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Comment by dageshi | Hacker News Reader

Well, that is the double edged sword. For two decades or more we enjoyed an internet that was more or less free from regulation because the politicians of the era didn't really use it or understand it. Now the politicians do use it (I doubt they understand it) and are happy to regulate it, I imagine we can expect much more like this from the EU.

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Double edged sword indeed. Without regulation the internet turned into shit and we have companies like Google and Facebook running the show.

With regulation what can be done with them tho

I'd say the internet is better and more useful than it's ever been. Some parts can be improved, but if we look at the track record of regulations so far it definitely looks more 'cure is worse than the disease'.

Human society is full of problems. Now most of human society uses the internet and not only the more educated, privileged ones. So obviously all the ordinary problems came to the internet.

But I don't see how regulation would have prevented that, nor any improvement of any regulation so far.

It seems a little disingenuous to say that you can't see how the GDPR has improved the privacy situation online, unless you didn't care about it before it was a thing and still don't care about it now.

Well then tell me: did it stop anyone from tracking me?

Did it stop facebook from manipulating the communication of their users? Did it stop google from harvesting data out of most websites?

It mostly just created work and more annoying banners for people to click away, but no real improvement I see. But you see more? Maybe you mean the recent discussion in germany that landlords might have to remove the names on the door? Or new opportunities for bored and greedy lawers to sue websites who did not care or knew enough and don't have lawers on their own?

Yesterday I sent two GDPR requests to two companies that would not stop spamming our address with physical junk mail, addressed to us by name.

In the request I requested all the data they had on us, their reason for keeping it and how they obtained it. Secondly, I demanded they remove us from all of their databases, including those of their vendors.

This is now my good right under the GDPR and I am very happy that these tools exist to allow simple citizens like me to reign in untouchable companies' use of my personal data. It measurably improves my life.

I don't see how the GDPR not preventing Google from harvesting website data is in any way relevant or a measure of GDPR usefulness.

I have succesfully used it to get my data removed from services where that would be impossible in the past (most notably, everyone who sends me emails that they feel I desire). There are more examples (like companies that finally have to think about what they're collecting and how), but on a personal level I think that's the most tangible and best one.

If people actually implemented a cookie banner that was compliant, I would like that they are there. Because that means I could filter them away and I could be safe in the knowledge there were no tracking cookies. As it stands, you can see a lot of angry people making things that sound acceptable in the US (by continuing to browse, you agree to [...]) but is actually just not compliant. That's a sad state of affairs, but it's not the fault of the GDPR in my view.

Beyond the giants the only thing the GDPR practically did was double the amount of cookie popups you see on the web, and the suppoused harsh consequences don't work if so many organizations are doing it that the bureaucracy can't keep up

It definitely has not. Let's say company X allows company Y to access data that is personally identifiable. X is located in the EU, whereas company Y is not. Y promises to allow persons to delete their data upon request. However, there is no way that a person know their data has been shared from X to Y until they want to delete their data. At that point, who knows how far the data has spread or if it is even possible to track down. Y could have shared the data with any number of third parties, or may even be incapable of finding every reference to an individual and since it is not EU governed it will be difficult to ever bring Y to court.

> Google and Facebook running the show.

It only runs the show if you let them. You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.

No, you can’t. Not unless you stop living in Europe or the US or any other place that has internet. I don’t have a Facebook account, but I’m certain Facebook knows all it needs to know from friends who shared pictures and tagged me, from people who uploaded their address book which included my phone number, from companies that uploaded my data as part of a targeted audience list. You cannot opt out of this part of the data collection. And all the policies that Facebook promotes, all the social dialogue it shapes, this affects me, too. I cannot possibly opt out of that either.

Facebook under GDPR isn’t allowed to create a shadow profile of EU citizens: all consent has to be opt-in. OK, so they could have some legitimate interest argument, but I find it hard to believe that’d fly in an EU court. They’re also not allowed to use the consent of your associates to process your personal information without your own opt-in consent. So it’s going to be interesting when the first court case with Facebook as a defendant against the GDPR happens.

Let’s see if that happens, but that’s tangential to the point. The GP was asserting that you can just ignore Facebook/Google and that act alone will remove all (ill) effect it might have on your life. I’m asserting this is false. If that effect is reduced by regulation, then this is the opposite of ignorance, it’s actively shaping what these actors can and cannot do.

As far as “social dialogue,” who cares? There is nothing on Facebook that is actually important unless you let it be. Not a single thing happening on Facebook makes one bit of difference to my daily life.

