[forest_dweller]

> GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.

All that sites will do is do a cost assessment of whether it is worth serving those in the EU and just block the IP range and people that want to use those services will just use VPNs anyway (which is what I do when I am banned by IP from a site because of the GDPR rules).

>Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.

No it doesn't. Corporatism is a collusion with government. If governments were smaller, buying influence wouldn't be effective. You don't even understand what you are arguing.

Yes the market is a dynamic system that why if you allow it to operate freely those companies that are abusing their position will start to lose market share when other competitors that don't will be more attractive to consumers. However once you involve regulation, then that mechanism doesn't happen because you just raised the bar higher for all the would be smaller players.

Again you always want to frame it in the worst light.

Anyway. Fuck this site, dissenting opinion is frowned upon here. So much for the hacker part.

[pushrax]

The major barriers to competing with Google/Amazon/Facebook etc are not regulatory hassles, by far. Even in highly regulated industries, like space launch vehicles, the additional cost of compliance over your own due diligence isn’t the biggest barrier.

Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize companies from outright lying in the first place.

Companies and people in a fully free market system won’t magically become rational automata that behave ideally. We’re only human. Our superpower is the ability to collectively leverage our individual specialization. Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization that needs regulation to be effective.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

There's plenty of room for dissenting opinion here. But if you're going to offer up an argument for capitalist-libertarianism that isn't any more than a largely evidence-free rehash of the same positions that filled talk.politics.theory on usenet in the 1990s, then yeah, you're probably not going to see a lot of support. Offer up a cogent, evidence-filled position that genuinely causes people to say "huh! gonna have to think/read about this ..." and I'm fairly sure you'd see a different response.

[forest_dweller]

I've given my rationale. Calling it evidence-free when there are thousands of examples where it works and almost everytime there is government involvement it happens to be a mess. So piss off with you patronising response.