And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.
For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."
However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.
To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
Right, but there's also the competing religious zealots who are ideologically opposed to regulation... like as a concept.
What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed.
What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt.
Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
> Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
Have you missed all the large AI companies in US loudly demanding and otherwise lobbying for more regulation?
Regulations can be good for companies when you can make sure that they are written in a way that entrenches them against any new competitors.
Big enterprises like regulation because it enables them to capture the market and slow startups down: that's why they invest so much in standardization, for instance.
It allows them to force startups to match their (slow) pace of development.
> The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long
My feeling is that in 9 years you could read it.
However, I read most of the relevant bits in an afternoon. Most people on HN making preposterous claims about GDPR have never in their life read anything but industry's take on it.
> it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
It's trivial to comply with for the absolute vast majority of companies, you can very easily read it yourself, the bits that are relevant to most businesses shouldn't even take an hour to read.
> Every HN thread about GDPR devolves into this circular argument.
The only reason it devolves into a "circular argument" is that the vast majority of anti-GDPR comments on HN come from people who have never ever read even a single line from the regulation and just parrot the same old "GDPR requires these stupid banners".
> You’ll find zero intelligent engagement here if you bring this up however, because nobody here actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to Europe’s legal patchwork and its kneecapping effect on the private sector that Europe desperately needs to fund its inverted social welfare liability death spiral.
Yup. And this is the other reason: bad faith word soup that doesn't even pretend to be coherent, mixes up everything together, and goes from non-sequitur to non-sequitur.
So. Yes, complying with GDPR is trivial for most companies. No, your yet-another-shitty-startup does not need to sell my precise geolocation data to data brokers to store for 12 years to survive: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541 And no, it's not a burden not to do that.
> So. Yes, complying with GDPR is trivial for most companies. No, your yet-another-shitty-startup does not need to sell my precise geolocation data to data brokers to store for 12 years to survive: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541 And no, it's not a burden not to do that.
this is exactly the attitude of these people
for most legitimate businesses the "pain" of the GDPR consisted of maybe removing Google Analytics from their website
the entire point is to stop the shitty companies (facebook) data harvesting everything they can get their dirty mits on
The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...
And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.
For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."
However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.
To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!