A huge chunk of people uses Facebook, like it or not. Facebook shapes what they see and how they see it, it at least partially shapes their perception of society. And even if you and me opt out of Facebook, the way Facebook shapes that dialogue for that huge chunk of people does affect your daily live.

> It only runs the show if you let them.

A few billion in fines for anti competitive behavior would disagree. Google does not want you to have a choice.

> You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.

Can you? Most restaurants in my area publish their hours and menus using Facebook, others integrate themselves with Google. And how could I fault them? It certainly is cheaper than what they did in the past, paying for a minimal website to do the same. Unless some government comes down on them hard they will continue to infect every aspect of modern live.

I may be an anomaly, but I live in Mountain View and never once looked up restaurant hours on Facebook. Yelp (which I despise,) Google, TripAdvisor and other sites generally have business hours. You could even call the restaurant to get hours! Old fashioned, I know. Maybe I am in a bubble in Silicon Valley but I never have to interact with Facebook to get things done. My kids school, frustratingly, has a What’s App group for parents, but I don’t even need to interact with that to know what’s going on.

All the people lamenting Facebook: simply stop using it.

> Can you?

Yes, you can. Nobody is holding a gun on your head to use Facebook and Google. You don't have to look up restaurants using these services, and if your restaurant is not listed there, you can go in person, or call you know? Or avoid such restaurants altogether. There is absolutely no obligation except habits that have formed over time. And habits can be broken.

See for yourself how many sites run Google AdSense and Analytics. It was eye opening for me. Google is the internet.

It has nothing to with any politicians using or not using the internet. It simply was "unregulated" because it has less impact on the world, and because existing laws were by and large adequate to capture everything that did happen (contrary to popular opinion, the internet has always been subject to regular laws, and some fraud on E-bay is not materially different from offline fraud)

No. What happened is politicians have found a new avenue for indirect taxation and the pay off long term is in the hundred of billions if not trillions of dollars over decades.

The simplicity of it all is that it relies on the same two methods most indirect taxation works, ignorance and exploitation of jealousy. The ignorance part is easy, the public doesn't understand the scope of the issue or how it is a tax on their activities. The jealousy is sold by portraying those being taxed directly as not paying their fair share and such. Indirect taxes are the unseen but real burden on your paycheck

I suppose you can reduce the fact that some people don't like that international tech giants effectively don't pay the same amount of taxes as the homegrown competition as "jealousy" but it's not extremely constructive.

The big problem for the EU is that the internet is effectively a border-less global playing field which makes is very hard to enforce laws, taxes and regulations locally. I agree that their current approach is deeply flawed but at the same time it doesn't seem like we're nearing any kind of global governance for the internet so it seems that the alternative is either Chinese-style crass protectionism or just giving up and letting Google and Facebook eat the European web without giving anything back. Pick your poison.

I offer a simple solution but nobody likes to hear it. The solution to legal tax avoidance is to stop using tax incentives to do public policy.

Set a single income tax rate for all businesses that they pay on revenue, not on profits. Do the same for individuals as well. No deductions, no credits. If you make $200k a year, your taxes are the same whether you have zero dependants or twelve.

Similarly, if you made $200M in revenue, you pay taxes on the $200M.

This is a little difficult because I have no idea how to account for Google putting ads for Pixel devices on Google search results or Facebook peddling their Alexa device in Instagram but there must be a way to force companies to report this as revenue. No idea how this will work for the Google home page for which there is no established price structure.

We can still keep a progressive tax regime. Maybe 0% income tax for revenues under a certain amount and higher taxes for higher brackets. But people never want to listen. They keep saying oh grocery stores will go out of business or whatever. I think it is pretty silly. We can't have it both ways. If we want to prevent legal tax avoidance, we must act to prevent tax avoidance.

That solution is not simple at all. Let's take the creation and selling of wooden chairs as an example.

Let's say chopping down trees costs $100, turning wood into chairs costs $100, and selling chairs also costs $100. Let's assume companies are non-profits (to make things easier).

Company A Spends $100 to create a unit of wood.

Company B spends $100 for a unit of wood, and spends $100 to make that into a chair, and sells for $200.

Company C spends $200 to buy a chair, spends $100 to have a nice shop and friendly sales people, and sells for $300.

Now let's add taxes! We'll do 10% to make the numbers easy.

Company A pays $10 taxes.

Company B pays $20 taxes.

Company C pays $30 taxes.

Total taxes paid on a chair bought at company C: $60.

Now we introduce company D. Company D is large, and can produce its own wood, has its own chair-making factory, and has its own shop. A chair at company D also costs $300. But company D only has to pay $30 in taxes!

In the real world, company D will immediately drive companies A, B, and C out of business (or acquire them!) because it can sell its chairs cheaper, because it only had to pay taxes once.

