That data sharing thing goes pretty far. Am I reading that correctly? Anything that is hosted in the EU, or sells to EU citizens, has to share _all (generated by activity, personal and non-personal, including meta-) data_ that the service itself can use (i.e. backup tapes are excluded), upon request, free of charge, without any obfuscation, and without much of a delay. For B2B and B2C.
Almost sounds too good to be true. As far as I can tell:
* There is no clause for restricting this if it's hard to do. If it's _a lot_ of data, you still have to provide it.
* There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data (this seems fair to me; the prep and transfer costs, assuming you automate the process, are incredibly low unless it's, I dunno, some 'permanently live stream my entire life in 4k' service). Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
Note that this is essentially already the case under the GDPR for anything that's tied to a natural person.
> * There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data
Quite the opposite; There's a clause mandating it be free of charge. Chapter II, Article 4:
> Where data cannot be directly accessed by the user from the connected product or related service, data holders shall make readily available data, as well as the relevant metadata necessary to interpret and use those data, accessible to the user without undue delay, of the same quality as is available to the data holder, easily, securely, free of charge, in a comprehensive, structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and, where relevant and technically feasible, continuously and in real-time. This shall be done on the basis of a simple request through electronic means where technically feasible.
There are rules pertaining to B2B relations, where there's some restrictions on how fees may be charged. (Article 9, where fees may cover costs but must not discriminate and must be "reasonable")
> Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
The "reasonable" clauses exist to pre-empt this. EU courts generally aren't very amused by companies pulling stunts like setting fees to 'Math.infinity'.
A good case study for this has been Apple's legal fights around the DMA & App Store monopoly. Which mostly consists of Apple trying to be "clever" and the European Commission telling them that no, their clearly unreasonable fees are unreasonable.
> Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
Smart. Telcos in The Netherlands in the past did something where, for unlimited cellular data service, they used a "Fair Use Policy". Which they took at 10x the 'average' (mean not median) data use.
Only problem was, this was early 2010's and there were still a lot of old people who weren't using data. They had 0MB subscriptions on their mobile subscription, which meant they technically had a data subscription although with gigantic costs per MB.
You can already see where this is going. All these subscriptions were added along in the calculation, which meant their mean fantasyland data usage came out at 1500MB and '''unlimited''' data usage was capped at 15GB, after which speeds would plummet to 64Kbps.
These days unlimited does mean unlimited, although you get a 20GB daily allotment, after which you have to send a refill text for every 2GB of data. Which of course can be scripted :). Although I don't see why you'd need north of 600GB of mobile data per month.
It does not? 1&1 has "unlimited" but after 50 GB you need to add 2 GB again in the web interface every time. I think Telekom has real "unlimited" but it costs like 100€ per month.
(1) buy a true unlimited data plan (2) download and upload as much as you can for a whole month? Make sure it's something useful though - iperf is cheating.
Since it's true unlimited, they don't track usage. You can set your phone to a 1GB warning so the counter will always be displayed in your notifications.
This is classic regulation by technocrats as opposed to technologists.
Flawed reasoning among technocrats is that software can simply be made interoperable.
What they fail to understand is that interoperability is a two-sided process, requiring cooperation and collaboration between two (or more) parties.
And yes - it’s a process, with a cost.
Software cannot simply be made “interoperable” with all possible future permutations of other (often competing) software.
To imagine that you can demand all software is “interoperable” is literally to impose unbounded cost on all participants, because they cannot know how many other parties they will be forced to cooperate and collaborate with.
This is the kind of financial calculus that only exists in the world of bureaucrats (with their endless supply of public funding, and their never-ending remit).
To businesses, on the other hand, cost is existential.
> Flawed reasoning among technocrats is that software can simply be made interoperable.
What they fail to understand is that interoperability is a two-sided process
1. Data that software operates on can easily be made interoperable. Even trivially. There's no end to standards around that
2. Yes, it's a "two-sided process" in the sense that companies go out of their way to make any and all data as inaccessible as possible
What if I claim need your data in a particular form in order to “interoperate” with you?
Will the EU legally compel you to give me the data in the form I want?
