 2025-11-204:42 Why isn't #1 an import duty sales tax system instead and you need to declare the proper value as part of shipping, or the good is rejected / confiscated?
By billy99k 2025-11-201:48 75,000 is very small for a business.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-202:071 reply Actually, online shops that mail stuff to Australian customers who request them to do so don't have to collect or pay any sales tax. The Australian government might stomp their feet and declare otherwise, but they have no legal or jurisdictional authority to do so, nor any real means for enforcement.
This trend of countries declaring that everyone on the planet is under their jurisdiction if they mail something there (or respond to a network request) is bananas.
> This trend of countries declaring that everyone on the planet is under their jurisdiction if they mail something there (or respond to a network request) is bananas
I disagree.
Imagine I ban health potions in my realm. I am running a Darwininistic experiment to make my people the most resilient people of the world and I want them to succeed through survival of the fittest. I tolerate non magical medicine but anything else will pay 1000% duties or be confiscated. A merchant comes by with a delivery of health potions to "Johnathan Man". The guards point to the "Survival of the ssssttttrrroooong" banner, while the merchant throws a fit saying she has a very powerful uncle that just happens to be a known warlord. The guards laugh, close the gates and go back inside for another pushup context. Meanwhile Johnathan and the merchant complain things about jurisdiction to no one in particular.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-2015:09 I have no idea what you're even trying to say here. Australia is welcome to try and confiscate goods that are mailed without paying sales tax, but we both know they lack the ability to actually execute that. And their ability to do anything about digital sales is basically non-existent.
So if I'm understanding your analogy correctly, the guards can't really do anything, so the merchant and the buyer will be the ones going about their business.
By fwip 2025-11-200:39 In fact, "too many" is the exact point at which it becomes excessive. :P
By samdoesnothing 2025-11-1922:00 I think this is an excellent point. More is almost always worse, but if there is a genuine need for regulation it should be absolute.
That cookie banner needs to be standardized and offered by the browser. It should be like a certificate popup. Why is every website forced into doing a shoddy job ?
They aren't forced, they choose to. They're forced to get user permission before tracking them across websites and sharing info with 3rd parties, but how they do it is left up to the industry. And the industry chose dark patterns, hoping to annoy the users into complaining to the EU about them.
By fluoridation 2025-11-2012:56 It is the fault of the EU. If you leave a steak on the floor you don't punish the dog for eating it. Site operators just chose to do what was most convenient for them within the boundaries of the law, as would you.
By dgb23 2025-11-2012:16 We had a do-not-track header that has been deprecated. Simply enforcing the header legally and having it on by default would suffice and it would be much easier to test, because it's not bespoke from the client side of things.
I assume it's because a business has different ideas about what to collect from their users and users are more or less willing to share some data with some specific businesses. Hence, every business needs their own consent rules. The fact that this is achieved with a cookie banner for 99,9% of all businesses is a side-effect. Could there be a better solution? Probably. But the law and the incentives aligned to cookie banner hell.
By 1718627440 2025-11-208:54 > Probably. But the law and the incentives aligned to cookie banner hell.
Most cookie banners are non-compliant, so I doubt that.
Aren’t tracking cookies mostly irrelevant nowadays, because every browser can be uniquely fingerprinted anyway?
By Aaargh20318 2025-11-2012:18 The law doesn't even mention cookies. This is a common misunderstanding and causes a lot of annoyance as I've seen websites ask for permission to store cookies even when they don't need explicit permission.
The law only concerns itself with tracking. If you don't use a mechanism to uniquely identify people over multiple visits and/or websites, you're fine. You can store simple preferences in a cookie without asking. No need to bother your users with a cookie wall for that.
By Tarq0n 2025-11-208:58 No. The regulation is about processing your personal information, cookies are just an implementation detail.
By sdoering 2025-11-208:39 Fingerprinting is actually covered by the regulations and needs to be "consented" to.
There are different regulations, but basically they are technology agnostic (a good thing). If you as a compnay want to use data that could theoretically be used as an identifyer for me, you need my consent. For any type of use. Except if it is absolutely necessary to provide the basic service. Or if we have a contractual relationship, but there are also protective rules in place to protect the customer.
Different regulations handle storing data (like cookies, but also local/session storage and similar things on the devices of your users. But those are separate from GDPR.
GDPR is - as said - only concerned with data that could be theoretically linked to me as an individual. Regardless what this data is. Could be an id in a cookie, could be a fingerprint, could be smoke signals. It could even be the combination of different data points, that taken together allow for an identification.
Theoretical example: Imagine I live in a village with 500 people. The company tracks the location and that I am male (so roughtly 50% of the population), that I am between 45 - 50 (say about 10% of the population), have multiple cats (say maybe only three people now in that village, use a Linux based machine - bingo: You found me. And now you have a set of data that falls under the GDPR. Welcome in having to ensure you only use this data in a way that I gave consent to.
See: The law doesn't even just look at marketing or tracking data. Or what happens in an app or a browser. It covers all data that is either pointing ti me as an "ID" - like a cookie ID, or at personal identifiable data - like bei combination in my example.
By Aaargh20318 2025-11-2012:20 > That cookie banner needs to be standardized and offered by the browser.
That's actually part of these changes. It's mentioned in the linked article about halfway down.
How would that even work? The browser has no way to know what a cookie is for.
By vilhelm_s 2025-11-205:36 They are regulating websites anyway, surely they can just invent some standard format to say what function each cookie has. How about requiring that the name of every cookie has to start with one of "Strictly Necessary", "Functional", "Performance", and "Targeting/Advertising"?
By will4274 2025-11-205:37 It's not the tech that's hard. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2024JulSep...
By rs186 2025-11-2011:47 I mean, websites don't need to use non-functional cookies in the first place. If they use it, they have to declare it. It's a problem created by website owners themselves.
GitHub doesn't have a cookie banner: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
That said, looks like what you asked is happening: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/19/europe-gdpr-cookie-chan...
By ernst_klim 2025-11-2013:093 reply > But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone.
It took me to move to Germany to figure that privacy is a spectrum, and I, despite being a crazy on privacy and security, actually don't want that much.
I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz.
My colleagues had 3 bikes stolen in a week bc we have no CCTV cameras.
Privacy definitely has costs, and not only for business, but for regular people in daily life. It should, as anything, be balanced against costs of doing business, people security concerns.
Same goes for security: few private cctvs are ok, massive coordinated surveillance and chat control not ok. Everything is on spectrum and is a trade off.
By JimmyBiscuit 2025-11-2013:311 reply Yeah, I can tell you that the only thing CCTV does is making the thief wear hoodies. And you get some clips of them carrying expensive bikes around the corner out of CCTV range to their parked transporter.
By LtWorf 2025-11-2013:53 Even without hoodie… who was it? Some dude.
By m000 2025-11-2013:38 True. I don't know from where people get the idea that the police would bother with an investigation for your (personally important) case if you had full-on surveilance.
You may have your laptop snatched, go to the police station and show them the exact location of the thieves using e.g. find my Mac. The will do nothing, even if it's in the building across the street.
Now, showing them some blurry (at best) faces in CCTV footage and ask them to investigate? Good luck.
By afandian 2025-11-2013:19 > I've been to a German factory where robots could not distinct between humans and objects bc Datenschutz.
It sounds interesting but I'm not sure what it means. Could you clarify this?
Related, recently in the UK news. British Transport Police won't even look at CCTV for bike theft at train stations (because of resource constraints, but the presence of CCTV doesn't automatically mean it will be used).
By Semaphor 2025-11-2013:57 Private CCTVs are legal, you just can’t have it film a public area. And I’m grateful for that.
Most baffling thing is that sometimes you can't opt-out from "always active" stuff that still involve hundreds of "partners"; see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844691
Users can opt-out by not using the service or buying an ad-free version if available.
One would think that developers should not be forced to offer for free a version monetized with 60% less effective ads. And I understand currently this is indeed not the case for small developers, they can offer paid ad-free or free but with personalized ads. Large platforms apparently cannot.
By sdoering 2025-11-208:42 If you want to do business in the EU, just follow the law.
You are not allowed to sell Heroin to anyone in Germany. I don't see you making the argument, that we should - in the same fashion as with digital spyware using companies - not target drug dealers. Becase hey, people can just decide to not buy drugs.
[Edit]: Typo
That’s how most news websites work in Europe: accept the cookies, or pay.
Yes, but opt-out tracking data which is not necessary for the operation of the primary use case of the app is not allowed.
It must be opt-in, truly a free choice, and informed consent, and declining must be as easy as accepting.
My search told me that unless you are a gatekeeper, offering a reasonably priced ad-free tier allows to make the ad-monetized version personalized only.
I think it makes sense. Either pay, or consent to effective ads. There's no free lunch
By moi2388 2025-11-2117:20 You are allowed to serve ads, but not use data to serve personalised ads without free choice opt-in.
In theory of course, in practice nothing is being governed or fined for smaller companies.
I'm 100% on the same page as you. I just wanna point out that apparently, the enforcement of said regulation just failed. There are way too many businesses that don't give you a single "reject all" button and get away with their dark patterns. A regulation that can't be enforced consistently is not desirable and failed to some degree.
By sdoering 2025-11-208:30 I recently registered a complaint with my local data protection authority. This then got routed to their colleagues in North Rhine-Westphalia that are responsible, as the company in question had their business location there.
What the company did? They showed a consent banner - but already sent my data to all manner of analytics and marketing companies. Before I even denied consent. They also did not mention all of those trackers/companies/cookies in their consent solution nor on their privacy page.
The result from the authorities was a clear: Go f*k yourself e-mail to me (I had screenshots attached in my complaint). Basically stating: We do not see any way you are personally affected and we also have too much to do, so we won't go after a company, just because they tracked you and sent your data to a bunch of marketing companies and tracking firms, even as you denied consent. And we also don't care, that they actually did not mention quite a bunch of those receivers of my data in their data privacy page.
So yeah - when governments actually have no interest in enforcing the rules in place to protect citizens, I am lost for words. Might have been, because the company in question being in violation of the law here was a former state-owned business, that while privatised is still run by politicians (like currently by the Chairman of the FDP Federal Committee for Justice, Home Affairs, Integration, and Consumer Protection to be precise).
What pisses me off about this the most, though is, that companies that actually follow the regulations, treat customers well and respect their data privacy concerns, they are at a disadvantage. It is not that our government and those EU conservative ars**es are for a free market. They want a market in which their buddies and the ones providing the juicy jobs after governmental terms come to an end, to win. As always, conservatives follow Wilhoit's Law.
By yapyap 2025-11-1921:50 > I get that too many regulations is a bad thing
Well yeah, cause your sentence relies on itself.
_Too many_ regulations is a bad thing.
But to have a lot of regulations, especially in fields where there is not much to be gained but oh so much being lost in the interest of capital gains like in generative AI, is a blessing rathr than a curse.
FTA: “Under the new proposal, some “non-risk” cookies won’t trigger pop-ups at all, and users would be able to control others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly.”
GDPR allows for essential cookies with no popup.
Implied consent is valid for most functionality, just not selling peoples tracking data or giving it to a third party who could.
Its entirely possible to have no pop-up.
Someone once told me they wanted one anyway because it made the site seem more legitimate than if I removed it (the only thing I would have needed to change was the embedded video from youtube and I could have dropped the popup. Oh well).
By dgroshev 2025-11-202:40 No pop-ups on apple.com!
By NooneAtAll3 2025-11-203:102 reply embedding youtube is enough to be non-cookiebanner-compliant??
By sdoering 2025-11-209:00 Look at what YT loads in terms of tracking, when opening a page with an embedded YT video - even if you do not play that.
Or install something like pi-hole and watch how many analytics calls to Adobe Analytics the Adible app is sending out. Even if just idle in the background. Given the fact that you pay Adobe by the server call, Audible clearly must earn a shitload of money, if they can burn tracking calls like this.
If you are on a Mac, try Little Snitch and see where your data is going while surfing the net. No wonder in the US there are companies, that can sell you a clear image of all relevant data on nearly any person to enable algorithmic wage discrimination [1].
I know, that industry is trying to push EU further and further towards less consumer protections. But we have a great example of what that means for workers, consumers and all of us in the US.
[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/10/zero-sum-zero-hours/
By Spunkie 2025-11-204:02 We went the route inspired by gamingonlinux.com
So anywhere there is a YouTube embed we instead display a static thumbnail with 2 inline buttons underneath. 1 button to accept cookies and then load the embed and 1 button to view the video directly on YouTube in a new tab.
It works nicely and also pushed us to switch most of our videos to being first party hosted instead of YouTube.
That would be fine, if there was a law that forced every browser to have this setting and every company to respect the setting.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-11-1921:161 reply arguably if there was a browser setting for this the current GDPR would require you to respect that setting. But that's arguably, it would still need to adjudicated.
By 1718627440 2025-11-1921:361 reply The browser setting already exists (DNT), so I don't know what you want to conlude.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-11-205:341 reply My conclusion would be that under the current GDPR that if someone had the browser setting on, if a company did not respect that setting and kept private data, that they could be reported for GDPR violations and then the issue could be adjudicated, i.e that the courts would then decide if in fact GDPR violations occur by not following that browser setting.
Secondary conclusion - it might be more beneficial if one just contacted the EDPB and said since this browser setting exists and nobody is using it please issue a ruling if the browser setting must be followed, set it to go into effect by this date giving people time to implement it, and if they agreed the browser setting would be adequate to represent your GDPR wishes they might also conclude that it would be an onerous process to make you go through a GDPR acceptance if it were turned on, howe ver as this article is saying that they are "scaling back" the GDPR that would seem to be dead in the water, which is why I said under "the current GDPR".
By 1718627440 2025-11-208:091 reply In the absence of any explicit consent, no-consent is always assumed by the GDPR. The absence of a DNT header definitely doesn't count as consent, so that header is kind of useless, since the GDPR basically requires every request to be handled as if it has a DNT header.
A pre-existing statement of non-consent doesn't stop anyone from asking whether the user might want to consent now. So it is not legally required to not show a cookie dialog when the DNT header is set, which would be the only real purpose of the DNT header, but legislating such a thing, would be incompatible with the other laws. It would basically forbid anyone from asking for any consent, that's kind of stupid.
The GDPR requires the consent to be given fully informed and without any repercussions on non-consent. So you can't restrict any functionality when non-consenting users, and you can also not say "consent or pay a fee". Also non-consenting must be as easy as consenting and must be revocable at every time. So a lot of "cookie-dialogs" are simply non-compliant with the GDPR.
What would be useful is a "Track me" header, but the consent must be given with an understanding to the exact details of what data is stored, so this header would need to tell what exactly it consents to. But no one would turn it on, so why would anyone waste the effort to implement such a thing in the browser and web applications?
> GDPR that would seem to be dead in the water
I agree, and I don't like that.
By bryanrasmussen 2025-11-2010:311 reply If there were any companies that provided value for tracking people would turn on a track me header, but there are none. so I agree.
By 1718627440 2025-11-2010:53 I mean I run Debian, and voluntarily enabled popularity-contest, so is not like these examples don't exist.
By mmooss 2025-11-1921:37 Like Do Not Track?
By wat10000 2025-11-1922:55 They should have gone farther. Don't require the user's permission for non-essential tracking cookies. Just ban them outright. No opt in, no opt out, it's just straight-up illegal to track people unless they're actively using a signed in account.
You can do this trivially in modern browsers: private browsing.
I have one "normal" browser window for "persistent cookie" use (like gmail, youtube, etc) and another "private" window for everything else. Cookies are lost anytime a tab closes.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:082 reply Private browsing is equivalent to creating an ephemeral browser profile everytime. It might get rid of more browser storage, but for how tracking works now-a-days, it is useless. It is only for what you want to store on your disk, not for how you want to be seen to remotes.
I'll admit I may have fallen for "private" browser marketing. Is this representative to current methods?
