throwaway4719

That's the beauty of it all.

Do you really think YCombinator has no EU exposure? It's a multi-billion dollar company.

Is the website available on any known platform, including any selectric-based platforms?

How were you able to read anything?

This is comically bad.

I think gutting the value of a forum so that people can remove all their content at will on a whim can readily go bad places.

Thankfully, there's a really easy solution that HN today will not consider/is not taking seriously enough: Just change the goddamn displayed username for each comment to "<deleted>" or whatever.

1) this kind of (seemingly; it's all a black box in reality though) naval-gazing-based decision making is exactly why the GDPR makes sense. We can't run our lives on the whims of a few random people.

2) Does YCombinator tell us all of this stuff when we sign up to HN? No. We have to find it out by ourselves. When we e-mail them to ask them to delete our contributions, since there's no delete button, they just say "sorry, we can't do that".

This kind of stuff is what the GDPR is good for.

To be able to post at all. I've given up on the vgf handle. And on HN as well, to be honest.

I posted that (I'm vgf). My account was rate-limited and the post was very clearly artificially pushed to the second page, then the third. Just minutes before that it had started to climb up the front page relatively quickly.

I assume you were being sarcastic, but in this aspect, I actually think the GDPR is great. At least for Europeans.

(The fact that people will find a way of disagreeing about pretty much anything online is a whole other matter.)

Alphabet Inc. break their revenue down into:

EMEA, APAC, Other Americas, US

Out of this, in 2017, EMEA was 32.5% of total revenue, based on numbers from page 33 of https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20171231_alphabet_10K.pdf.

My bullshit-guess is that out of those 32.5 percent units, EU/EES was responsible for about 31 units or so, and the rest 1.5 was from the middle east and africa. (Reasoning: the ME certainly has money, but no population to speak of. Africa has lots of people but besides relatively tiny South Africa very little revenue for Google.)

So yeah, the EU has a pretty powerful hammer.

That's one part of the negotiation puzzle. EU would want it's citizens to retain access to their google-hosted emails.

Legally speaking, I'm sure there's plenty of ways the EU can force Google to do things it currently does not want to do.

I'd say the EU has lots of negotional angles currently to win things from Google. That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess). And that, alas, was also a large part of why the EU was born. So now we'll will reap the benefits.

If I could say anything to our EU negotiators in this case, it would be: stay brave.

Google is however nowadays staffed by activists.

Note: Docker is a YC company (S10).

Note 2: This kind of comment from a moderator feels a bit out of place, given this. At least without a disclaimer explaining the relationship between the topic and the moderator's employer.

It is illegal to use a monopoly in one market to create a monopoly in another market.

They kept the fact that they were going to deploy this on the search service that has a monopoly on search in EU secret until it was launched in Chrome. Before this, this link prefetching has seen very little use in the wild.

Posting from a throwaway account since I work on a competing browser.

I think Google needs to check its steps quite carefully when doing things like these. For quite some time they have leveraged their search monopoly (think about their EU search market share) to bring search/browser-type integration features to chrome first. I would say this is abusing a monopoly in one market segment (search in the EU) to attempt to create a monopoly in another segment (browsers in the EU) by continually making sure that Chrome is the browser that works better than other browsers when using Google search services.

Yes, this is innovative, but there is also a concept known as antitrust laws. Another way of bringing this to the market would have been to invite competing browsers to use this and build a credible time plan for a simultaneous launch for all the browsers that wanted to support this.