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I disagree. It only displays the challenges when you're trying to comply with the letter of the law while doing everything you can to evade its purpose. Stuff like pre-selected consent boxes are not just mistakes or misunderstandings.


The only guaranteed way to avoid regulatory attention is to shut down everything and stop operations. There is fundamentally no decision you can make other than "comply with the law while continuing to operate as effectively as possible".

Even more unfortunately, bureaucracies, including every modern corporation and government, are UnFriendly AIs. You must comply with the letter of the law because not a single agent involved, not the regulators writing the law nor the courts that will interpret the law nor your competitors that will bring complaints against you nor even the users of the products involved, knows or cares what the spirit is. They don't have the correct value systems, experiences, philosophical frameworks, or cognitive architectures to execute the "comprehend human values" step that would be required to interpret the "spirit" of the law. That incapability is why an even minimally functional justice system needs things like checks and balances and case law and jurisprudence and rules of evidence and all of those things. But we do need those things, because history has proven universally that the letter of the law is the only thing that matters.

On the one hand, this means we literally can't trust any organization composed of more than approximately two people. You often can't even trust organizations with one person, simply because bureaucracy is a force-multiplier even for single humans; think about things like bug trackers and source-control systems and apply them to other workflows. On the other hand, this means that it's pretty much worthless to try to do anything about any individual corporation. Up to the point where you entirely obliterate their industry you're stuck. Which is, coincidentally, what an antitrust action really is - antitrust actions happen exactly when a single agent has taken over an entire industry, and making sure that that an identical bad actor doesn't reappear requires not just breaking it up but also obliterating its industry and introducing a new one with similar features but substantially different (non-agglutinative) dynamics.

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