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
I assume a subset of these bits could be used, meaning the "unique" or not claim of this test probably doesn't reflect if you can be tracked. I also assume that a VPN would help tremendously.
For that test, as is, I get "unique" every refresh when using Brave Browser. With Safari and Chrome, I get a fail an subsequent sessions.
By 1718627440 2025-11-2110:13 > I'll admit I may have fallen for "private" browser marketing.
The private claim isn't wrong, the threat model is just your spouse seeing that you watched porn and not at all about the remote party.
By 1718627440 2025-11-2110:191 reply > https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
What? They just claim Linux has a marketshare of ~20%?Platform Linux x86_64 One in x browsers have this value: 5.73By nomel 2025-11-2120:24 For all of these values, I think they're going purely by bits rather than occurrences observed or market share.
By morshu9001 2025-11-210:06 It's still the easiest way to track users. If it were useless, Google wouldn't be so opposed to blocking 3P cookies in Chrome.
> You can do this trivially in modern browsers: private browsing.
The one that Google keeps tracking? https://www.tomsguide.com/news/going-incognito-in-chrome-doe...
Edit: not just Google. Incognito mode does not prevent websites from tracking you, period.
--- start quote ---
Once these new disclaimers make their way to stable builds of Chrome, you’ll see a message that looks like this when going incognito:
“Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google."
--- end quote ---
I don't use browsers made by ad companies, because I fully expect that browser to stay out of the way of their revenue stream. There are many browsers out there that care about privacy.
Are you sure cookies get scrapped after you close a tab? Does opening a single session-based web site in multiple tabs work (eg. logged into Amazon in a private browser)? What browser are you using?
By morshu9001 2025-11-205:15 In Chrome and Firefox, all the private windows share a session that gets scrapped when you close them all. Safari keeps them separate.
By morshu9001 2025-11-202:071 reply Yeah idk why there's a law trying to poorly enforce this instead
By troupo 2025-11-2010:29 Because the law isn't about cookies, but about tracking? You know, the kind that doesn't stop even if you open the "ignorant mode" in your browser: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/going-incognito-in-chrome-doe...
By insurancesucks 2025-11-1923:50 Laws should punish wrongdoing. Regulations that seek to stop all wrongdoing place burdens on law abiding citizens and businesses that were never going to harm anyone. We can't stop all wrong upfront, and the costs of attempting to do so are substantial.
By shoddydoordesk 2025-11-1920:374 reply Who is the audience your comment is trying to reach? Who are these mysterious "companies"?
It's important to realize companies are made of people.
Someone had to explicitly code the dark pattern in the GDPR cookie dialog. Ever notice the button for "Accept All" is big and shiny, while refusing all is more often than not a cumbersome, multi-click process?
That's not an accident. That was coded by people. People around us, people who post here. I'm sure "made GDPR dialog deceptively confusing" went on someone's accomplishment report that they then used to justify a raise or promotion.
My theory is that companies are not the sum of their employees. Employees are generally good; toxic humans are a small minority (unfortunately they tend to be over-represented at the head of companies).
But put employees together into a profit-maximisation machine, and the machine will try to maximise profit, with dark patterns and downright evil things.
Similar with our species as a whole: nobody is actively working to break the climate so much that their kids will die long before they reach the age of retirement. But that's what we as a species are doing together, somehow. Individually, we don't want that, but that's not enough.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-11-200:181 reply That explains passively malignant processes, like not radically overhauling your business to address climate change. It doesn't explain actively malevolent things like "let's bury the "Decline Cookies" dialog under 3 layers of clicks. That's a proactive choice, that some software developer chose to implement.
By palata 2025-11-209:46 I'm guessing that in many cases, it's not one software developer who decides. Most people are told what to do, and for many websites I'm guessing that it's just some kind of Wordpress add-on.
Someone realised that they sold more add-ons if they implement those dark patterns, so they did it ("it's not me, I offer a good one but they buy the evil one"). In my experience in startups, the website was managed by marketing people who honestly had no clue: they seemed to genuinely believe that they needed those cookies ("I am in marketing, I need the data") and they did not understand the consequences. "I just install this Google thing, and then Google gives me nice data for free".
Why do people build weapons? That's a lot worse than a cookie popup, but I'm sure every single person in that industry will tell you that they "save lives".
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:152 reply That's why we need to realize, that decisions in the small constitute what happens in the large. If some person comes and tells me to implement dark patterns into the consent popup, I'll tell them that this is illegal. I'll also tell people, when their current consent is manufactured or when their cookie/consent popup does not conform with GDPR. Been there, done that. Only unfortunate, that it was not my role to deal with that. It was simply that most people didn't care (I must assume frontend developer knew better, otherwise they were utterly uninformed about their job), some people who should have known better didn't (everyone else in the engineering team), some people wanted dark patterns to be in there (project management and marketing/sales, as usual), and I was the only one pointing out the tiny problem with the law. Of course no one ever thanked me for that.
It's not that people who implement those things don't care, per se. It's that they care about getting their paycheck more (or, in the current climate, retaining their job). And they are also acutely aware that if they refuse to do it, a replacement that won't is easy to find.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:11 Your moral integrity is tested, when your paycheck depends on it, not when it doesn't have repercussions to you.
I have been in that situation in a startup. The boss would come to me and ask for some dark pattern (not cookies, I don't remember exactly what it was). I said I wouldn't do it. They literally asked a guy in the adjacent room, and he took it as a new task and did it.
He was not a bad guy: I did not care about getting fired (I was young and single), he did (he had a family). And in his opinion, if the boss wanted it, anyway it would end up being done. His job was to implement what the boss wanted, not to contradict the boss.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-2010:11 Both understandable and good that you stood up to it!
Sometimes though bosses need some contradiction, for the business to be successful. It is not the best approach to have no opinions or ethics.
By s1mplicissimus 2025-11-1922:142 reply Having coded multiple such buttons in the past, I'd like to ask to consider that the person doing the coding is barely the person making the decision. It's hard to reject such a request when your lifelihood depends on the job
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:231 reply It might be hard in some places, with especially toxic higher ups. A good start is pointing out the law a few times. If that doesn't get them to stop, what you can do is ask them to give you a signed piece of paper, where it says, that against your objection and warning about this being illegal, they want you to still do that. Usually at that point they will find someone else, or stop trying to do it.
By s1mplicissimus 2025-11-2010:491 reply I agree with everything you say, except
> Usually at that point they will find someone else
is not really something a lot of people can afford to risk
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-2016:11 This is why am glad to live in a country with comparatively good employee protections. In other countries, where people can be fired at will, this might be more problematic. But at least in this country, it would be a very clear cut case, if your employer asks you to do something illegal, that they will not be able to legally fire you. Of course you might have to go to court to get your right.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-11-200:211 reply Which is why we need professional licensure: You get to tell your boss "If I tell you to go fuck yourself, then I risk this job. If I implement your feature, I risk losing every future job by losing my license. And everybody you can hire to do this will tell you the same thing".
I don't want to live in your hellscape where my government tells me I can't program a website without a license.
Grow up and tell someone you won't implement a feature because you don't like it. I do it all the time - "that's a bad idea, I'm not doing that". I still manage to eat, it's not either/or, you have agency, you can refuse without resorting to regulation saying you must.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:211 reply Maybe you could still program a website. But you might not be able to do it professionally.
But yes, more people should tell other people that they won't do that.
Should contributing code to open source software require professional licensure?
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-2016:161 reply As far as I know most (all?) open source and free software licenses include terms, that explicitly states, that there is no warranty. So I think maybe a license there wouldn't be required. It is an interesting question though.
But many people are paid by their companies to work on OSS.
Most commercial software doesn’t have a warranty either.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-2022:53 In that case I would say, since they are getting paid for their work by the company, they are in a different position than someone developing FOSS on their own private time.
I think a lot of commercial software that is not open source or free software, doesn't have licenses in the same sense. They are proprietary and they might have an EULA, that prohibits you from reverse engineering or something like that, or that declares the no warranty. But not licenses like for example GPL or MIT license. Such a license would be useless for proprietary software projects, because the user isn't supposed to ever get the code.
By s1mplicissimus 2025-11-2010:51 Lucky you. In my experience it ends up with talks to HR, where they will explain that "you are being difficult to work with" and "things are going to have to change" or "we are going to have to look for alternative avenues"
By OkayPhysicist 2025-11-200:151 reply IMO, this is a great example of the lack of professionalism in the software development field. No individual software developer is responsible for violating the GDPR's prohibitions on cookie banners in a legal sense, but we could be. Real engineers have that leverage: A PE who thinks a bridge's design amounts to professional malpractice gets to refuse to approve that design, and anybody who the employer could find to approve it risks their entire career, on top of personal liability.
By necovek 2025-11-204:54 But that's a great example of why we might not need to turn into professionally licensed experts: the risk of messing the implementation of GDPR up is nowhere near messing a bridge or even a single family home up.
Now sure, with software controlling everything today (even the tools an engineer would use to design and build a bridge: imagine a bug in software setting the cement ratio in concrete being used), there are accountability reasons to do it.
someone coded it once, everyone else just adds another dependency that fulfills the spec, they don't even have to search for "dark patterns", just "most effective"
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:29 How much incompetence do we accept or tolerate, before we deem it negligence? If someone adds a consent popup or similar thing to a website, usually knowing, that there is a reason why this must be done, and that this reason is GDPR, it seems quite incompetent to not know the first bit about what is required, and not doing their due diligence to read up on it when not one doesn't know.
Perhaps it would change things for the better, if this special kind of people were at least temporarily removed from the job, until they have gained basic knowledge about their job and how it affects other people.
Realistically speaking, how much are people willing to pay for email, communications, cloud backups, social media? This is the hard question.
By necovek 2025-11-204:44 They already do as part of their internet subscription at home and data plans on mobile.
ISPs used to provide email addresses for people, and it was part of the cost.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-1920:24 Yep, it is exactly what the EU shouldn't do. This will actually further disadvantage EU companies, when US companies are left to run rampant. It also will take away any "made in EU" advantage that EU-local companies had over US competition. GDPR was exactly the right step. In fact it was not enforced strictly enough and should have been enforced much stricter, punishing all the shady businesses which employed dark pattern to extract personal data from citizen.
Every regulation has some unforeseen consequences. Most of the time it's impacts are worse than the effect we wanted to regulate from the start. Us humans discard the effects we can't predict as benign even over smaller inconveniences we can see.
By vanderZwan 2025-11-207:53 > Every regulation has some unforeseen consequences.
This argument would feel a lot less insincere if the people who always trot it out also used it every time something gets deregulated.
> Most of the time it's impacts are worse than the effect we wanted to regulate from the start.
Are they though? Or do you only hear a disproportionate amount of complaints because of manufactured consent? Because I sure as hell don't trust the talking heads on TV backed by billionaires who don't like to see people push back at their greed and lust for power.
By erikerikson 2025-11-205:07 > Business never respects anything, but profits
That is taken as a law of the universe by some but B-Corps, Social Purpose Corps, FairShares Commons... There are exceptions and some are working to do better. That statement has mostly become an excuse.
By PeterStuer 2025-11-2010:03 Once they lobbied in "legitimate interest" as the exception to the opt-in requirement, the whole regulation de facto became a farce for the end user.
Are cookies really tracking you? 3rd party cookies don’t work in any browser. Ads are passing session data on the URLs instead. You can alow easily change some settings to stop persistent cookies. You can install privacy extensions like ghostery to block beacons. You can use features like ICloud private relay to prevent IP tracking. Solutions are all there and they aren’t because of any law.
By rckt 2025-11-2010:02 Everything you mentioned is advanced knowledge. An average person, who doesn't deal with all these technicalities simply doesn't know this. It's like Telegram saying that it's the most secure messenger while not offering encrypted chats by default and not allowing to have encrypted group chats. An average person in tis case ends up completely unprepared and unprotected.
By sdoering 2025-11-208:49 Don't mix PII data and cookies (or any other similar tech). There are different regulations in place here.
If you want to use ddata that can identify me (even in theory), you need to ask me, if I am fine with that. If you want to store data on my computer, you also need to ask me, if I am fine with that. Because, if I request a download, I expect to download the file. If I request a website, I expect the website content. I do not expect data that you or others can use to see how often I visited your site. Like meta-shit, or google-crap, or linkedin-slop...
If you want to do that, just ask m. And explain in clearly understandable words, what you do and why. That is just human decency.
Yes, I can (and strongly do) protect myself against this (and I am working in that business, I know the tricks and tools and stuff). But my late mom can't. Or her 80+ year old neighbor. Or SO#s my 19 year old niece that only uses a tablet and a crapload of apps that target her and spew a shitload of targeted ads for wheightloss onto her since she was an early teen...
So no -> Those companies need to be highly regulated. To me, those companes need to rott in hell, but that is my take. I want people to be protected. From business, from government. Thst is the basis of European privacy law - protecting the small person from the big entities. And rightly so. We have our history from which those protections originated.
There are a bunch of sites that stop working if you tweak privacy related settings. Twitter straight up tells you that if you experience problems, you should disable Firefox's tracking protection.
By sdoering 2025-11-208:52 And by that they are actually in violation of GDPR. But hey - since when was Musk interested in following regulations. And since when has a governmental or supra-governmental entity been able to curb that tendency of the super rich and biggest cooperations.
Like with meta: They know they mke 7 billion annualy from serving 15 billion scam ads daily. They calculated that they will have at most have to pay about a billion in governmental fines all over the world, if they should one day be regulated for that.
So it is a clear business decision to go on shoing 15 billion+ scam ads per day to their "users". Were some interesting journalistic pieces on that a few days ago.
And exactly those companies are the reason we need stronger protection. And these protections more heavily enforced.
By ralferoo 2025-11-2012:47 > Ads are passing session data on the URLs instead
At which point it also counts as PII and is subject to the GDPR rules.
By 0xedd 2025-11-206:45 [dead]
Why not accept and let cookie autodelete delete it after closing the site?
Expecting any industry to follow the law is foolish, if it gets big enough, they will wear down and overturn any annoyance against it, malicious compliance is the only way.
By renegade-otter 2025-11-1921:532 reply Europe has much more fatal startup-killing regulation problems than cookies, however. Who cares about cookies? I am on your site, you are going to plant/collect cookies. These goddamned banners are a solution in search of a problem, and it's yet another hurdle a company of, say, 3 has to go through, for very little reason.
The banner isn't required. They could just not do the things the banner would ask consent for.
People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law. That's because, if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs. Notably missing from that list is "lawyers who can be bothered to research the question".
People put the banners up because they see other people doing it and it seems safest. That all of this would be so should have been perfectly obviously to whoever contemplated bringing the regulation into existence. Therefore they are either imperceptive or malign.
By miramba 2025-11-208:44 > if you haven't noticed, the people concerned are computer programmers, UI designers, and PMs.
Those are the people who should know best what is meant by "ask visitors for consent before you track them.".
Lawyers and more work is needed if you want to track anyway and look for ways to make people accidentally consent. "Let's ask the question, but hide the unwanted answer as deeply as possibly without breaking the law."
You may blame EU bureaucrats, I blame the unwillingness of the companies to fulfill the spirit of the law and putting all the work into pretending.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:06 > People don't know whether they are or are not doing things that require consent under the law.
This knowledge is taught in school and we also had one lecture in university and I am not even studying CS or anything computer adjacent. You can very much rely on CS graduates to know this, and even if they don't, the company could organize a training day, like they do for all the other stuff. This is really a dumb excuse for a company.
Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.
By novok 2025-11-204:43 "Just sign the contract, we'll never use that clause!"
Any company that can hire teams of software developers can afford to hire a lawyer to tell them whether they need to irritate all their customers. And frankly, they'd be dumb not to hire a lawyer if they think they need some legal cover to determine whether that cover is sufficient.
Good god. I certainly wasn't suggesting this situation would be improved by software teams hiring lawyers to advise on their software! You appear to have completely lost perspective.