Or perhaps you’ll explain that raw data is raw data. In which case, is the EU legally compelling you to give away all your raw data to anyone that might want to cooperate / compete / sabotage / spy on you? If not anyone, what’s the minimum bar that a counterparty has to satisfy to get access to all your data? Who judges when they meet this bar? The European Commission? Judges in the ECJ? For every interop in the cross-product of all software on the market?
Are the flaws in this regulation not blindingly obvious to everyone in this community? Am I going mad here?
> What if I claim need your data in a particular form in order to “interoperate” with you?
Oh. Malicious compliance is an art form. Just look at GDPR.
Doesn't mean that interoperability is somehow hard.
> Are the flaws in this regulation not blindingly obvious to everyone in this community? Am I going mad here?
You'd go much less mad if you read the regulation in question which I doubt you have. As a rule, the madder a person is about some EU regulation, the less likely they are to have read it.
Instead you rely on media headlines and misinterpretations.
(Note: I haven't read the act yet, but I've yet to see an act people are in arms about that doesn't actually answer most questions in the text of the act itself or in the accompanying documents)
> What if I claim need your data in a particular form in order to “interoperate” with you?
I read this as:
rzwitserloot is the operator of a SaaS service that has a bunch of data. Let's say, photos.
cbeach uses this law to request this data from rzwitserloot, and asks if it can be in .g3 format. It's _a_ format. Let's posit for a moment that it's burdened by patents, is unwieldy (produces really large files), converters are hard to find, and so on.
And your point is: HAHA! Because of dumb technocrats, GOTCHA!
And you'd be wrong. That's not what the law says.
I would tell you: Here are the files in jpg2k format, bzipped. These are common formats, they are how we store and use them, and it is a reasonable interpretation of the rule that I must provide this data in no undue delay in 'industry standard' standard formats. If you don't like it, sue me. And if you sue me, you would lose.
> s the EU legally compelling you to give away all your raw data to anyone that might want to cooperate / compete / sabotage / spy on you?
The exact data you need to provide is limited to that data which you host that is (also) owned by the requestor. I can't just ask, I dunno, facebook for the firehose of _everything by everybody_, I can only ask it for data that _I_ contributed to the platform. Other rules put limits on facebook contractually claiming ownership. Using this law to 'compete / sabotage / spy' is therefore difficult, and if it _is_ possible to meaningfully compete/sabotage/spy by using this law, then I posit that the service is rentseeking and needs to die. It is taking the 'value' of hoarding its network effect over others which is parasitising value out of the community and thus does not serve the broader interests. I can see a world where you want to financially incentivize companies to create network effect benefits, because you need to bankroll the creation if the system somehow, but doing so by giving its operators forever-rights on rentseeking the value created is perhaps a bit much. We have been doing that the past 20 or so and the results are catastrophic, which proves the point.
I _want_ a different attempt at it, and if that risks the pendulum swinging too far the other way, so be it. The EU and other law bodies have been practically screaming from the rooftops that they aren't happy with what IT companies are doing specifically in regards to e.g. hoarding their control of data to squash competition and reasonable use by the populace for years now, and they aren't moving.
This is how the world is supposed to work. You might want to check how e.g. the movie rating system came to pass. There wasn't one, the citizenry wanted one (we can debate whether the citizenry was correct in wanting that, not the point - they did), government threatened to write a law, and the business got the message and set up their own system. Government dutifully responded by not making a law.
When businesses start ignoring the strong hinting by government that laws will occur if they don't get in line, i.e. if they think they get to lord it over the populace and fall back to libertarian maxims to avoid all repercussion, the system fails. And here you are, advocating for just that.
This american defeatism about using laws and therefore just going with 'let the free market' decide is toxic and you need to cut it out. You can always find a case where a well meaning law has resulted in a disaster _and_ the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the authors of the law, just as easily as finding a case where lack of laws has led to unbridled massive export of significant externalities to society and it is ridiculous that no law exists.
> Am I going mad here?
Well, take your pick. Mad, difficulty with understanding basic reading, or trolling. You're guilty of one of those 3.
Almost sounds too good to be true. As far as I can tell:
* There is no clause for restricting this if it's hard to do. If it's _a lot_ of data, you still have to provide it.
* There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data (this seems fair to me; the prep and transfer costs, assuming you automate the process, are incredibly low unless it's, I dunno, some 'permanently live stream my entire life in 4k' service). Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.