Comment by hnbad
5 months ago
Under German law, the BGB (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligations or explicitly waive ones prescribed by the BGB (and some in fact can't be waived or not entirely) - if you can prove an agreement was made that falls under the BGB's laws, those laws apply to it regardless of the existence of a written and signed contract. And yet it's extremely uncommon not to have a written contract for serious business relations and most contracts explicitly insist on signatures (in fact in German contract law, the legal phrase "in Schriftform", literally "in writing", is defined in such a way it specifically requires a document signed by both parties whereas for "in Textform", literally "in text", even an e-mail or text message would be sufficient).
It's not cookie banners that are wasting productivity, it's mutual distrust and the need to protect against it. "Cookie banners" (or more correctly: consent forms) are legal contracts. The reason they are often so annoying to navigate is that the companies that built them want to try to trick you into agreeing to things you have no interest in agreeing to or might even have an interest in not agreeing to. Technically the law forbids this but it's still more profitable to risk the fine than to abide by the law.
Or to put it another way: there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. The consent form isn't for reading the article, it's for what the site wants to do to you (or your data - which includes all data collected about you because the GDPR defines that as being yours, too) while you're reading the article.
The GDPR doesn't make you waste time on cookie banners. The GDPR grants you ownership of all personally identifiable information of you and about you - it creates legal rights and protections you previously didn't have. Cookie banners exist because companies want to infringe upon those rights. Most cookie banners are difficult to navigate because most companies don't want you to understand what you're agreeing to (and on second order because they want you to blame the law granting you rights rather than them for infringing upon those rights).
> there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article.
Respectfully, this is untrue. The article is there because of the ads that pay the bills. Without ads there is no article and no site. Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
> Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
When behavioral targeted advertising was new, it vastly outperformed previous ad networks which used a spray-and-pray approach and paid by impressions. In the years (decades?) since, the payouts for behavioral targeted advertising have dropped significantly. "Untargeted" ads on the other hand have mostly vanished simply because the ad networks that used them have moved on to behavioral ads where they had to compete with mass data harvesters like Alphabet and Meta, mostly unsuccessfully.
Behavioral targeted advertising also doesn't live up to its promise for consumers. Nowadays most actual ads people get are either trying to sell products they already purchased or outright fraud - the rest is the same generic drivel that you would expect without targeted advertising. The reduction in tracking surface from sites that don't require these ads to operate (e.g. sites that previously fed into networks like Google's via unrelated services that can now no longer be legally used for that purpose and require opt-in) also means the targeting will become increasingly worse.
The GDPR does allow for making behavioral ads conditional to accessing content, by the way. But it requires providing the user with the option to instead pay for the content. The problem a lot of companies like Meta run into is that it also requires the price to be proportionate to the lost advertising revenue - Meta is infamous for having priced its "ad-free" tier orders of magnitude higher than their actual value of an individual user.
That said, what is killing this kind of site isn't users deciding not to give away their data but services like Google scraping their content and pre-empting user traffic to their websites entirely - first via news feeds and search summaries and now via "AI enhanced search". The ad-driven business model is dying and has been dying for a long time, the GDPR just puts limits on what can replace it. Google wasn't paying sites because it wanted to sell ads, Google was paying sites because it needed access to their users' data.
You also can't have capitalism without bureaucracy. There's no such thing as stateless capitalism because states allow for capital to exist. Without states, you'd have to justify your claims to your peers and anything in excess of what you can justify for personal needs would be considered hoarding and wasteful. And in order to have a state, you need bureaucracy to structure the operation of that state for it to act as a cohesive entity.
Rights don't make sense without bureaucracy because they only have meaning when you deal with them at that layer of abstraction. You can't respect and infringe "rights" interpersonally. You can act ethically or unethically, you can be nice or a bit of a dick, you can harm or help. But rights only become necessary as a concept when you have processes that need to interact with them and abstract entities that uphold and enforce them. Rights allow you to sue or call the police. But without rights you can't have capitalism. States enforce property rights literally at the end of a gun (and this includes "state property" too in case you were wondering about so-called "communist" states).