By thfuran 2025-11-2013:59 You think a company worried that they have a legal issue should just ask the programmers and ui designers to sort it out? Or that programmers who think the company has a legal issue should take it upon themselves to come up with a feature that they think addresses it without consulting legal?
By miramba 2025-11-208:29 Since you asked: I care. I leave sites which insist on tracking me and appreciate that it is now mandatory for said sites to inform me about their intentions. So this is a solution to a problem I actually have. There are sites which place a "reject all" button above all and make this easy for me. Others try it the sneaky way, by making me turn off every single tracking vendor and then a lot more hidden under legitimate interest. Those are the sites I leave and never come back. The hurdle in question has a lot of simple solutions. 1, don't use cookies. Github does that AFAIK. 2, be transparent about your tracking intentions and use one of the several premade solutions. 3, design a dark pattern UI that hides the important switches in technical named lists and count on the laziness and confusion of users to use them. That is probably the most expensive way for a 3 person company, as you need devs and UX designers and lawyers to judge if you bended the regulation requirements just enough without breaking them.
By kvgr 2025-11-2013:17 We had our underground parking and storage units broken into in apartment building. And we couldn't see the CCTV camera, to be on a lookout for the thief and call cops. Only cops could see it. Thieves have higher protection than your property.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-11-1922:502 reply The trouble is that everyone else is pursuing tech unhindered by such regulations at breakneck speed, and Europeans realize that Europe - once the center of science and technology - is increasingly sliding into a backwater in this space and an open air museum.
Now, some will agree with you and say that privacy should never be violated, but nonetheless accept a certain measure of tolerance toward that kind of violation, because they see rigid intolerance as causing more harm than the violation of privacy itself is causing [0]. This harm is chiefly the economic harm caused by the burden of regulation and the roadblocks it introduces.
Perhaps this isn't true, but if it is, then moral offense is likely to have little effect. A more effective means might be the make following regulations cheaper. Of course, as we know, when you make something cheaper, you increase demand. This means that EU institutions would likely see this as an opportunity to increase regulation, nullifying the gains of introducing less costly ways to adhere to regulation.
[0] This reminds me of Aquinas's view of prostitution. Naturally, Aquinas saw prostitution as a grave, intrinsic evil. No one is ever justified in soliciting the services of a prostitute, much less of being a prostitute. That's the moral stance; it concerns our personal moral obligations. However, from the position of the state and how the state should police such activity through law, Aquinas saw the criminalization of prostitution, however good in principle it might be, as a policy that would be practically worse - even disastrously so - than law and policy that is permissive toward prostitution. Whether you agree or disagree with him, the principle holds, namely, that the state not only does not need to police every bit of immorality, but by doing so, may actually contribute to the destabilization of society and to an even worse condition than the one it is saddled with.
> sliding into a backwater in this space and an open air museum
Or a place that follows a different approach than "break it to make it" mad dash, that fosters a different - perhaps richer - culture with tech more aligned to people's needs, and overall healthier to live in. If there is a good set of regulations in place. And that is where EU is not consistent, and this backtracking not helpful.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-11-2015:43 > a place that follows a different approach than "break it to make it" mad dash
You don't have to convince me of the foolishness of mad dashes. Or the emptiness of consumerist culture. But is the EU not consumerist? Does it even have any viable or good ideas about alternatives? Without consumerism, the modern world doesn't know what to do with itself. It has no other modus vivendi. Consumption is all it knows.
> a different - perhaps richer - culture with tech more aligned to people's needs, and overall healthier to live in.
Sounds great, and I do not contest these as aspirations. And economies are supposed to serve the objective good of human beings. But is the EU on the path of greater cultural richness, or one of cultural decadence?
> If there is a good set of regulations in place. And that is where EU is not consistent
Bingo. What is good regulation, not as just an expression of principle and aspiration, but as a matter of practicality and prudence in the given circumstances?
It also takes more than good regulation as well. You have to ask: what does it take - and that's possible within morally licit limits - to encourage a richer culture, a culture that is also more conducive to health, and a tech industry that serves the human good? Is the EU succeeding, or merely stagnating and reacting defensively (for better or worse) to the changing conditions of the world?
Some things are only possible in vibrant economies, and where tech is concerned, the EU is not exactly vibrant.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:351 reply I don't think GDPR is the problem that makes science and technology succeed more elsewhere or fail more in the EU. There are far, far bigger problems, that are at play here. For starters we have a war still ongoing in the east. Economic power houses have had utterly corrupt governments for decades. Standardization of many things is difficult with so many separate nations. Education systems are questionable. All of these will play a larger role than GDPR.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-11-2017:37 Indeed, and I'm not blaming GDPR for all of the EU's problems, or even blaming it for anything specifically. I was entertaining a plausible rationale for a particular case and using this as an occasion to pose a more general question about the EU's effectiveness in balancing various concerns when regulating.
By Noaidi 2025-11-2012:59 This is why I just bought a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. And one with a SIM card that I can take out whenever I want. No AI, limited tracking, and no big tech. This is my personal boycott.
By blueblisters 2025-11-2011:121 reply The problem is paternalism and assuming the user is too dumb to take control their privacy preferences.
The compliance of the cookie banner regulation has measurable negative externalities - one estimate suggests a EUR 14B/year productivity hit in the EU
Most modern browsers allow you to disable all cookies if you like. You can always use incognito mode if you want to be selective about it.
In an ideal world, the EU could have simply educated their constituents about privacy controls available in their browser.
By IanCal 2025-11-2012:46 It's broader, it's about users data. For example, you can store my address so you can send the item I ordered to me. You can't, without permission, use that to send me marketing stuff.
By alexnewman 2025-11-2011:39 Perhaps if you had some engineers write the laws they’d work better
By lynx97 2025-11-206:51 Everything that happens under Ursula Von der Leyen leaves a bitter taste.
By everdev 2025-11-202:53 And when they use our data to profit, we don't get a royalty cut.
By miki123211 2025-11-2010:042 reply Nothing is ever black and white.
You could prevent all car accidents by banning motor vehicles. You could prevent all side-effect related deaths by banning all the drugs. You could stop all phone scams by banning telephones.
Obviously, that's excessive overregulation. Just as obviously, letting people get away with car accidents, phone scams and drugs that kill more people than they cure is not what we should be doing either. It's the job of the lawmakers to find the tradeoffs that work best for society.
The moment you say "it's black and white, the other side has 0 good arguments", you lose the discussion in my view. If you don't understand what we're even trying to trade off here, we can't have a productive discussion about what the right tradeoff is.
By rckt 2025-11-2010:27 What kind of a discussion can there be? It's very simple. I don't want any business or individual or whatever to collect any of my personal data if I don't agree to it. Right now companies do everything they can to do the opposite. And there's nothing here that can prove them right.
By krainboltgreene 2025-11-2010:07 What a funny comment. “You see, you just don’t understand trade-offs, here let me explain to you…”
Using an Ad blocker I feel regret for stealing the site's revenue. So I allow them to collect my personal data. Anyways, I think most of them will not respect my rejection.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-1920:252 reply A site that cannot exist without collecting not needed personal data and without selling out its visitors, has no justification of continuing to exist. Don't let them guilt-trip you.
Do you think anyone cares in the slightest about your 'personal data'?
It's garbage and no one would waste energy for it, if it weren't for the ability to serve more effective advertisements.
If I'm going to offer an application monetized with Ads, I'm going to use a big ad network like Google which requires cookies to personalize the ads and prevent fraud. I could not care less about collecting your personal data.
And that's probably the same for 99% of websites.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-1922:52 Well, without any personal data, FB/Meta and Google would have nothing. Their whole business model is selling the idea, that they are able to advertise better, due to them knowing things about people and their preferences or interests.
Obviously you need to consider what happens in the large.
By s1mplicissimus 2025-11-1922:12 > It's garbage and no one would waste energy for it, if it weren't for the ability to serve more effective advertisements.
Advertisements, among other things, for political views, influencing voter behavior. Which lots of interest groups care about
A blog writer who injects ads cares in an analogy similar to how a low-level street dealer cares about pushing to clients. It provides the income. Further up the chain it goes much further than just ads, up to state actors who try to influence elections all across the globe, based on such data. And with AI a new Wild West wide open to explore.
Selling drugs causes harm.
Targeting political ads? Debatable - whether AI is somehow involved or not.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:161 reply I would consider making people to vote for a criminal dictator to be more harmful than selling drugs, the former is destroying way more lives than the latter. And I am someone who would vote for more enforcement and regulation of bans on drugs.
By user34283 2025-11-2012:11 No matter your political opinions, the ability to target political advertisements hardly seems like the nightmare you all act like it was.
Multiple people keep talking about selling hard drugs in the comments. Seems a tad dramatic.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-2022:58 Showing ads (not necessarily political ads) can be harmful. Very easy example is of course ads for gambling sites.
that just shallow and one sided argument that never respect another side of coin
By array_key_first 2025-11-201:061 reply It's also true.
Not every business model is viable, and that's life. I can't run a hitman business. Because that's illegal. Oh well, too bad, so sad. This is what makes the world a somewhat decent place.
If we make things that suck ass illegal and then, as a byproduct, a bunch of businesses can no longer make money - then good. That's the correct outcome. This is how a free market works. You want to win customers? Make a good product, have a good model, don't cheat by lying to customers, or doing shit without their consent.
We don't want scams, scams are bad. If those go away that's a net benefit for humanity.
what do you mean illegal???
tell that to Ads advertising business that bringing billions every year, and its legal btw
By array_key_first 2025-11-201:232 reply Right, and that sucks major fucking ass. It's bad and literally nobody likes it.
If it went away overnight, I would not lose sleep. I don't think I'm alone in that.
If you want to run a business that relies on gathering obscene amounts of data on people and then using it in aggregate to commit crimes against humanity, then fine. But at least make them consent to you fucking them up the ass. I don't think that's too much to ask for.
By senordevnyc 2025-11-202:101 reply Nobody like it in the same way that nobody likes paying for groceries or gas. Wouldn't it be great if they were free??
Of course it'd be awesome if the world had no ads, but most people prefer free with ads to paid without ads.
By array_key_first 2025-11-202:402 reply Uh, no, not in the same way. You have absolutely zero proof that you NEED to fuck users up the ass to make the service work.
Many services worked without the ass fucking. We did it for a very long time.
> but most people prefer free with ads to paid without ads.
No, you can't actually say this, because part of the deal is that nobody actually knows HOW or WHAT they are giving up for this free service.
Things like GPDR or consent, again, do not outlaw the actual thing. Ads are still legal, personalized ads are still legal, tracking is still legal. It just forces you to ask consumers. If what you're saying is true, then GPDR is fantastic!! All the users should click 'accept all cookies', because that's what they actually want right?
Unless, wait, you think... maybe that's not what they want? And they're only agreeing to the current situation because they don't know what they're agreeing to? Hmm... what a conundrum!
Okay. So would you prefer to pay a subscription for every site you use or pay with your eyeballs by looking at ads?
By Reedyn 2025-11-206:13 this is a false dichotomy. You don't need to track your users to show ads.
Contextual advertising works fine for many sites, especially those with a specific targeted audience (for example a gaming website can show ads for gaming related products).
By senordevnyc 2025-11-2015:12 Imagine if grocery stores had someone standing at the front asking if you'd like to pay for your groceries or opt-out. Of course most people would opt-out, because that's what's best for them individually. But they probably won't love it when the grocery store closes...
so you want people cant earn livelihood by your saying?????
for some people and I mean some people in this are entire industry that working with directly and indirectly. this is the only way to earn a living for them and you saying this people cant do that????
"If you want to run a business that relies on gathering obscene amounts of data on people and then using it in aggregate to commit crimes against humanity, then fine. But at least make them consent to you fucking them up the ass. I don't think that's too much to ask for."
well. you are free to choose not to?????? what we even doing here? life its about choice and you are free to not sign up service that scummy
it literally totally difference case that worth another article/post for that
By int_19h 2025-11-203:33 > this is the only way to earn a living for them
Who are those people who literally can't earn a living in any way other than working on personalized ads?
By array_key_first 2025-11-202:441 reply So, so many glaring problems here:
1. Consumers can't just 'not use something' because of network effects, and you know that. Don't play stupid with me.
2. The service is scummy because they lie. That's the scummy part. Sit back and read what I wrote. I'm not saying services CAN'T commit crimes against humanity. They can! I'm saying they must DO IT HONESTLY.
If this is about choice, and you want users to choose what they want, then you have to be on my side. It's not optional. IF what you're saying is true, and consumers have the choice "not sign up service that scummy", THEN they must know if the service is scummy. Necessarily!
You are literally agreeing with me!
You are making it like they are doing human crime level hitler or some shit
No, the competing solution/alternative its not better
if there are better ways to do this, it would be born already
By mrguyorama 2025-11-2018:39 Which is why shrinkflation always fails right?
In a free market, consumers will pick the better option right? The one where they don't pay more for less?
Right?
By int_19h 2025-11-203:34 > if there are better ways to do this, it would be born already
That's not how it works in capitalism. If there are more profitable ways to do this, then it would have been adopted. But better is subjective - better for whom? For the users? The businesses don't give a fuck about the users, only about their money.
By array_key_first 2025-11-225:27 > You are making it like they are doing human crime level hitler or some shit
I mean, yeah, Facebook directly caused a genocide because of their pursuit of ads. Do with that what you will.
But either way, it's like you're pulling every fallacy you can think of out of your ass!
Even if it's not a big deal, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. That's stupid.
And the idea that 'oh well we don't need to think of solutions, because the magical solution fairy would've already done it' is also stupid.
How do you think stuff gets done? Who's doing it? Us! The conversation we're having is that! It's the "born already" you're talking about!
By Telaneo 2025-11-1920:40 They should feel ashamed for collecting your personal data in the first place.
By wat10000 2025-11-200:29 Typical ad blockers won't block ads that are served natively by the site you're viewing. And outside ad networks are a security and privacy risk. So I don't feel too bad. It's not my fault that they made their revenue contingent on loading untrusted third-party content.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-200:181 reply Reminder that cookie banners are not a regulation problem, they're a privacy problem. If you don't spy on your users you don't have to have cookie banners.
no. even including a font from a different host is not allowed under the gdpr because you are leaking the users IP to that host. you are poorly informed on this topic.
By ekjhgkejhgk 2025-11-2017:40 But the different host IS tracking because that's how they make money from serving "free" fonts. So if what you're saying is true, that's exactly how it should be. When I go to a website I don't want others involved.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-2018:41 We used to use Subway's proprietary font. We never needed to call a server for that.
Maybe don't build stuff in such a dumb and lazy way?
By paulddraper 2025-11-2118:38 > they just shouldn't be able to collect anything without me actively opting in
That's exactly why things are the way they are.
There are lots of uses for cookies that have absolutely nothing to do with collecting data about you.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-11-200:22 And you don't need user consent for most of those cookies.
By rckt 2025-11-2010:14 That's true. But it's just a small part of overall tracking. And nobody would care if the cookies were used only for auth or purely functional reasons.
By ndesaulniers 2025-11-201:101 reply I wish we standardized on Do Not Track headers. Cookie banners are a plague. Thanks Europe.
By dgroshev 2025-11-202:44 There is nothing stopping the industry from standardising on an alternative form of expressing consent, for example on browser installation. GDPR is agnostic to the form the consent takes, as long as it's informed and freely given.
However, by far the biggest browser is funded by a corporation that wants tracking data across the web. I'm not very surprised that the corporation haven't made it easy to refuse just once.
Thanks Google.
Do you really think that clicking on any button on cookie consent popups actually does anything? It's just an illusion of choice. The reality is that these sites will still track you, whether that's via cookies or, more commonly today, fingerprinting. When they list thousands of "partners" with "legitimate interest", it's a hint that there's a multi-billion-dollar industry of companies operating behind the scenes that will do whatever it takes to profile and track you, regardless of what you click on a silly form. Regulations like the GDPR don't come close to curtailing this insanity.
