GDPR is a scam

Full Title: The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) of the European Union is a scam

Introduction

This is not a paper about enabling privacy for the citizens of any location on earth. It is rather a paper about the process that enables the representatives of the people to take the legitimate concerns of the people and draft legislation which does precisely what any set of rules always does, it benefits the interests of the organization that makes the rules. It often happens that the rule makers benefit when the people that select them believe that they rules are in the interest of the people, but that is only a side effect of the rule making process and never the primary goal of the rule makers. So it would be good to understand who will benefit from the GDPR. That will at least enable us to understand why the rules were written. We will then examine a different set of rules that were written with close attention paid to the people affected by the rules so that we can see how an alternate method can result in a better set of rules.

N.B. This paper was published on the date scheduled for the regulation to go into effect. Since the regulation depends on each nation in the EU creating supporting legislation, there is an expected delay coordinated all of those efforts. What is less well-known is that members of the electronics services continue their fight to weaken the GDPR. Council negotiations have been slowed by internal disagreements about how to respond to industry pressure to derail the regulation. The specific item that is under attack appears to be the need to acquire user's explicit consent before placing tracking codes on users' devices or collecting data about their communications. Given the fact that the protocols of the internet are now structured to require cookies to establish a consistent user experience over multiple information interchanges, the effect on the user experience could be unacceptable if some relaxation is not achieved.

The Creation and Likely Impact of the GDPR

The primary function of any bureaucracy is preservation. That takes money. The primary goal of any rule maker is to acquire and maintain power to make rules. The maintenance of that power takes money. The most dangerous rule maker is one that discovers the power to make rules that make money without taxing the people that give the rule maker power. The Brussels bureaucracy has discovered that ability. The GDPR is at its core a mean for the bureaucracy of Brussels, in cahoots with the national privacy offices to mint money at the expense of corporations all running out of silicon valley. This is the scam. The means and motive are clear, the impact will likely be unexpected.

The first impact is easy to understand, the advertising and content producing industries are working ferociously to maintain their existing cash flows. This is happening mostly our of the lime-light that envelopes the social networking companies of silicon valley, who are mounting their own defenses, which are designed to sound like acquiescence without undue expense. It is to be expected that the great effort of the standards bodies to build compliant software will have little effect on the results as compared with the well-funded lobbyists. Still some good should come from the effort at compliance, but only if the standards that are created have the resilience to work even in an environment where compromise is on-going. What is most concerning is that the standards MUST NOT cater to the regulators, they are to fickle in the face of pressure. The standards must give the user the experience that helps them achieve their goals without excessive cognitive load. Evolution is the only way for survival of any organism or ecosystem in the long run. Stasis never survives for long.

Is Advertising Nessessary?

Monopolization of information flows has worked to the advantage of oligarchs as long as history has recorded any thought about the value of information, or intelligence as it is sometimes known to the oligarchs. The information revolutions: printed books, radio broadcasting, and now narrow-casting on the internet, have all been faced with paying for the medium of exchange. Books were originally modestly expensive and hard for the general population to afford until free lending libraries were established. Newspapers have relied on money from advertising more than cost of the paper for as long as they have been popular. A similar problem faced radio until the advertising potential was realized and then exploited. From the beginning of the World Wide Web (which is now synonymous with the internet) the prevailing mantra is that "Information want to be free". This idea flies in the face of all history but sounds like a good thing. The trouble was that someone must pay for the internet, a fact that seems to have been conveniently overlooked by the freedom lovers of this current age. Noam Chompsky is a good spokesman for this view in this book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" which shows that, "contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order." While this may be true, it is also true that the United States founders, especially Hamilton, believed that the voice of the people is inimical to free government as the people always can be swayed by demagogues. Recent history has proven that even if Chompsky was correct, the alternate, a free exchange of ideas by ideologues, is certainly not better than the privileged groups seeking to maintain global order. Empirically it seems true that some moderating medium is required for the maintenance of freedom.

Getting back to the desire for freedom from advertising or any impediment to the free and unfettered flow of information, how can a balance be constructed that gives people what they need, rather than what they ask for. Certainly neither Plato's ideal Philosopher Kings, nor the John Stuart Mill's utility function have worked to find the best course for government. The need to govern the flow of content on the internet should now be manifestly obvious given the desire of sovereign governments, as well as would be king makers, to mold the voting patterns to suit their own goals. As Facebook is now discovering, such a governing bureaucracy is expensive. It is the general form of some government for the internet that needs to be created while recognizing the desire of most users to make no overt payment for their entertainment and also recognizing the need for paying service providers for their quality content. This will be a major challenge for the next dozen years. It is earnestly to be hoped that the world can create such a government that has at least as good an effect on liberty as the philosophers of 200 years ago imagined for us today. It is expected that no proposal will be able to replace advertising as a convenient payment mechanism.

Is the GDPR a Net Benefit?

Clearly the privacy of citizens of the European Union have been improved by this regulation. It is likely that the privacy of most citizens of the world have been improved by the spill over effect of multi-national corporations. But the following reports serve to show the downside of the regulation. Only time will tell if there will be a net positive benefit to the citizens of the EU as a result of this regulation.

The New York Times has reported a series of problems so far, and other reports are certain and will be posted here as time and interest permits:

• NYT 2018-05-28 "In Europe, New Battle on Privacy" states that "the legislation is so stringent that it could kill off data-driven online service and chill innovations."
• NYT 2018-05-27