Cory Doctorow

Or you could speed them up

so that you fire nine-tenths of the cashiers, and you take the remainder, and you make them work at such an accelerated pace that they can't even make eye contact.

So look, I love you both, but I think you're dead wrong about the GDPR, just as a factual matter about where it comes from, what it permits, what it prohibits, and why it failed, because I agree it failed.

So you may ask yourself, how is it that GDPR compliance consists of a bunch of cookie compliance dialogues?

And the answer to that is that European federalism allows tax havens to function within the federation.

One of the most notorious of those is Ireland, and almost every American tech company except for Amazon pretends that it's Irish so that its profits can float in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea.

And because of the nature of the GDPR, enforcement for these bullshit cookie pop-ups, which are the progeny of the big American tech companies, starts in Dublin with the Irish data commissioner, who to a first approximation does nothing.

So that's only because the companies went to Ireland, broke the law, and said, we're not breaking the law.

And if you disagree, you have to ask the Irish data commissioner to enforce against us.

But a few people, Johnny Ryan with the Irish Civil Liberties Association, Max Schrems with NOYB, this none of your business, this nonprofit, European nonprofit, they dragged some of those cases to Germany.

More importantly, they've got the European Commission to start modifying the way the law works.

So you can tick a box in your browser preferences and it can come turned on by default that says, I don't want to be spied on.

And then they're not allowed to ask you.

I mean, the answer is just going to be no.

And so...

I think that corporations want you to think that it's transcendentally hard to write a good law that bans companies from collecting data on you.

And what they mean is it's transcendentally hard to police monopolies once they've attained monopoly status because they are more powerful than governments.

And if that's their message, then a lot of us would be like, well, we need to do something.

We need to turn the cartel into a rabble again, as opposed to, God, I guess governments just have no role in solving this problem.

No, I think that one of the things we should probably anticipate Time Warner saying in defense of this merger is the same thing that Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House said in defense of their failed merger that was blocked under the Biden administration.