By zelphirkalt 2025-11-202:38 I very much doubt, that the practice of putting hundreds or thousands of partners into the legitimate interest category is legal. I wish this was more challenged and brought in front of the courts. And not just wristslaps dished out. Such practices need to have business threatening punishments attached to them.
By vanviegen 2025-11-207:11 I'm sure that happens in some cases. But the EU is building a reputation for handling out fines that actually hurt, and I'm sure that actively lying to consumers about this would warrant a big one, if ever discovered. And in any case, tracking will be a lot less robust without those 388 cookies.
I think I should be able to collect whatever publicly available data I can find.
By rckt 2025-11-1922:56 But we are not dealing here with the public data. Stalking people, recording their every step and action so then you can sell their behavioural habits is not collecting public data, it’s stalking and invading people's private life.
Yeah, but a lot of the rules around privacy and personal data make it hard to accept business from Europeans. If you are a small business or startup you might not even accept business from Europeans because navigating these rules are almost impossible.
By Etheryte 2025-11-1920:32 I'm not sure how this makes sense. Functionally the rules are the same across the entire bloc and it's pretty straightforward: unless you have a legitimate reason to store the data, you need to ask for consent and the consent must be free. I want to make more money is not a legitimate reason. I have a legal requirement to fight financial fraud is a legitimate reason. Obviously the reality is more nuanced, but understanding this basic idea gets you there 95% of the way.
By OkayPhysicist 2025-11-200:24 Just don't track users. Don't store any information you don't need, don't try to spy on them beyond what information they choose to share with you freely, and the GDPR has zero issues with you.
By kronicum2025 2025-11-1920:36 > But when we talk privacy and personal data there should be no gray zone. It has to be black and white.
you are wrong. If one followed your ways, we would never do a lot of things. There are things called regulatory sandboxes for a reason. But those don't really work in fields where the "scale of the data" is the core reason of why things work.
Chat control is stupid.
I'm not understanding, as an European who's been part of multiple startups how's that supposed to boost growth.
There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).
In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans.
Sure, there is an attached cost in having your terms reviewed by a proper lawyer and documenting the entire list of cookie providers, but that's basically where it ends. It's really minimal effort and cost, we talking in the low single digits for the review, and few hours of engineering time.
The biggest issues in European growth are others:
- focus on being an export economy while neglecting the internal market.
- bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in physical goods (our economy's backbone) nor services which doesn't allow national startups to scale at European level
- very conservative and risk-adverse mentality. Young people in college can't wait to graduate and find the best paying lowest effort stable job. That's not a problem if it involves a majority of graduates, I imagine all world is like that, but you do have an immense problem if you have 1% or 3% or 10% of wannabe entrepreneurs.
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-2014:073 reply I would go farther. Privacy laws seem like an excellent way to tighten the internal European market and develop homegrown competitors, which (one might argue) Europe really needs. If Europe is loosening up those laws, does that help Europe? Or does it help Meta and Google and Microsoft?
Europe has a shitload of homegrown competitors. The problem is that users here in Europe either goes for a national service or for an US service. They don't look up what their EU neighbor has to offer. In fact, most don't bother translating their services to appeal to the entire EU market.
If you live in country X, you will only ever learn about services from country X or from the US. No one here knows what goes on in neighboring countries.
It's easy to think the EU is like the USA, but it's not, it is still separate sovereign countries with their own language and culture.
I think there's something like 24 national languages in the EU. I can hardly blame hetzner for not translating their services to say polish and think it's entirely the wrong approach anyway.
It's really true language is a big barrier but honestly the solution cannot be for every single company to offer services in 20 languages. It can't be. English must be adopted.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-210:054 reply
I cringe when I read this. Why not German? There are more native German speakers than any other language in the EU. Also, in the age of LLMs, translating (on a best effort basis) to (at least) 24 different languages is trivial.> English must be adopted.That sounds like a very German approach to the whole thing.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... and look at the total speakers vs. native speakers.
Now it should be clear why one is better than the other. The shared language of most is English, so you have the least amount of "extra learning" required.
Also, the number for German is generous in that it includes people that speak wildly "incompatible" dialects and accents. While people in Bavaria technically speak "German" and having them talk to other people that speak "German" (with various dialects) is easier than asking either to speak English as their primary language, that doesn't really solve the problem of even intra-German language rivalry.
Of course one thing will unite Bavarian and Saxon and Swiss and Austrian German and other highly accented/dialectic German speakers: They'd rather speak "German" (and deal with weird pronunciation/words) than English as an official language ;)
By throwaway2037 2025-11-2310:48 I have asked multiple native German speakers about the "linguistic distance" between various styles within the Federal Republic of Germany. It is completely overstated that people don't understand each other or are "annoyed". All German children grow up learning standard German in schools. Yes, they may speak a different at home and in the community, but they are all fluent in standard German. I am pretty sure most standard German speakers can communicate clearly with all of Germany, most of Austria... and Switzerland is a roll of the dice. Still, anyone in the German-speaking half of Switzerland that is university educated will surely speak standard German. Again, they may speak Schweizer Deutsch with their family and friends, but can also speak standard German, especially in a business setting.
By SomeUserName432 2025-11-216:39 > Why not German?
Are there more distinct markets in the EU/EEC where adopting german would give you a quantifiable economic and/or competitive advantage over adopting english?
By musicale 2025-11-212:13 It didn't work out well the first couple of times they tried it.
By ImJamal 2025-11-213:46 Why work work with native language rather than spoken? According to wikipedia less than 20% of the EU is a native German speaker while 47% speak English. When talking about technical people who may be looking into something like Hetzner it is probably higher than 47%.
By Moosdijk 2025-11-2018:19 I never really looked at it that way, but I think you're right. Although, non-European-owned companies aren't necessarily incentivized to look towards European companies. Looking towards your European neighbors mostly comes down to logistical situations. In those sectors, multilingual services are more common.
This argument in favor of protectionist industrial policy is almost universally opposed by most modern economists, for a good reason.
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-2014:172 reply Nations don’t outsource critical national security industries even though economists might say that’s more efficient. The question is whether they should outsource critical tech infrastructure to huge quasi-monopolistic US firms that can turn it off or abuse European data at will. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I have to imagine it’s a worthwhile debate. The data we have cuts both ways: China applied protectionist policies to its own Internet companies, and it’s hard to argue that this has been economically devastating for them.
>China applied protectionist policies to its own Internet companies, and it’s hard to argue that this has been economically devastating for them.
China has 1.4 billion people in one country while the combined population of Europe is around half of that, so that's one difference.
But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism. To the Chinese state, protecting Chinese citizens from harmful things (like knowing full details about atrocities perpetrated by their government, or organizing to criticize the government) outweighs other concerns.
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-2019:401 reply Define "better off". Companies like Meta and Google are enormous behemoths that make their money through advertising. One advantage of their size is that they have lower costs, but a greater advantage is that they have much larger market power: they can purchase competitors and demand higher rents for advertising space. Is society genuinely better off from this kind of concentrated market advantage? One might argue that there are different kinds of 'efficiency' at play here, and not all of them are in society's interest.
This would allow direct, constant competition between companies like Meta/Google and their Chinese counterparts. Americans could choose to use Chinese providers when they're outcompeting the American behemoths, and vice versa. We see that China's companies are very competitive and innovative. Both American and Chinese citizens might be better off if they all could freely choose from different global options.
By matthewdgreen 2025-11-2113:00 But that's not at all how things have worked out, even here within the US. Waze does not compete with Google Maps. WhatsApp and Instagram do compete with Facebook, each of these companies were simply acquired. We've learned that new social media companies have a very hard time spinning up the network effects required to make them prominent, and in the rare cases they do, they quickly get bought out or their products cloned by incumbents. There's an excellent chance this would have happened in China without state intervention.
The most prominent recent exception to this rule is TikTok, which spun out of an already-successful Chinese tech company. Its owners resisted acquisition until legislation forced their hand.
By pyrale 2025-11-2015:53 > But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism.
I really don't see how Chinese tech companies would have benefited from receiving the diapers.com treatment.
Disagree. China has had incredible benefits from its own social media and commerce platform growth.
Yeah, the US is missing out.
But the US could have benefitted from China's social media and commerce platforms and China could have benefitted from the US's. That's my point.
I am no economist or even that economics-knowledgeable and maybe I'm wrong and maybe China's protectionism is better somehow, but from everything I know or at least from every trope and meme I've ingested, free global commerce eventually leads to better outcomes for all parties.
What would have happened is the US platforms would have moved into China and stifled the competition.
As we can see everywhere else.
This wouldn’t even be good for the US, just good for the shareholders of these companies.
By epolanski 2025-11-2016:54 Maybe, maybe not.
China is a decade ahead of the rest of the world in different kind of use cases (think their super apps or payments).
TikTok is the most popular social media app out there, and it's chinese.
They are also tremendously competitive in AI despite all the limitations they encounter.
Honestly I think that the last century should be a clear statement that protectionism, sanctions and closeness is a failure whose bills are paid by tax payers.
We've been bailing out and protecting non competitive industries (which have further incentives *not* to invest due to protectionism they benefit from) for decades.
When Trump 1 put high taxes on dishwashers and house appliances it hasn't really pushed US companies to do better, it just allowed them to raise the prices and do very little.
But the fact that some countries play dirty (see China and their industrial espionage and lack of respect of patents and intellectual property), while others are obsessed with being #1 even if it means pursuing that via bullying methods have pushed us in this very negative scenario I don't see how can we leave us behind unless we get a new generation of brighter leaders.
Sadly, that's not how you win consensus and elections today.
By hearsathought 2025-11-2018:451 reply > But, yes, both US and Chinese technology companies would likely be better off than they are now without China's protectionism and authoritarianism.
How would china be better off? All their tech companies would have been bought out by larger foreign tech companies. Kinda like what happened to many european tech companies.
> To the Chinese state, protecting Chinese citizens from harmful things (like knowing full details about atrocities perpetrated by their government, or organizing to criticize the government) outweighs other concerns.
Yeah that's what the chinese state is worried about /s. Not the neverending misinformation, disinformation and propaganda directed against it.. When china does it, it's "authoritarianism". When "the west" does it, it's fighting against misinformation.
>All their tech companies would have been bought out by larger foreign tech companies.
That's not necessarily true.
>When china does it, it's "authoritarianism". When "the west" does it, it's fighting against misinformation.
What's the "it", here?
>Not the neverending misinformation, disinformation and propaganda directed against it.
Talk to any pro-democracy Chinese citizen and I think they will probably agree with me.
By hearsathought 2025-11-2218:16 > That's not necessarily true.
Yes it is. Why wouldn't larger foreign tech companies gobble up smaller companies if they were allowed to.
> What's the "it", here?
"Protecting" the population against disinformation. "It" was fairly obvious.
> Talk to any pro-democracy Chinese citizen and I think they will probably agree with me.
You mean the "pro-democracy" plants funded by the US, europe, etc. Good one. The ones that always seem to flee to germany, britain, us, etc after each crackdown? You talking about those ones.
Imagine if china was funding "pro-communism 'citizens'" trying to undermine political systems all over europe and the US.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-210:08 "Economists" also love free trade, and we have learned in the last 10 years that it has become harmful to people at middle class and below. Even if GDP does grow, the benefits are not distributed evenly.
By epolanski 2025-11-2018:19 While I agree with you 100%, I think most modern economists fail to account for bad actors.
If a situation was "China is producing X and having its taxpayers subsidize cars, steel, etc" then it would be their loss and our advantage. We get great products they get pieces of paper. I couldn't care less.
But considering that the real goal of those bad actors is to annihilate the competition and then pull the rug this is ultimately a bad idea.
Especially when those bad actors, at the same time, do their best at playing dirty and ignoring intellectual property.
I couldn't care less if Europe didn't have a shipping industry, in fact protectionism of it has failed miserably in Europe, and made our yards less, not more competitive. So yes, in that world I agree.
But in a world where an elected (or unelected) government, can suddenly blackmail you or create such an immense strain on your economy (as Russia did with Europe) this is not really like that. And suddenly you realize you should've paid way more, but invested way earlier in diversifying energy-wise.
In an ideal market I'd be 100% with you, in the real world, it's really neither black nor white.
By bcrosby95 2025-11-2014:29 Yes, and the reasons why they do so has little to do with why this law exists.
A law whose purpose is protectionism is bad. It invites stagnation, pointless inefficiency, and retaliation.
A law whose side effect is a bit of protectionism has none of these problems.
By moooo99 2025-11-2016:43 Something that is good for a country as a whole isn't necessarily good for the economy. On the flip side, being good for the economy isn't necessarily good for the population of a country.
By intended 2025-11-2014:28 Which would make sense when everyone is part of open markets.
People are opting for the less efficient options, on purpose now. We live in an era where America is imposing tariffs.
By LtWorf 2025-11-2014:12 We wouldn't be banning any law abiding company from operating.
By matt-p 2025-11-2022:39 Secondly it forces European companies to all have a 'USP' for high privacy which is useful when selling abroad as well. Becoming a byword for privacy and therefore trust/security is absolutely not a bad thing and comes at very low cost.
Europe has a lot of problems that result in low ambition and growth, privacy law isn't one of them.
By wheybags 2025-11-2016:38 IMO the biggest barrier is internal mobility. The European silicon valley never happened, because people don't want to move around. The biggest single barrier is language. I'm Irish, and young Irish people often emigrate (way more than in other countries). When I look at where my college classmates ended up, it's mostly America or the UK. We also emigrate a lot to Australia and New Zealand. In other words, we only really emigrate to English speaking countries.
Almost nobody goes to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. The mainstays of the European economy. Let alone central or eastern Europe. But if you're a young talented engineer in the middle of nowhere usa, you can just easily move to the bay area without any issue. That cultural unity IMO is America's biggest strength, and the lack of it is Europe's biggest weakness.
Note: I've lived in Ireland, the Czech Republic, and France, so I know first hand how hard it is to move inside Europe, and I understand why people don't do it.
> bureaucracy to fight at European level so we still don't have a real unified market, neither in physical goods (our economy's backbone) nor services which doesn't allow national startups to scale at European level
I guess you have been part of software startups and you severely underestimate the bureaucracy that is involved in physical companies nowadays. Farmers, fishermen, factory-owners, and other small to medium size companies all have severe difficulties with ever increasing regulations. By itself the regulations are not always bad, but usually it takes way too long to get through the system which makes it hard to compete with, for example, China.
By hearsathought 2025-11-2018:411 reply > it hard to compete with, for example, China.
What exactly is europe competing against china on? Isn't europe's competition the US?
By throwaway2037 2025-11-210:111 reply Cars
By hearsathought 2025-11-2218:111 reply Aren't most of the foreign cars in europe american? Or maybe japanese?
By throwaway2037 2025-11-2310:43 I believe "most" is true today. However, my point is about change. Ten years ago, there were probably less than (finger in the air!) 10,000 Chinese cars in all of Europe. Now there are millions. This is the change -- fewer American, Korean, and Japanese cars.
By epolanski 2025-11-2018:16 How am I underestimating it when it's literally in the quote you provided?
> an European
European starts with a vowel in spelling, but actually phonerically begins with a consonant, /j/, so it doesn't trigger the "an" thing.
Similarly some spellings start with a consonant but have vowels (like acronyms, "an SSRI", the name of the letter S, "ess", begins with a vowel)
More to the point I agree with what you're saying. This seems like lazy attribution of cause that is so common in American business and politics. "Of course deregulation will boost growth!" Why? Because of religious beliefs about deregulation boosting growth.
> European starts with a vowel in spelling, but actually phonerically begins with a consonant
Ah makes sense.
In my head it's never "you"ropean, but "ew" uropean as I'm not a native english speaker and phonetically it's a consonant in english only. In greek, slavic languages, german or latin-derived it's always "ew".
By xeromal 2025-11-2017:07 That's pretty cool. I'm from the Southeast US (redneck), and it sounds like "Yur-uh-pee-in"
By heavenlyhash 2025-11-2017:371 reply Really depends on where you're from.