The problem with your suggested solution is that companies owning their entire production line get an immediate tax-advantage over smaller companies who do not. If implemented, there would still be legal tax avoidance by simply forming bigger companies.

That's not how VAT works. All three companies A, B, and C pay $10 each, because they have all added $100 value to the goods they have sold. Is that not how it works everywhere?

No, the US is as OP said.

Apropos... popular macro-economic theory is based more or less on the idea that the economic financial system is not sensitive to conditions like these. As you just showed, it's actually quite trivial to demonstrate that it is.

He isn't proposing VAT - mcny was explicitly proposing a straight up tax on revenue.

I am pretty sure that would be easy to game by professionals...

I offer a simple solution - tax on UK sales - UK costs. (For the case of the UK, but substitute your own country here). If the business is generally importing cheaply, marking up heavily and selling on then it will pay a large tax. If they employ loads of people and export then they'll probably pay not tax.

Taking on extra employees or switching to a local producer will reduce your tax bill. The government is then collecting payroll taxes from the new employee so it doesn't miss out too much.

If you're a global coffee chain that didn't make any 'profit' because you licence your logo from a subsidiary based in Switzerland. Well, that can't be deducted so you will be paying tax.

I cannot really tell what your supposedly "simple solution" actually is. But it seems just a restatement of OPs, but filtered through a Brexiteer's compulsion to add a bit us-vs-them to the mix.

In that case it suffers from the same failures as OP: Starbucks would seize to exist because coffee still makes up 50%+ of their cost of doing business. And it adds an extra layer of "but why?" with an artificial distinction between domestic and foreign-produced goods.

That model is generally called "The Rally Stupid VAT". It bankrupts every single trading business, as well the majority of producers–essentially any value chain longer than 1.

All retail business will be the first to die. Because when your supermarket charges you $1 for milk, they would have to pay 20 cents (or whatever your tax rate is). They also have to buy the milk. Since margins are typically around 2% or 3% in this segment, any tax >3% will make retail impossible or dramatically increase prices.

So congratulation for effectively demonstration the danger of this ignorant trend of mindless hate of "government", and "experts": Those that believe they have easy solutions don't even notice when what they're proposing would cause widespread famine.

Thank you. I'm not married to my plan. I only bring it up because people were talking about tax loophole. I'm perfectly willing to let it die. I can't say retailers are exempt from my plan. I definitely cannot say tax domestic revenue minus domestic expenses. There is no way we can get all our trading partners to synchronize on a date to start doing this at the same time and without that synchronization I think this is against international trade agreements.

"letting Google and Facebook eat the European web without giving anything back. Pick your poison. "

Democracy means power of the people. That is more than just voting.

If most of the people decide to use google and facebook although hating it, than maybe they deserve what they get. I don't like Facebook, I don't use it. I like google less every year, I use it less.

But I don't cry and whine for my politicians to tell those evil corporations to do what I want. They are free to offer me what they want. And I am free to decline and use something else.

And this may be smug, but if more people would act like that, there would be more real alternatives.

Except it's not as easy as that. Almost half the web is reporting your every click to Google, through Analytics, and plenty are also reporting to Facebook and others. If you use a Mastercard, Google is getting info on your purchases. If you email a Gmail user, they're getting it too. Your friends (maybe not yours, but many's) are backing up photos of you to Google Photos and sharing them on Facebook, Instagram and more. Your Wifi router is tracked and your house is photographed.

But I am free to use and support the other half of the internet. And I am free to use adblockers.

And my home is free to be photographed from the outside from anyone. I do not loose anything because of that. Neither do I loose, if friends upload pictures they made. If I do not want to be on a picture I tell them the moment they make it. Or we consent on private use only. And if people make pictures without consent they are not my friends and there are laws for that. (but I actually do not care about that so much)

What I care about it is my communication. I want to be able to communicate with friends all over the world, without a company being able to control and influence that communication. Which is why I do not use Facebook at all.

And I am able to do that, with all the people important to me. The people who insist on facebook ... I can miss out.

And again: yes the situation IS shitty, but I don't see any improvement from regulations at all. Quite the contrary: we just got the annoying "We use Cookies" banners. But the tracking goes on as ever.

What do you mean they don't "understand" it? Like, they don't get the mechanics of how HTTP and links work?

It is more like politicians realised they can make a lot of money creating regulations in the internet space for whoever pays more. Just like they do with anything else. They just need to wrap it with nice words and public is going to buy anything, you just need to cook it in the media for a bit. I am being cynical but there are no good intentions in the politics, it is only about power and money. They just need to be careful to not anger the Plebs too much.

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