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Having a government full of technical lot illiterate politicians regulating digital advertisement - what could possibly go wrong.


Then that's the fault of companies who fucked up self-regulation so badly that the government has to step in. If they had behaved, this wouldn't be necessary.


I am not sure whether there could be anything worse than the current situation of a free-for-all with customers' data.


There absolutely could, if the new legislation were easy enough to circumvent for large companies but expensive to implement for everyone else, giving big players an even bigger advantage as far as data goes.


Maybe the government having access to all of your data....


>Having a government full of technical lot illiterate politicians regulating digital advertisement - what could possibly go wrong.

I'm not sure that argument works.

If we expand a bit, It wouldn't be difficult to find that governments are mostly comprised of <industry> illiterate politicians. There is no need for a government to be comprised of digital advertisement industry specialists in order to pass meaningful industry regulation.



You're trying to convince me that the system isn't perfect. Listen, I've long since agreed with you.

I commented on your initial response because it was overly dismissive and implied the only way forward is to first wait until we have a government stocked with domain experts who only act only on policy within their domain. It dismisses the fact that it is unlikely that the politicians introducing regulation were solely responsible for its construction.

Yes, there is corruption in government and yes ignorance is painfully obvious in some legislation, but to dismiss the idea of enacting regulation because the politician(s) signing it into law may not be experts in the field the regulation addresses, isn't at all practical.

I'd further argue that it is incumbent upon those working in industry to ensure the creation of regulation is conducted transparently and includes representatives from the industry to contribute the necessary knowledge and expertise required to formulate the law(s) such that society benefits from the protection and commerce suffers no undue burden.


Given the choice between a corrupt company and a corrupt politician, the corrupt politician can do far more damage. It’s far easier for me to choose which companies I use than choose which government that I am under.

The government can do and has done far more damage than big tech.


History has much scarier lessons about governments abusing detailed lists of population preferences.




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