OP already mentioned in his area it's phonetically mostly "ew".
I'd say a lot of germanic areas also do something I'd describe as "oi". That'd also make one inclined to use an "an" when speaking.
By asveikau 2025-11-2018:40 I speak other languages where it starts with an E sound. But I'm not aware of any native English speaking place where it doesn't have /j/ in English.
By maleldil 2025-11-2016:36 Maybe they say it as an "ew" diphthong instead? As an ESL, that makes sense to me.
By pyrale 2025-11-2015:45 > In fact the actors that most opposed those laws have always been non Europeans.
This decision is in response to lobbying from these actors (and their new friend in the white house). It is not supposed to benefit you.
Here's my take, as a Romanian developer (since 2004ish).
One day I got a letter from the national authority regarding personal data where I was asked to reply to 15 questions regarding a personal project of mine, invoking the GDPR. The sanctions for not complying within 5 days was an incremental fine of 600 euros PER DAY, until I complied. This letter was directed to me as a natural person (not even my company).
Another story: I had a publishing website with some ads on it. The moment full GDPR went into effect, some years ago, revenue instantly dropped by 30% because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB). Most of the "approved" cookie banners are insanely overengineered nonsense and almost all of them cost a lot of money. And they kill your performance metrics. And when I finally gave in and implemented one of those, revenues dropped even more because I was losing readers who just quit without consenting at all.
Third and final anecdote: at one point I was contracted by a Romanian DTH television company who mostly operated with prepaid customers. According to GDPR, they were supposed to anonymize data they no longer needed, but because their clients were seasonal or less predictable, that turned out to be ridiculously hard. Their legal department, together with external contractors such as us ended up spending months to adjust their systems to conform to GDPR, and the result was their losing business and time, while being unable to properly serve older customers because they could no longer identify them.
So in my opinion, despite originally being well intended, GDPR opened a huge can of worms, created a lot of issues and made everyone's life harder on the internet, for no real benefit. On the contrary, the large companies could afford the legal counseling that they needed, but the smaller ones were hit hardest.
By immibis 2025-11-2018:01 Did you consider running non-tracking ads? Of course not because even after the 30% drop, the spyware still pays more, right? But destroying websites with spyware is literally what the law is for - the people have voted to nuke your website from orbit.
By troupo 2025-11-239:49 > because the cookie banner I was using wasn't part of the approved european framework for cookie banners (they created an entire organization for this, called IAB)
There's your mistake. It's not approved. The EU literally sued them for coming up the bullshit banner: https://www.euractiv.com/news/top-eu-court-finds-widely-empl...
It's in the name: IAB stands for Interactive Advertising Bureau. They couldn't give two shits about your site. All they care is about testing the limits of the law to get their hands on any and all user data.
Their banners originally were explicitly illegal: https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come (this describes mostly OneTrust banners, but IAB's banners were the same) and https://noyb.eu/en/say-no-cookies-yet-see-your-privacy-crumb... (IAB's banner turned your "no to tracking" into "yes to tracking")
> So in my opinion, despite originally being well intended, GDPR opened a huge can of worms, created a lot of issues and made everyone's life harder on the internet, for no real benefit.
Translation: shitty businesses made life of everyone harder on the internet and blamed regulations for their own behaviour. From IAB (and OneTrust and Admiral and other scummy greedy leeches') banners to idiots at companies who assume that data on their customers is no longer needed to ... provide services to those same customers.
Yes, it exposed a can of worms. Worms decided its their god-given right to stay.
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2015:564 reply Sure but the laws are probably relevant for the startups you _haven’t_ been a part of. The ones that never got started.
It’s funny you mention a lack of entrepreneurial spirit but then dismiss something that’s clearly a factor (not saying it’s the main factor but obviously it has some effect).
I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.
By soiltype 2025-11-2019:35 Of course it's easier to do a bad job of something or to give up and not do it. That has no bearing on whether or not doing it the right way is actually onerous.
By wqaatwt 2025-11-216:46 > do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European
Making it harder for foreign companies to compete is actually great for European startups, though
Can you share the projects? In most cases it is very, very easy to comply with the *"random laws" (not that GDPR is much different from California's CPRA. Are you blocking Californian users too?)
Sorry, that's nonsense. cpra has a carveout for small businesses. gdpr has your one person company obey the same rules as meta.
By immibis 2025-11-2018:00 This brings up the point that for some reason we're all terrified of the government. Maybe because we see the daily abuse from the USA? But if you accidentally violated the GDPR while in good faith trying to follow it, the most likely outcome is being ordered to fix it.
By andreasmetsala 2025-11-2018:22 > I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.
GDPR fines scale based on annual turnover so blocking EU users on a non-commercial product is utterly pointless and just being mean.
By mosburger 2025-11-2014:01 I think (I'm an American so take with a grain of salt) even the "proper lawyer reviewing terms" part can be deferred quite a while by being conservative with PII (which you should be doing anyway) and using a service like iubenda to deal with terms and cookie warnings when you first start out.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2014:473 reply The biggest hurdle Europe has to face is the cultural shift away from the post-soviet era of "Don't take work too seriously, enjoy life".
There is now a full generation of Europeans who grew up in with this mentality, looking down on Americans for their ridiculous work ethic and comparatively meager benefits.
But it's not sustainable, and the strain is already becoming obvious. Young Europeans will have to work longer and harder for less if they want to move Europe away from being totally dependent on American tech, American defense, and Chinese wares.
By kryptoncalm 2025-11-2015:282 reply The data [0] begs to differ: in richer countries workers and fewer hours. The gap not shown here is working hours per capita (instead of worker), but I couldn’t find that data quickly.
Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
I think your data agrees with OP, you're just misunderstanding it. Yes, richer countries work few hours and richer countries also see modest GDP growth.
Cambodia's GDP growth is over +5% YoY, whereas Switzerland (and the rest of Europe) has more modest GDP growth.
There is some "Work smart, not hard." facet to this, which requires an educated population.
The other fascet is developing countries exist in climates heavily impacted by global warming (look at flooding in VN or TH this year). They make 2 steps forward, and then 3 steps back when a monsoon takes out an entire town.
> Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
Personally, employment makes my life interesting and rewarding. I love the puzzles (and compensation) that my employer provides. The rewards compound, but in career development and via investing the profits.
Unfortunately, I think the one area that isn't accounted for is child care. Societies (rich and poor) continue to extract time away from parenting, via cost of housing near job centers and dual-income families. Offering an extra month of vacation or 4-day work week isn't the same as 1 income household or the parents living 15 minutes from their job.
> richer countries also see modest GDP growth.
This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
A lot of GDP growth can come from establishing basic services like a functioning healthcare system, insurance apparatus and financial system. Of course, we can't building out infrastructure like roads, power, etc.
Especially construction can lead to substantial GDP growth, but once you have a basic set of infrastructure and housing in place, growth is much slower and consistent for very obvious reasons.
Once you have that stuff in place, getting consistent growth requires more advanced stuff.
The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.
> This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce. Entering the 2008 crisis, USA and Europe were neck in neck. Now, the USA has left Europe in the dust.
Declaring the US an outlier seems like an odd choice... What country should you compare Europe to?
By moooo99 2025-11-2121:21 > Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce.
First of all, I hate that we're still using GDP as an indicator for any success, because by any stretch, it is a pretty shit indicator. Take medications as an example. Many medications in the US are substantially more expensive than they are in Europe. By selling/buying those medications, you to have a substantially higher GDP related to services like these, without having any benefit for the actual people living and working in that country. (/rant)
Putting differences like these aside, there are a few notable differences. First, the US being an outlier should be fairly obvious to anyone. First of all, the US being extremely resource rich is part of many US states' economic success. If you're lacking the natural resources to extract, there is barely anything you can do policy wise.
Then there is the fact that the US is (still) world reserve currency. With this constant demand for US dollars, the US can relatively easily follow an inflationary economic policy (as demonstrated by the debt to GDP ratio), which is obviously good for growth. Then there is the fact that the US has more consolidated large scale companies. In Europe, aside from a few national industrial giants, SMBs tend to play a much bigger role than they do in the US. This can of course partially be attributed to the fact that the US is a unified market, as opposed to Europe/EU (despite regulatory efforts). Partially this is also down to differences in market watchdog interventions (you can decide for yourself wether or not that is a good thing).
Aside from that, there is no denying that the US also knows how to use the advantage. Unlike other countries cough Germany cough, the US actually has a fairly solid domestic market, which is generally a healthy indicator.
All that "US has it easy" whining aside. I can't really comment on the industrial policy on other European countries, but as far as industrial policy goes, Germany really made some policy mistakes that are now backfiring in a spectacularly painful way.
Why do we use GDP though? On average quality of life, Europe left the USA in the dust. GDP just measures how expensive everything is. More expensive things is bad.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2018:391 reply GDP is a measure of productivity, which is (normally) corrected for inflation.
The point you are making is exactly the reason why this problem is so existential for Europe. QoL is good, so nobody wants to change anything, or feels the need to.
But structurally, Europe is not sound and European leaders know it (Just look at the surge in rhetoric about Euro independence). Do you know the story of the ant and the grasshopper?[1] Europe is in a 50 year long post soviet era summer. Most young (and now even middle aged!) Europeans only know summer, so it's going to be incredible difficult to get them to collect food for this mythical thing called "winter".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
Can you provide convincing evidence that this is the case? What is the winter that is coming? And that your proposal will prevent it? And what exactly is your proposal anyway?
North Koreans think the outside world is going to collapse because they aren't doing what North Koreans are doing, but it's all just propaganda. You need to distinguish what you say from this.
The surge in anti-EU rhetoric seems to be mostly coming from US propaganda bleeding over, and is still a minority.
People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe and the immediate collapse of the USA for decades.
Nobody on the ground, who actually buys groceries, trusts official inflation numbers. How much apparent GDP growth is actually just unreported inflation? I saw some food getting 50-100% more expensive over the last 5 years, which is 10% per year. What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Many topics condensed into a single comment to conserve rate limit.
By wqaatwt 2025-11-216:59 > People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe
Have they? I thought most were predicting stagnation and slow decline? Which has been the cast for the past >15 years. Europe is just being left behind..
> trusts official inflation numbers
Because they are unwilling to read and learn what these numbers mean and how they are calculated?
> What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Well… reported GDP growth is always adjusted by inflation.
By itake 2025-11-2022:13 > What is the winter that is coming?
This is not a fair question. The roaring 20s had no idea The Great Depression was coming. Most people didn't see the 2008 crash happening. Ukraine signed agreements with Russia to not be attacked. In 2019, no one was worried that their country couldn't produce face masks or mRNA vaccines.
IMHO, the only foreseeable disaster now is climate change and CN/TW conflicts. I'm not smart enough to model the downstream effects of those events and how Europe should be preparing for them.
The USA is forcing TSMC to at least shift some of their output to US soil.
> anti-EU rhetoric
I don't know what you mean by anti-EU rhetoric. Americans have no problems with the a centralized governance for Europe. Generally speaking, we are taught the EU is a good thing Europe (and the USA), because we want strong allies.
Just like how the EU got upset with Greece for poor fiscal responsibility, the US is concerned about the EU's military investments, tech development, and general economic output.
> trusts official inflation numbers
I think you're comparing apples and oranges. The inflation numbers are not supposed to represent any one individual's on-the-ground's inflation numbers. For example, Washington state adding a gas tax might not show up in the national inflation numbers, but if you're a long distance trucker, you're definitely experiencing inflation.
---
Anecdote with heavy sampling bias: When traveling in Southeast Asia, I met tons of Europeans complaining 5 day work weeks is too much and 30 days of PTO isn't enough. One woman in her 30s took an additional month off of unpaid leave so she could have a second holiday in Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.
IMHO, Europeans should be developing their own tech / biotech / military, instead of demanding 4 day work weeks, and 60d holidays.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2016:54 >The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.
Right, Europe also has a suffocating business environment which is the primary driver.
By epolanski 2025-11-2020:01 > This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
E.g. emerging markets tend to outperform advanced ones, because they have more room to grow.
If you think the US stock market has done well in the last few decades, wait till you see India or Peru.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2016:201 reply Joining the rat race isn't worth it, in the near-term, which is why the threat is existential. Europe has been sleeping on it's laurels for 30 years now, and the signs are clear; borderline stagnating economies, low working hours, generous benefits, and most importantly still relying on the exact same industries as 30 years ago. Europe totally missed out on the tech boom, and is now also missing out on the AI boom. And Europeans response has largely been "Whats the issue, we can just buy it from the Americans/Chinese?".
Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash to stave off Putin should have been a gut-punch wake up call that Europe is in an extremely vulnerable position, and needs to get to work building their own modern tech, their own defense, and their own industry.
Failure to do those things will lead to Europe balkanizing as the economic situation gets worse under the weight of an aging population and shrinking economic output. Young Europeans think they cracked the code of comfortable living, but really they are just in a post-cold war golden period. Very similar to the post-WII era American baby boomers enjoyed (except they had lots of children).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Look at the bottom of the list and then go look at their growth.
> Look at the bottom
Also look at the top ;)
> Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash
That's beyond false, US provided little non-military help, the money mostly stayed in US and went to US contractors.
I don't need to tell you that those figures are also insanely inflated by crazy costs.
Zelenski himself has stated that he proposed multiple times to, e.g., send its navy to US ports to take the weapons so US taxpayers wouldn't have to bear the costs, but instead tens of billions went into that expense. Why? Because US support to Ukraine is a welfare machine for US contractors.
In total EU has provided around 3 times more between military and non-military.
https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/ukraine-support-tra...
By Workaccount2 2025-11-2114:42 There is a reason they wrote this article:
https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/ukraine-aid-how-eur...
But people at the ammo factory are going to have to work more than 4 days a week with 8 weeks vacation.
By ta9000 2025-11-215:17 [dead]
IMHO, the US and China’s hurry to expand into every possible corner is unsustainable. Unless we are actually trying to get ready to face an extraterrestrial threat, our endless effort to maximize our tech and become more and more efficient and profitable is unneeded and puts too much stress on earthlings, which is definitely not sustainable. Do you really believe that when we are able to pass production of almost anything to AI and robots and give generous UBI to each and every person, they will be happy and satisfied? It is a dead end, a loss of meaning that we are racing to reach ASAP.
Population collapse cannot be a good enough reason, either. Older people won't be happier if their servants are robots instead of climate migrants.
By itake 2025-11-2016:48 The standard of living in China is bad for most people. IMHO, they need to expand in order to provide the same lifestyle as offered in the USA.
This has the energy of "Why are we building rockets to the moon, when there are homeless people in San Francisco"-vibes?"
> give generous UBI to each and every person
Have you seen the movie Wall-e? I don't think society should strive to outsource all labor to AI and robots, nor is that the final end-state of building robots and AI.
By samsepi01 2025-11-2015:51 Maybe so. In the meantime, Europe will continue to fall behind economically.
By immibis 2025-11-2018:02 We could just, like, not give billionaires so much money, and there will be more left for everyone else.
Yeah, if we want to be the world superpower we have to work really hard. But we definitely won't get any of the benefits of being the world superpower - just like Americans don't already - all of it accrues to billionaires. And it'll make the rent really high. So why should we want that? Of course, we don't want anyone else to be a world superpower either, because kings/dictators/emperors are bad.
I know a friend who was building his first website, he asked in our startup group how to handle the GDPR cookie banner, it likely wasted 1 day on that, when he had invested maybe a whole othery day on the project. At that moment in time the GDPR cookie banner amounted of 50% of the effort. It killed momentum, it killed willpower with beuracracy. It should have asked himself how to get users, not how to comply with GDPR for a website that in that moment had 0 users.
By kassner 2025-11-216:38 The problem was not the cookie banner, but rather that they were doing things that required user consent (most commonly: filling up the website with 3rd-party marketing tools).
