I don't want an internet designed by lawyers and politicians. And I'm afraid that's what this level of regulation and enforcement would create.

Right, because an internet designed by profit motive is going great

I kind of like it. I mean here we all are on it. And sites like HN can just be written by one person and put up by one person with no permissions. The alternative if the government controlled it would be something like the Apple app store where you have to pay a fee to maybe be allowed to do something.

No it would not. We're already in some alternative where the government says that you can't make a website to sell CSAM, for instance. And we all agree that this is a good thing.

The goal of regulations is to prevent undesirable behaviours by making it "too costly" to do. The goal is not to take 30% on every app sale.

The post I replied to was on an internet designed with a "profit motive". What you describe is still basically profit motive with laws to stop bad things. I'm not quite sure what you get if you removed the profit motive. Maybe the app store wasn't a good example. Maybe something like the BBC?

My point was that the post you replied to was not saying that the alternative would be that the government would run it for profit. It was just saying that maybe it's better to have rules set by the government than to have the whole thing driven by profit-maximising machines.

I don't want an internet designed by businessmen and advertisers, yet here we are.

Any website can have a button to reject all cookies. Or if you use only functional cookies, you don't even need it! Websites could come together to make it a standard and enable a browser option to avoid bugging you.

Guess what: they didn't want that, and some prefer to make cookie banners which are really obnoxious.

I'm all up for incentives for better websites, and penalties for shit ones.

If it wasn't, you would see illegal adds all over the place. I mean you already do, but the "soft" ones.

Complaining about regulations as a concept is usually about forgetting those that work and seeing exclusively those that annoy you.

"I don't want a society regulated by rules"

I m not sure I follow your logic; are you saying that the regulation is not that bad because you are not fined enough if you don't follow it ? Some of us just follow regulations because it's the law - regardless of the fine. I feel like we should be allowed to express our opinion about their merits or shortcomings without considering the penalty aspect which is an entirely separate conversation.

I believe the point was the exact opposite: the regulation isn't enforced, which creates these absurd opt-out dialogue trees. If it were to be enforced fully, then anyone without a "reject all" button would be slapped with fines. Maybe even anyone who doesn't abide by the do not track/global privacy control headers.

Yes, that's what I meant.

Also businesses are not people. People may not do illegal things "just because they are illegal" or because they want to be "good" (e.g. I agree that we should not litter, I wouldn't even need a regulation for that).

Businesses are profit-maximising machines. If it it profitable to litter, a business will do it. The framework in which businesses maximise is set by regulations, which represent what society wants. That's how capitalism works.

The limit of capitalism is when businesses are more powerful than the entities in charge of enforcing the regulations. If "enforcing a regulation" means having lawyers work on it, but the businesses themselves have orders of magnitudes more lawyers trying to prevent those entities from doing their jobs, then we have a problem. That's a limit of capitalism, IMO.

I still believe that even with a reject all button, the regulation is absolute bullshit. The sheer fact that the regulation forbids that setting to be done at the browser level (the law specifically mentions that the consent - or rejection - has to be specific for each website and thus cannot be "once and forget"), is absolute dogshit.

I turn out to be the CTO of a mid-sized SAAS business (100+ FTE over 3 continents), and neither I, any legal advisor, or any other C-level that I have ever met are discussing "what's the fine ? should we just pay instead of complying ?" when dealing with legal stuff. I do not know who brainwashed you into thinking that all businesses are just gonna disregard any regulation given the chance but that has not been my experience at all. I am not saying that none are doing it, but this really isn't the norm. The whole "people = good, business = bad" is just some kind of cozy metal construction that fits in a TikTok video, but that not how the world works.

The EU's own government websites are littered with cookie consent banners. They want the data too.

Again, because those entities ("EU", "governments") are made of many people. It's not one guy who says "this should be illegal, but I will put it on my website too".