Hacker News Reader

In regards to your third paragraph, to me none of that matters. Mass surveillance on the Web is wrong, period. Meanwhile, all parties involved in this drama, except for non-profits like the EFF, are instead debating how people ("users") should be best exploited online for profit, while regulators arrive late to the party and focus on other less consequential matters such as antitrust and miss the forest for the trees.

There aren't trillion dollar companies that advocate for privacy. Private data is a market, I think you know that with that username.

Increasing privacy doesn't decrease competition, it would force businesses to not deal with private data. There is no conflict here. There is no net loss here aside for specialized advertisers.

It could even enable competition. Small companies have no chance to compete with the huge data collections of Google and friends.

> Google's removal of third-party cookies from Chrome in the name of privacy was just blocked by EU competition regulators, because it would cripple competing advertising companies[1].

That's not what the article is saying. The referenced EC PR[0]: "Antitrust: Commission opens investigation into possible anticompetitive conduct by Google in the online advertising technology sector".

Nothing has been blocked. Restriction of third-party cookies is only one of 6 points that will be particularly looked at. This investigation may rightly so have launched at this or a later point regardless of third-party cookie restrictions in Chrome.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_...

> Increasing privacy decreases competitions, strengthening the Big Tech companies that engage with users at the platform/browser/OS/hardware level.

What about products that people actually pay for directly instead of products that are "free" but funded under the table through surveillance and manipulation? Why can't those compete just fine?

Would be nice but they'd have to compete as beggars on gated app stores. Face it, big tech is robber baron territory.

> There are also two fundamental components of the Big Tech debate at odds with each other here - privacy and competition.

The article explicitly talks about how this is a false dichotomy.

> Regulators in the U.K., he said, had bought the ad industry's argument that privacy and competition are on a collision course. That, he said, is a false choice. "They could have required everyone to not access that data, Google included, which would have been a net benefit for competition and privacy," Soltani said.

Users pick browsers and their OS. They don't pick the latest iteration of Bonsai Buddy.

For the average users there's only two choices, Windows or Mac, and Chrome-based or Firefox (or if they're on a Mac they get Safari as a 3rd choice).

And who is going to click the "let random companies I've never heard of know every site I visit online" button?

The average user doesn't exist. It's an abstraction used by techies to make arguments they cannot defend.

The average user are all those people that are yet to bother with GNU/Linux desktop, despite the exodus migrations being profethized at each macOS or Windows version.

The average person has a fractional amount of children, friends, parents, even limbs. The average person exists no more than a spherical cow does.

Examples of average person as per Cambridge dictionary.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/example/english/average-per...

Apparently they exist.

As the saying goes: The average human has 1 testicle.