You can have a website as big as GitHub without a cookie banner yet still be compliant.
By captainbland 2025-11-2014:27 It's pure ideology that "cutting red tape" will lead to growth. Unfortunately I don't think there's much to understand, perhaps beyond the US giving the EU some kind of kickback for complying.
By franciscator 2025-11-2018:49 The Elysium-Cloud needs your data
By rdm_blackhole 2025-11-2015:551 reply I agree with you partially.
My hot take is that this is a signal for Trump. We play nice with you, you play nice with us.
Big tech is well connected to the current US administration so if the EU were to make theses changes, then they will appease big tech (a little bit) and therefore by extension Trump.
I (like you) don't think that these regulations are the reason the EU doesn't have home grown hyper-scalers a la AWS or GCP or Azure.
I think the EU just fell asleep at the wheel for too long. It basically outsourced its defense to NATO, its tech needs to the US and its manufacturing to China and for a while it worked perfectly.
However the world is changing and the EU is simply in my opinion not up to the task. It's too slow, bureaucratic and messy to be able to adapt rapidly and it lacks the vision necessary to remedy to its weaknesses.
Few things.
1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.
2. Would like to remind you that article 5 has only been invoked by US and we lost many lives on something that wasn't even relevant to us, let alone the other wars in africa or central asia that we joined. So far, it's been Italian and Polish blood falling to comply with our North American ally, it hasn't been the opposite case for decades.
3. I think the European commission is simply corrupted, and when it comes to this data stuff, please notice how many dozens times Thorn and Palantir and many other US security companies have lobbied EU commission members, and those are just the registered meetings, you don't need to record phone calls or out-of-office encounters:
https://transparency-register.europa.eu/search-register-or-u...
I'm quite convinced Ursula von Der Leyen is corrupt and is selling out Europe and keeps engaging in anti European policies.
4. EU would be fine, if it was able to pursue a coherent foreign policy. Instead you have 20+ countries where the occasional Hungary can veto anything. It should be given more power on many fronts. We shouldn't have 20+ privacy agencies, 20+ ways to register a company, 20+ different legislations on this and that.
5. There are politicians with the right vision, such as Macron, but most politicians have to live election by election, so it's very hard to pursue long term strategies. To be fair though, US is showing the same symptoms with one executive undoing what the previous has done from a bit.
By neoromantique 2025-11-2120:04 >1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.
Reality of the situation is that in 2025 Ukraine IS the most combat ready army in Europe, and by far.
Russian army of 2025 is not the same as it was in 2022 too. It takes over a month to transfer military equipment across Europe /even without war going on/, we are SEVERELY unprepared.
By rdm_blackhole 2025-11-2016:371 reply Are you sure you meant to respond to me? I agreed with you on most of what you said regarding the regulations but just in case let me respond to your points:
> We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.
Is that a counterpoint to my NATO comment? If so I agree, I think that the EU countries should exit NATO and form their own military alliance. However it is very clear that investing in military capabilities is not the priority of the EU countries as only a few of them managed to spend the required amount each year as per the NATO treaties. Most likely such alliance will be dead in the water.
> Would like to remind you that article 5 has only been invoked by US and we lost many lives on something that wasn't even relevant to us, let alone the other wars in africa or central asia that we joined. So far, it's been Italian and Polish blood falling to comply with our North American ally, it hasn't been the opposite case for decades.
Again I agree with you. I think that the US has caused much suffering by invading Irak and Afghanistan and then Libya (with the help of other countries), thereby causing the refuge crisis and then leaving the EU countries alone to deal with this problem.
> I think the European commission is simply corrupted, and when it comes to this data stuff, please notice how many dozens times Thorn and Palantir and many other US security companies have lobbied EU commission members, and those are just the registered meetings, you don't need to record phone calls or out-of-office encounters: https://transparency-register.europa.eu/search-register-or-u... I'm quite convinced Ursula von Der Leyen is corrupt and is selling out Europe and keeps engaging in anti European policies.
She was not elected to be a good politician.
She was a terrible politician in here home country. There was nothing to expect from her at any level and so far she has not disappointed. Her secret deal with Pfizer and her missing text messages are just the tip of the Iceberg.
> EU would be fine, if it was able to pursue a coherent foreign policy. Instead you have 20+ countries where the occasional Hungary can veto anything. It should be given more power on many fronts. We shouldn't have 20+ privacy agencies, 20+ ways to register a company, 20+ different legislations on this and that.
That is never going to be the case because all EU countries want different things and for very good reasons. They have different needs and different economies.
So the German government will keep selling out its EU "partners" as long as they can keep selling cars in the US. France or Italy would have done the same.
> There are politicians with the right vision, such as Macron, but most politicians have to live election by election, so it's very hard to pursue long term strategies. To be fair though, US is showing the same symptoms with one executive undoing what the previous has done from a bit.
I disagree with you on Macron. Macron has no vision besides a "more" federal Europe. The details are not very clear and his policies are constantly changing depending on his approval level in the polls. His promise when he was elected was that to put the far right out of business by the end of his presidency, the reality however is that the far right is now the biggest party in France and is in very strong position to win the 2027 election.
By epolanski 2025-11-2017:20 > That is never going to be the case because all EU countries want different things and for very good reasons. They have different needs and different economies.
That's quite of a weak argument, every state or county in the US has conflicting interests too. But there has to be defined boundaries in what is the business of EU and what is the business of single states.
I would say that matters like digital data privacy should have one common policy, not 20+ agencies.
By gonational 2025-11-2116:13 I know from the inside it feels like nothing is wrong, but if you're looking at the EU as a whole from the outside, the economies there have been coming apart for many years. You could even say the wheels have already fallen off. 100% of the economic woes in the EU are conferred by EU membership, and the web of inefficient, bureaucratic laws therein. Geographically speaking, Europe is positioned, perfectly, to be an economic powerhouse. It is close to the Middle East where much of the energy comes from, close to Africa where energy and other resources come from, close to Asia where certain base materials and manufactured components come from, surrounded by oceans everywhere, the Mediterranean has more than 1/5 of the world's coastline, giving ample opportunity to develop commercial ports, etc. The only reason the economies of Europe are in trouble is because of the EU. That is the only reason. The EU is the singular one only single reason. The EU. That is the single reason.
Cookie banners are just one tiny example that illustrates how death from 1000 cuts is a real thing. In the case of cookie banners, you could say it's death from 100 cuts, because, if you live in the EU, you spend probably one percent of your entire life clicking cookie banners. 7.2 minutes a day is all it takes to waste one percent of your productive life (assuming 12 hours of useful time per day). You might scoff at this, "I probably spend 10 seconds", but I spend probably a minute or more dealing with broken cookie banner garbage every day and I am an American. Just from American websites complying with GDPR nonsense, we have to waste some small portion of our lives here as well. Stupid laws written by stupider bureaucrats ruin everything for everyone. This is the description of an idiot by Dostoyevsky, somebody who does things that harm themselves and others.
By moralestapia 2025-11-2014:033 reply [flagged]
By LtWorf 2025-11-2014:15 > Btw, this is why the US alone has a larger economy than your entire geographic region combined.
And all of it is due to massively overvalued companies in california.
But where would you rather be an average Joe ?
Your health outcomes alone are better in the EU.
I think we all agree that looking at GDP figures needs to be supplemented with wealth distribution data.
By moralestapia 2025-11-2014:501 reply >But where would you rather be an average Joe?
In the US. By far!
And migration data backs it up.
By intended 2025-11-218:36 Come now - you are setting yourself up for an easy rhetorical response with that assertion.
I’m not disagreeing that america gets more migrants.
But are you going to say that migrants are “average” when compared to the average Joe ?
On average immigrants from a country are the people who are capable enough or desperate enough to make the move to an entirely different culture and life. America used to attract some of the best talent out there.
Most people, in most countries, are not that driven.
And besides that, the different in net immigration numbers are not so wide, as to suggest that the EU is unattractive.
By epolanski 2025-11-2014:06 [flagged]
By jdasdf 2025-11-2015:57 >There's literally 0 startups I've been part of where data protection laws or even the infamous cookie banners have been anywhere near relevant (unless your business was literally profiling).
Thats kind of the point...
Incredible to see the 180 both from EU and also from the HN sentiment. HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies, especially Meta. Meta is no perfect company, but the amount of 'please stick it to them' was strong (I reckon that is still a bridge too far for a lot of folks here).
Even extreme proponents of big tech villanery in the US (Lina Khan's FTC) is also facing losses (They just lost their monumental case against Meta yesterday).
What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site
By radicalbyte 2025-11-1916:1616 reply There has been a change in the community here over the last decade, we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick". The legacy of ZIRP combined with The Social Network marketing.
> we've lost a lot of the hacker spirit and have a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick".
Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?
By radicalbyte 2025-11-1921:582 reply > Doesn't that describe SV in general, and big tech in particular?
Absolutely! It's just that the hopeful hacker/nerd culture used to be more dominant here (slashdot had the more cynical types).
Now there are a generation who don't know anything but Javascript but think that they're God's gift to programming. I can understand it as ZIRP resulted in the bar being dropped to the floor for jobs which paid SV salaries. Imagine earning that kind of money straight out of school and all you had to be able to do was implement Fizzbuzz.
The hackers ARE still here as are some really amazing people but this always seems to happen with communities. The only constant is change. And without change communities die.
This sounds too much like a 'good old days' argument, which is actually in the HN guidelines (something like, 'don't say HN is becoming Reddit').
By UberFly 2025-11-208:00 No. It's reflecting on an overall culture that embraces taking chances. Even if 50% of those chances lead to failure it still beats the paralyzing fear of moving forward.
By matheusmoreira 2025-11-2010:162 reply The "hacker spirit" is dying.
Corporations and governments are locking computers down. Secure boot. Hardware remote attestation. Think you can have control by installing your own software? Your device is now banned from everything. We eill be ostracized from digital society. Marginalized. Reduced to second class citizens, if that.
Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is being destroyed. I predict one day we'll need licenses to program computers.
It's gotten to the point sacrificing ideals for money has started to make sense for me. The future is too bleak. Might as well try to get rich.
By jack_pp 2025-11-2012:46 I might get worried when mainstream computers won't be able to run Linux. Until then.. I'm not worried.
Seems there are efforts to bring openness to platforms that inherently have an interest to resist it and while the progress is slow.. there is progress
By cons0le 2025-11-2016:26 >The "hacker spirit" is dying
This is the number one issue in computing today. Everybodys running around trying to get rich building shitty extensions and frameworks without looking at the bigger picture. We need collective action. Imagine a movement where everybody becomes millitant about adblockers. Like install them on every computer and deflate the advertising industry. Smarter people than me can probably think of better ideas
Right now its death by 1000 cuts. There needs to be a big change or we could lose everything in just 20-30 years in my opinion
By morshu9001 2025-11-202:043 reply As a hacker, I don't care about cookies or what the EU thinks about them. Disable them if you really care. Or at least use a browser that blocks 3P cookies (not Chrome).
By jterrys 2025-11-207:35 people still insist on using a browser built by a company that makes money off of ads and act surprised when said company purposefully compromises their privacy and data on said browser.
By GJim 2025-11-2014:12 > As a hacker, I don't care about cookies
Well I care about privacy. And so should anybody with an ounce of common sense.
What about when the lack of cookies makes everything break and you cannot work around it because it's too much JS to reverse-engineer, and/or it's a copyright-felony in your country to develop workarounds?
"I'll use my l33t hacker skillz to avoid it on my own" is a losing strategy in the long run.
A similar thing happens with the proliferation of cameras and license-plate readers.
By morshu9001 2025-11-209:09 You can keep them enabled and clear at end of session. I'm not saying this makes you untrackable; that is a losing strategy due to all the non-cookie tracking, but also the cookie popup isn't helping there.
By dewey 2025-11-1921:43 As this is the message board of a VC fund it's not that surprising that it doesn't only attract hackers in the original sense?
By GardenLetter27 2025-11-1916:337 reply Hackers should know the government is never on your side.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-11-1918:175 reply > Hackers should know the government is never on your side
Never is naive. Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems. Those systems can be influenced and sometimes controlled by various means. And those levers are generally available to anyone with a modicum of intelligence and motivation.
In addition, hackers should know government is inevitable. Even in anarchy, governments spontaneously begin to form.
If I am not mistaken, the anarchist school of thought is okay with governance and even governments, but not with the concept of the state - an entity that exists to enforce governance with violence. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia
I’m not 100% sure though.
edit - a (vs. the) school of thought is more accurate.
By gary_0 2025-11-1919:35 I think of anarchy as a theoretical end state, where power is perfectly distributed among each individual, but that this is less of an actually achievable condition and more of a direction to head in (and away from monarchy, where power is completely centralized).
By xboxnolifes 2025-11-1918:452 reply That may be one of them, but there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-11-1918:521 reply > there isn't a singular anarchist school of thought
Would be oxymoronic if there were one.
Isn’t that like saying there must be as many universes as theoretical physicists can think up? Slight maybe but it could also just be one.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-11-1922:21 > Isn’t that like saying there must be as many universes as theoretical physicists can think up?
Schools of thought are theories. It’s saying there can be as many theoretical universes as theoretical physicists can think up.
This is true for any social construct, of course. But anarchy’s nature means you get less alignment.
By cess11 2025-11-1919:12 The ideal of self-governance as opposed to alienated state or institutional governance is quite common in anarchist thought. Some would probably consider it foundational for the tendency.
The thing that anarchists have a problem with is hierarchy, of which states are a manifestation. Most anarchists aren't just "okay" with some kind of government, but believe it to be necessary.
i guess I can see how it might work in a single person's life or small group, but on a large scale doomed to failure because the neighboring country/cit-state/etc will be organized, with and organized army. That group will eventually desire something the anarchist community has and will destroy it.
By int_19h 2025-11-204:29 That is indeed the sticky question, but, again, anarchists aren't opposed to organizing either, even at scale - only that such organizing should be fundamentally egalitarian, not forced.
You can argue that hierarchical organization is fundamentally more efficient, but by the same logic authoritarian governments ought to always outcompete democracies militarily, yet it's clearly not as simple as that.
One could also argue that in a world where anarchist modes of organization are the norm, an attempt by some group to organize for the purpose of conquering neighbors would be treated as a fundamental threat by basically all other groups and treated as an imminent threat that warrants legitimate community self-defense. Of course, then the question is how you get to that state of affairs from the world of nation-states.
I don't have answers to these questions, but it should also be noted that it's not a binary. Look at Rojava for an example of a society that, while not anarchist, is much closer to that, yet has shown itself quite capable of organizing specifically for the purpose of war (they were largely responsible for crushing ISIS, and are still holding against Turkey).
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:21 An entity, that invents rules, that are not enforced by anybody is a useless waste of energy.
By cholantesh 2025-11-1919:25 Nozick's libertarianism is not really an anarchist school of thought.
By 1970-01-01 2025-11-1918:42 Yep. The FBI swings from lawful good to lawful evil on a case by case basis. Trusting them is dangerous, but a world where they can be ignored is more dangerous.
By NooneAtAll3 2025-11-203:13 oh no, the dreaded "it's complicated" counter-argument!
making it complex helps nobody - everyone has to have a default
and default of "do not trust the glowies. EVER" is the better one
No, the naive position is to assume that the state is on your side because you occasionally gain something from it.
By array_key_first 2025-11-201:132 reply The reasonable position is that the state exists to propagate and protect itself, which is made up of it's citizens, you included. This is just like any organism or organization works.
Like a company, that doesn't mean they will always make decisions that coincide with what you want or what you think is best. But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.
For example, yes the US government sucks in a lot of ways. The US government ALSO wants you to get an education, and they give it away for free. Because more educated people means a stronger economy, which is good for everyone. You might take this for granted, but: there are many countries where the population, as a whole, cannot read or write. Your literacy is the result of hundreds of years of work and has, essentially, been GIVEN to you. That's not something you just have by nature of being human.
If you were to put a name on your ideological position, what would it be?
It can't be liberalism, since that tradition considers the state separate from society, and the state's purpose to provide liberty to the latter.
Communists of the 'tankie' variety (i.e. 'authoritarian' rather than 'libertarian' or anarchist) believe the state is or ought to be made up of its citizens, but they are aiming for scientific industrial administration and would never describe the state as an organism.
The tendency that does describe the state in that way, is fascism.
If the state inherently wanted all that for its citizens, why have people formed unions and militant organisations and struggled to achieve things like common education and so on?
By array_key_first 2025-11-225:23 The state, as like a concept, doesn't 'inherently' want anything, because there's infinite ways to form a state. The organization of human being in which every person has a voice or say, does tend to operate in a certain way.
The main difference between the public sector and the private sector is that the public sector is somewhat of a democracy, and the private sector is much closer to a monarchy. Obviously our democracy is not perfect, but it's a lot better than "the dictator (board and CEO) makes the decisions, you are cog, please comply".
There's market forces to mitigate that, just like we can say there's foreign affairs to mitigate dictatorships in nations, but that doesn't work if you have a lot of power. Exhibit A: Russia. Russia was supposed to be discouraged from invading the Ukraine, but ultimately, there's nothing stopping the King from doing that.
Let's look at Tesla. Elon Musk is supposed to be discouraged from doing a Nazi Salute because free market, but ultimately there's nothing stopping the king from doing that.
For our government, it makes decisions with the coordination of thousands of people, many of them poor and will experience the direct consequences of those decisions. The further we stray away from that core principle, the worse it gets. Just in general, when we talk about human organization.
> But, it DOES mean they have some goal to keep their people, on the whole, happy, because otherwise they no longer exist.
Not really. The goal is to prevent people from being unhappy enough that they revolt. But so long as that is not a real possibility, the company - or the state - is quite willing to make the population less happy if that means more productivity that can be extracted.
The example you gave - free education - is precisely about that. The point of schools is not to make the people happy, it's to make the people productive. But, also, ideally to brainwash them into being "good citizens" (meaning compliant and not causing problems). It can even mean "happy", but that is not necessarily the desirable state of affairs from the citizens' perspective, either - e.g. in USSR under Stalin, the cult of personality was strong enough that many people were genuinely happy to participate in it, and genuinely sad when the guy finally died; but it wasn't actually good for them!
No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.
The reasonable position then is to demand governance that is actually in the interests of those governed. And one can reasonably argue that the resulting entity is not a state.
By jltsiren 2025-11-205:52 > No, the fundamental problem with state is exactly that: it exists to propagate and protect itself, but you, the citizen, are not included. You are a resource, and your well-being and happiness is only incidental, not the actual goal.
Beliefs like that are self-fulfilling prophecies. People who believe in that often give up trying to influence the state and exclude themselves from its interests. If too many people do that, the state will not care about them.
There is a trade-off based on the size of the state. Small states are easier to influence and more likely care about their citizens. Politicians stay more in touch with other citizens, and the average citizen is more likely to know some politicians in their everyday life. But small states often make amateurish mistakes, because they are governed by amateurs without access to sufficient expertise on various topics.
Large states have an easier time finding the expertise they need. But they tend to develop a political class out of touch with ordinary citizens. Political leaders become powerful and important people who mostly associate with other elites.
I believe the ideal size of a state is in single-digit millions, or maybe up to 10 or 20 million. Like most European countries and US states.
By HardCodedBias 2025-11-1919:26 "Hackers should understand governments are complex, dynamic and occasionally chaotic systems"
No. Hackers should understand that government is force. This is the definition of government.
And force is the antithesis of the hacker ethos.
By layer8 2025-11-1917:08 Growth hackers aim for regulatory capture.
Neither are the billionaires and their deputies who both own and run all the megacorps.
99% of the current AI push is entirely anti-hacker ethos. It is a race to consolidate control of the world's computing and its economic surplus to ~5 organizations.
A few people do interesting stuff on the edges of this, but the rest of the work in it is anathema to hacker values.
The client ai push has also enabled people to run local llama models and build products without those companies. Presumably there'll be more of this to come
By vkou 2025-11-1921:13 That's the 1%. It's the hair on the back of the elephant.
Their capabilities will fall further and further behind models that need a billion dollars to train, and a supercomputer to run. You're making a faustian bargain.
In a democracy, the government is its citizen. It sucks when you disagree with the majority of the voters, of course. But it's wrong to say that the government is against the majority of the voters: it was elected by them.
By nrhrjrjrjtntbt 2025-11-1921:392 reply A government or president can definitely be against its voters interests.
By palata 2025-11-209:51 Then that president should not be re-elected. Or it's the voters' fault.
So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-2019:021 reply This is Mike Johnson's district:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_4th_congressiona...
The people who voted for him are very happy with what he does and that's why they vote for him again. They voted 75% for trump.
They don't want what you or I want.
By nrhrjrjrjtntbt 2025-11-2022:03 Well sculpted district shape.
By NalNezumi 2025-11-1919:29 A hacker should probably know that it's usually trade offs and blanket statements are very useless. Certain tools are good for certain tasks and situations, but bad for others. No free lunch and all that.
If you make that blanket statement, you're definitely not a hacker (or just a novice). But you'd make a heck of a politician or tech bro salesman
By purple_turtle 2025-11-1920:041 reply That is an absolute nonsense.
At minimum, government will be useful as defence against worse government.
I know that some anarchist had dream of a stateless world, but it is not viable.
And while I am not going to say that any government is ideal, many are better than USSR, Third Reich or Cambodia under Pol Pot.
By int_19h 2025-11-203:46 Government != state.
And the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. It can be a temporary ally, but you always have to be wary of it becoming strong enough because you can become its enemy tomorrow.
By poszlem 2025-11-1918:04 The truly "eternal" September.
By antoniojtorres 2025-11-1922:25 True that. I went to a building in SF that dedicated floor space to every adjacent field like robotics, AI, crypto, etc. Zero hacking or even cyber related space.
It made me feel kinda sad for a few days.
By cma 2025-11-207:15 It always had a lot of that, I would say 2-3% of articles were about SEO in the early days of HN. It was never slashdot.
By testfrequency 2025-11-2010:22 Couldn’t agree more.
I’ve said it before, but the cynicism and weirdness that used to exist here has been gobbled up by a new wave of early stage tech evangelists who are just here to complain about ladders and levels.
It’s honestly been depressing to watch lots of good comments and posts go unnoticed, while the bait comments get all the engagement.
There’s also weirdly (ok, maybe not that weird) amount of casual hate on here now. It’s subtle, but I’ve been seeing a lot of negative karma and rhetorics that never used to exist here. I suppose it’s just “the internet” these days, but I’d wager HN has just grown too much outside the bubble it once was, and now we have a wide open door with lights vs the tiny alley way we once had.
By Terr_ 2025-11-208:48 Some of that is attributable to raw inflow/outflow differences, where newer cohorts are bigger and therefore the blend would shifts even if no oldsters ever left.
In the last few years I think sentiment on hacker news has shifted from libertarian leaning to much mored left leaning. The same happened on Reddit a few years before. Anyway, just my gut feeling, nothing scientific.
Keen observation both you and OP. We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.
Valid criticism is OK (I stand by crypto being a scam) but bring up any topic that is neutral to popular(VR, Autonomous Driving, LLM) and people are first to be luddites come out.
> We've gone from a sense of techno optimism to tech blaming.
IMO this is simply because the tech industry isn't what it was 20+ years ago. We didn't have the monopolistic mammoths we have today, such ruthless focus on profiteering, or key figures so disconnected from the layperson.
People hated on Microsoft and they were taken to court for practices that nowadays seem to be commonplace with any of the other big tech companies. A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial; but with time these "futures" the tech industry wants us to imagine have just gotten either less credible, or more dystopic.
A future where everyone is on Facebook for example sounds dystopic, knowing the power that lays on personal data collection, the company's track record, or just what the product actually gives us: an endless feed of low-quality content. Even things that don't seem dystopic like VR seem kinda unnecessary when compared to the very tanginble benefit the personal computer or the internet brought about.
There are more tangible reasons to not be optimistic nowadays.
By Terr_ 2025-11-208:56 > A future where everyone has a personal computer was exciting and seemed strictly beneficial
I like to frame it in terms of capital goods, even if I didn't think of it at that time: The personal computer's promise was that everyone would own their own digital foundry and factory, creating value for them, controlled by them, and operating according to their own best interests.
Nowadays, you're just renting whatever-it-is from BigCorp, with massive lock-in. A tool for enacting other people's decisions at you.
By radicalbyte 2025-11-1922:261 reply I find it really hard to classify myself. I've always called myself a "libertarian" - I believe the best strategy to Civilization is to maximise freedom for anyone. As freedom enables enlightenment an enlightenment drives progress. To actually achieve that, in the real world, means that you have to distribute and limit power. That means limiting not only government power but also corporate power. That means regulation, strong regulators (breaking monopolies), policies to keep prices down (including rent/housing!) and to enable free market competition and innovation. And provide an economic system where risks can be taken, enabled by a social let (and social healthcare).
I felt that that was more common here 15 years ago before Big Tech pivoted into the cynical extractive and, in the case of the socials, net economic drag industry that it is now.
The really weird thing is that my views are considered both very right-wing (free markets, globalisation are great, maximal freedom, maximal responsibility, freedom of religion) and very left wing (strong regulation, policy to minimise rent/house prices, strong social net, progressive taxation and wealth limits, freedom to be LGBTQ+ etc).
By int_19h 2025-11-203:55 This isn't actually unusual in the grand scheme of things, just at the moment. "Libertarian" was originally a word that anarchists came up with to describe themselves for a good reason. Lysander Spooner is famous in right-wing libertarian circles, but the guy also promoted mutualism and was the member of the First International. Today, what you describe goes under the label of "libertarian free-market socialism".
Regarding regulation, I do have to note that in many cases when you try to root-cause corporate power, it turns out that it hinges on active government regulation in practice. For example, consider the fundamentals of capitalism, namely, accumulation of capital. Why do we get those huge monopolies in the first place? Well, because more capital means more way to generate wealth (or, more precisely, to appropriate wealth generated by your workers), which can be invested into more capital etc - there is a natural positive feedback loop here. So at a first glance it feels like you need government to actively do something to prevent companies from becoming too large. But consider: what does it mean for a company to own something? It's not a person, so it can't really have physical possession of things. It's all abstract property rights, and the only reason why that works is because the society as a whole acknowledges those rights and legitimate, and, crucially, because there is a state providing infrastructure (police, courts etc) to enforce them. Now imagine what would happen if, for example, the state simply refused to acknowledge property rights past a certain limit and simply wouldn't enforce them on behalf of the property owners.
By fsckboy 2025-11-200:50 >a larger proportion of "chancers", people who are only in tech to "get rich quick"
your complaint was Unassailable Hacker® jwz's complaint about HN more than 10 years ago here's a link (many on HN complain that this is NSFW https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png since there are rarely complaints here that anything else is NSFW, I'd suggest people feel insulted by the message)
the thing that has actually changed since jwz's disgust is the site is now flooded by socialism, the antithesis of get-rich enthusiasm
By sandworm101 2025-11-1916:242 reply The hackers are still here, lurking in the shadows. Bananas. They are just tired of being berated by fanboys anytime they criticize the will of the tech bros. There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
By filoleg 2025-11-1919:01 > There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.
That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.
By danem 2025-11-1918:53 Am I the victim of the algorithm? Because all I see on HN these days is people pessimistic about tech and society. The tenor here is overwhelmingly negative.
Where are you seeing anyone defend big tech, tech bros, or any tech in general?
By nofriend 2025-11-1921:20 This is such a laughable comment. Being in favour of a regulation - any regulation - is not part of the "hacker spirit". A hacker qua a hacker is interested in a regulation insofar as they can work around it, or exploit it to their ends, not to put one in place to directly achieve something. That's not to say all regulations are bad, or even that the GDPR is, just that HN being for or against it isn't proof of some demographic shift.
By pixxel 2025-11-1921:35 [dead]
I don't know if it's a changing of the audience or a change in how people behave generally, but this place has been insufferable lately whenever anything remotely related to Donald Trump's administration comes up.
One of the things that made this place special relative to other online communities is the ethos to interrogate through a lens of curiosity. Now, there's a lot of vitriol that's indistinguishable from any other comment section.
By rootusrootus 2025-11-1919:40 Yeah I still remember my first interaction with a supporter back in 2016. It was startling, and the first hint I had that politics was about to shift abruptly.
My rule for a sane HN experience: avoid and flag any articles related to Trump, Elon, <current culture war topic>, American politics, and anything tangential that summons them.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-11-204:49 That's getting pretty hard these days. I did a query on Clickhouse and this year a full 1% of all comments on this site mention Trump.
It’s a difference in values. To some, the ends justify the means and human life has no inherent value and the world is zero sum, and to some, a lying malignant narcissist deciding who lives and who dies is a personification of evil.
To some people, it’s literally a choice between that “lens of curiosity” and their families lives. But people for whom politics has never directly impacted them past a few % up or down in their paychecks can’t understand that, or feel safe in the idea that “they won’t come for me”.
precisely this. cool detachment or disinterested curiosity around political events is the privilege of those comfortable enough to believe current politics won't affect them. These same people are also usually ultimately responsible for the apathy/failure to act and stop meaningful regime change before it's too late.
I'd love to live in a world where one can neatly compartmentalize reality and view life-altering political shifts with "a lens of curiosity", but that isn't how the world works.
> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.
That's impossible. The network effects are too strong. Facebook may die, or even Instagram, but WhatsApp is so intermeshed with the majority of the world that it can only be taken out by a government.
I uninstalled WhatsApp last year after I sent a message to my most important contacts that I'm switching to Signal. In the mean time, I convinced a grand total of 2 people to install Signal so we can talk. Also, I realized that actually not being part in some of the WhatsApp groups that I left behind has quite a lot of advantages!
Yes, the network effects are very strong, but each of us has the possibility of making a small sacrifice for this thing to change.
By int_19h 2025-11-203:58 You might have convinced 2 people to install Signal, but the real test is whether they will still be using it a year from now. My own experience from going Signal-first for a while was that it doesn't stick for most.
By pseudalopex 2025-11-1921:01 Social connections can be a large sacrifice.
Facebook is filled with billions of people I have no reason to speak to, ergo its network effects for me are zero, and its value to me is zero. Other services have similar zero or negative value, and hence I don't use them either. As much as some around here would like to believe that network effects are a moat that effectively allow social media to be immortal, experience has shown that not to be the case. Facebook is dying a slow, lingering death. It is not the place you go to find trendsetters and people of import, but, at best, to go check up on grandma. Facebook will die when grandma finally kicks the bucket and there isn't anyone to replace her because they're all on Discord.
Facebook is still running strong on Marketplace and Groups. They have almost no competition on those.
....and I don't care because I don't use either of those. All the network effects in the world mean nothing if that network has no value to me.
By roflmaostc 2025-11-208:59 Yes, but then it's about you. A significant portion of society is using Facebook marketplace and group so it won't die with "grandma"
By microtonal 2025-11-1919:161 reply What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die.
The problem is that with a nearly infinite amount of money, you are not going to get irrelevant on merit. You just buy up any company/talent that becomes a threat. They have done that with Instagram and WhatsApp (which was and is really huge in Europe etc.).
Didnt the judge rule literally yesterday that this wasnt illegal. This was one of Lina Khan's signature lawsuits, and judge didnt agree even a single one of FTC's arguments.
By calgoo 2025-11-1920:05 Just because something is not illegal does not make it a good thing. Judges have political ties and if the people in power dont want any monopoly laws, then there wont be any monopoly laws.
By dyslexit 2025-11-1922:46 I think you might have a different definition of "merit" than OP. "Merit" to me means how much value the company brings to society. If I'm reading correctly about your point of it being legal, to you it seems like "merit" means how much value they bring to their investors.
Social media companies becoming more consolidated and influential might be legal and good for their stakeholders but it doesn't mean it's a net positive for the rest of the world. And unfortunately, as much as so many people like to believe otherwise, being a net negative to society absolutely does not lead to a company becoming irrelevant.
Where can I read more about this? Quick search turns up nothing for me
https://www.theverge.com/news/823191/meta-ftc-antitrust-tria...
It is actually a monumental case ruling, and for some reason it wasnt reported or discussed here. Lina Khan's FTC has lost both their marquee cases now (Google, Meta)
> Meta won a landmark antitrust battle with the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled it has not monopolized the social media market at the center of the case.
Wasn't the case here really weak to begin with? I remember reading the FTC's initial filings and they just sounded absurd. The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.
I'm not very happy with Lina Khan after she killed our only remaining low cost airline carrier. And killed iRobot to let Roborock, a a Chinese company, take over.
She "stood up" to big tech, failed, and her remaining legacy is destroying American businesses that people actually relied on. Literally no value was added, but a bunch was subtracted. I never understood the hype for her.
> The very premise that Meta didn't face meaningful competition from TikTok was a farce.
The original claim was centered around the timeline of purchasing Instagram and Whatsapp. TikTok came much, much later.
By xvector 2025-11-2013:03 If this is true, the case then becomes "Meta was a monopoly from start_date-tiktok_date" which isn't a very meaningful claim since they are not arguing it is a monopoly to be broken up.
Anyways, I disagree - this is not the case. If you read the filings and their slides, the FTC argues Meta is a monopoly in the personal networking space.
They essentially carve a market out of thin air to selectively exclude Snapchat, TikTok, and Shorts. The judge has understandably called this for what it is.
It was a phenomenally poorly litigated case, most experts at the time doubted it would succeed, but it did wonders for Lina Khan's popularity. Seems to have served her well with NYC and all.
Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.
By xvector 2025-11-2012:59 Correct, yeah.
By WorldMaker 2025-11-1920:53
It's pretty telling that people here think enforcement of anti-trust laws that are already on the books is "extreme". The implicit goal of half of tech startups is basically becoming the platform for whatever and getting a soft monopoly, so I guess it's not surprising that that people who are temporarily embarrassed monopolists have these views.
By GardenLetter27 2025-11-1916:151 reply Look at what happened to iRobot vs. Roborock though.
By pas 2025-11-208:07 can someone explain what happened? how is it relevant to EU laws?
This is a proposal from the EC. Whether the EU accept it is not clear.
Yeah I really hope they don't. It's ridiculous to throw out all the great work they've been doing.
By 4ndrewl 2025-11-1918:27 Nothing's been official published though, so this is largely a kite-flying exercise.
You don't need a pop-up to use cookies on your site. You (quite rightly) need to get consent in some form if you're to track my (or your) behavior and sell that to rando third-parties.
By jonkoops 2025-11-2017:30 It is good to stress this, most people don't know how the EU works, Europeans included.
By surgical_fire 2025-11-1916:114 reply I live in EU. I am totally in support to force Meta down through government's big stick.
While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too.
Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.
By jonesjohnson 2025-11-1916:482 reply Then I propose you should support https://noyb.eu/
Their track record is pretty good.
By stavros 2025-11-1916:33 Yeah, seconded, and I also live in the EU.
I'm a hacker type and generally extremely (left) libertarian. But when it comes to megacorps, I have basically zero sympathy. When they are big enough to rival nation-states in economic and political power, they can't complain when said nation-states start to notice.
(I would still prefer the world without either, though.)
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:30 Yeah, I think states need to release that entities as large as them become their competitors. Now we have entities way larger than them.
By rebolek 2025-11-1918:21 I wonder what kind of people downvote you. They must have interesting priorities.
By geraneum 2025-11-1919:31 > What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.
Why? Is META relevant only on merit?
By JoshTriplett 2025-11-1918:263 reply > HN was cheering on as EU went after Big Tech companies
HN is not a hive mind or a monoculture. Every time the EU goes after some company, some people always cheer, some people always boo, and some people will cheer some and boo others based on the impact/nuance of the particular policy or company.
This is accurate, however if you look at any thread you can see an overwhelming consensus of opinion. The diversity of views are not equal - in the sense that there isnt equal number of for and against comments.
In most of the threads I have observed about EU action on Big Tech, the overwhelming majority of thoughts are 'for', with perhaps few dissenting thoughts.
It depends what time of the day you log in too. I'm in the GMT time zone, I can literally see a comment go from +20 upvotes in the morning to negative numbers when Americans start waking up. It really shifts your perspective of the site too, because comments move down or even disappear based on the number of votes.
I would strongly encourage everyone to read HN with `showdead` enabled (it's in your profile page). There aren't actually all that many downvoted comments, and while mosts are low-level trolling, even with `showdead` you see them at the end of the parent thread and they are greyed out, so it's not all that distracting. But being able to see some of the things that get downvoted / killed unjustly (and then vouch & upvote them) is how you get a better HN.
By 1718627440 2025-11-209:251 reply You can upvote dead comments? I can't maybe you need to have some amount of karma.
By int_19h 2025-11-2021:04 You can "vouch" for them, which makes them non-dead (and upvotable again). But, yes, it does have some karma limit - I'm not sure if the specifics are documented anywhere, the FAQ just says "small karma threshold".
By oblio 2025-11-208:14 Yeah, you can sense how strong libertarianism is in the US.
Europeans here steer more in the "we can, but should we?" category, while Americans are in the "move fast and break things" category.
I literally see upvotes during the day (Europe) and then downvotes during the night. Mostly. But the trend is there.
By stickfigure 2025-11-1923:06 The loudmouths do not necessarily represent a majority of HN users. They're just loud. Some of us find the social-media-bashing threads boring and just go back to our social media.
I think there is plenty of diversity of comments, substantially less diversity in voting and flagging.
You can say lots of things, many that go against the hive mind will just get you more or less instantly grayed or even flagged
By JoshTriplett 2025-11-201:31 > substantially less diversity in voting and flagging
I don't think this is true either. I've seen comments swing wildly from one end to the other and back. It's more that comments show a distribution, while voting squashes that distribution into a single result.
By dlcarrier 2025-11-1919:48 On top of that, one thing that always gets support is complaining about the status quo, and those comments have been the most upvoted, on either side of the debate
By sieabahlpark 2025-11-1919:16 [dead]
By carefulfungi 2025-11-2013:31 > What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.
Me too. But losing on merit requires an (at least somewhat) fair marketplace.
By g-b-r 2025-11-1921:41 Meta's only merit is having a lot of users and keeping them hooked at any cost.
It might surprise you, but success is not always rooted in having done great things for the world
> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT. People stop using Meta products, and then I want to see it die. But not by forcing the hand - that's bad for everyone, especially the enterpreuer / hacker types on this site
I honestly don’t get why so many people jump to the whole "we need the government to save us or we’re doomed" argument. To me, it's simple: put your money where your mouth is. I can’t stand Meta, so I just don’t use their products.
By aniviacat 2025-11-2010:22 To many (especially younger) people, giving up Meta products would make them a social outcast.
Some industries naturally tend torwards monopolies. In social networks, this effect is very strong.
The 180 does not surprise me at all. GDPR and associated laws are a perfect example of the old 'Good intentions, unintended consequences'-pattern we see in laws all the time.
The results of the GDPR (and the unrelated Cookie Directive) on my everyday professional life are what made me - an European - from a flag-waving European-Unity-proponent to a heavy critic that dreams of a Dexit. And I know I am not the only one - public opinion is shifting - some because of cookie banners, some because of driving licenses, some because manufactuers have started to neuter their devices when sold to Europe, taking away features available everywhere else in the world, some because of the ridiculous VAT reporting regime that hits European businesses once they hit a 100k gross income mark, some for yet other reasons. And now they are trying hard to get the de-minimis-rule taken away, increasing trouble and cost for anyone who does cross-eu-border trading.
It's only been a matter of time even Brussles remembered that ultimately, their throne is built on sand, and that Europe has a history of getting rid of unreasonable leadership.
I'm not as miffled about that as others, but in Germany, licenses used to be forever (unless you yourself gave it back OR there was a court order, e.g. for a traffic-related crime). Enter the EU, and now licenses come with a renewal date, which is considered mostly a cash grab as you now have to buy a new copy every few years.
A few weeks ago, there even was an attempt to have air-traffic-style medicals beginning at 60, which, in a society that becomes both older AND worse at public transit, was highly unpopular.
You may think that's a little thing. The issue is: these little compound. And every time they come around the corner with a new regulatory clown act, people remember ... when lighting bulbs were a few cents instead of the energy-saving 10-euro new bulbs mandated by brussles ... when we were forbidden to have powerful vacuum cleaners or showerheads (yes, the new ones are not really worse, but they sound worse), ... and a hundred other little annoyances.
Not to mention that national governments like to blame Brussles for stuff they wanted, but which were highly unpopular. "Unfortunately, we cannot do anything, it was an EU decision (which we openly supported)".
And eventually, people become eurocritic. Which is one of the reasons why people start to vote for right-wing, eurocritic to anti-EU parties.
By pas 2025-11-219:58 Hah, we already have those medicals in Hungary. Well, it definitely has some cash-grabby aspects, but - at least here - there's some real benefits to having a doctor think at least for 2 seconds about how someone's chronic conditions can and will affect them (and others!) on the roads.
People are getting glasses because the doctor told them that they need them for driving. People are getting regular blood sugar checkups because the doctors told them that driving with prediabetes is dangerous.
And even though I was surprised when they told one of my relatives that he only gets the license renewed for a few years and then he needs to get a checkup again, but he definitely fits the risk indicators. (Recently lost his wife after a very harsh and unfortunately unfair battle with the medical realities and the resource-constrainedness of healthcare, mental health problems, etc.)
...
regarding little things, I completely agree. This trade-off to have some environmental sustainability static look better at the cost of having far worse consumer experience doesn't make a lot of sense when we are not doing the obvious things to sweeten the trade-offs. (Ie. building more walkable cities, better insulation, better public transportation, yadda-yadda. But of course the European auto industries have a lot of influence.)
I think the rise of far-right is very well explained by the salience of immigration problems:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist...
Of course the usual consumer annoyances help fuel the populism/propaganda.
By energy123 2025-11-1920:39 Can contract killers become irrelevant on merit, or does it take government intervention?
By yardie 2025-11-1916:16 I believe the FTC had a case years ago. But the market has moved on. YT took off backed by Alphabet capital. Tiktok took off withe Bytedance capital. There was a time when FB/IG/WA commanded most of social media. And Meta did use that clout in some pretty grotesque ways.
Prior to 2020, FTC would have had a much stronger case. But too little too late.
Well yeah, the GPDR was great in theory and a huge win for privacy advocates until it did jack shit in practice. It turned out to have zero teeth and everyone just found ways to keep business as usual while 'complying' with the law.
I think it's ridiculous to say GDPR did "jack shit". I now have the ability to withdraw consent for tracking/marketing cookies on every major companies website I visit. An option that was near non-existent before GDPR.
It was the 2002 ePrivacy Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive
What the law wanted: putting regulatory friction on tracking cookies by requiring collecting consent will make sites do less tracking.
What the law did: endless cookie banners.
What the law wanted: ending the torrent of people's inboxes filling with ads.
What the law did: nothing because they caved to the industry and let people send ads anyway. actual spammers never followed the law anyway and real companies who ship ads weren't at all burdened by an existing customer relationship requirement.
What the law wanted: companies will stop keeping your personal information on their servers forever.
What the law did: nothing because they again caved to the industry and it just got added to the cookie banner consent screen or the company just said they kept the data for "value add" services like personalization.
By pas 2025-11-219:44 I'm shrugging a bit, because we have very different experience regarding what the law did, as I worked on projects and privacy and handling of personal data was taken pretty seriously. (Sure, my sample size is small.)
Separating good traffic (and emails and sites) from bad is an inherently hard problem. I'm not surprised that a big generic supranational regulatory body did not solve it. But I think they found and okay balance between regulatory burden and efficacy.
(And even though I understand that the enforcement had to be left to various agencies of the member states, the absolute sluggishness and total lack of proactivity was bad for morale. Even though I'm aware it had to go through the courts too. But that's a communication problem and I expect the fucking supranational regulator to be able to articulate what the realistic expectations are and where are we compared to them, and what's keeping us from getting there, and so on. Post-legislation monitoring and follow up is very important, and all regulatory bodies are atrociously unaware of the harm their skill deficiency causes in today's complaint-driven cumulative resentment-based populist politics/propaganda.)
By oersted 2025-11-209:45 The thing is that it didn't work for that objective. It didn't seem to have any meaningful impact on all on the Metas and Googles out there. They control the user base and people depend on their products, it was trivial for them to get full consent like they've always done with their Terms & Conditions.
At the same time, it was a heavy burden for data-oriented EU startups like mine. I've spent a few hundred hours dealing with GDPR, it felt like it was designed to stick it to the big companies without any thought on how it would affect the rest.
And it's been a low-level but ever present friction for users.
> What I really want to see is Meta getting irrelevant ON MERIT.
That happened a decade ago. Users dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg's response was to buy Instagram. The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.
Likewise, Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition. In fact, Google controlled so much of the M&A market that YCombinator (the company that runs this forum) complained in an amicus brief that they were basically being turned into Google's farm league.
So long as companies can be bought and sold to larger competitors, no tech company will ever become irrelevant. They'll just acquire and rebrand. The only way to stop this is with the appropriate application of legal force.
By ljlolel 2025-11-1919:38 ?? He bought instagram in 2012 when it was tiny. They all moved in 2016.
His response was 4 years back in time because he can see the future?
They moved from meta to meta.
By eptcyka 2025-11-1918:49 What about hp, dell, ibm, compaq, sun? Companies are temporary.
By graemep 2025-11-1919:40 > sers dropped from Facebook like flies and moved to Instagram.
Even worse, bought Whattsapp.
By pessimizer 2025-11-1919:071 reply > The Obama DOJ waved through what was obviously a blatantly illegal merger.
Speaking of buying Instagram[1], it's plain to see that the horrible judges that Obama appointed simply don't believe that antitrust should exist.
Exactly what you would expect from the guy who let Citigroup appoint his cabinet[2]. The powers that be at the Democratic party thought that Hillary Clinton was too independent for corporate elites, and she makes a fairly good case that they fixed the primary because they thought he was their best chance to "save capitalism" after the crash. They were right. She even sabotaged her next campaign with her desperate need to show bankers that she was a safe choice (e.g. the secret speech.)
> Google's only ever made two successful products: Search and e-mail. Everything else was an acquisition.
And search was only successful for 5 minutes, until SEO broke PageRank. Since that one fragile (but smart) algorithm, and the innovation of buying Doubleclick, everything else has been taking advantage of the fact that we don't have a government that functions when it comes to preserving competition in the market. The West loves corporate concentration; it's better when your bribes come from fewer sources, and those sources aren't opposed to each other.
[1] James Boasberg; "Meta prevails in historic FTC antitrust case, won’t have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram" https://apnews.com/article/meta-antitrust-ftc-instagram-what...
By alex1138 2025-11-204:26 I like what Kagi does which is just using the nuclear option of "Look - if you fill your website with crap we're not going to index you"
That said, Google stripped away +must +include +terms from their searches so I do blame them some and not just SEO
By lanthissa 2025-11-2010:29 so what it like working at meta?
Hackernews has always been a venture capitalist forum and has always had a significant minority that generally sides with money. I don't think that is substantially different today.
Most European regulations seemed to be less about helping regular people and more about protecting European ad firms, many of which are even shadier than big tech.
By paulryanrogers 2025-11-1919:451 reply > ...more about protecting European ad firms, many of which are even shadier than big tech.
Where can I read more about that phenomenon?
By Aunche 2025-11-1921:09 There are lots of companies like this:
https://zeotap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Zeotap_-Time-t...
