Hence the numbers I gave. Most people questioning authority do indeed just want some other authority in power.

With AI agents not even being remotely secure, anybody running this is asking for it.

This is about keeping the market _diverse_. It is anti-trust measures that keep capitalism from devolving into monopolies. It is good for consumers and keeps vendors on their toes. It keeps innovation going. But lots of clueless Americans apparently want to be abused by big-tech.

Just that it is neither IP not trade secrets this is about. Try to keep up, you sound very stupid.

Indeed. Even Microsoft and YouTube react very fast when they get a GDPR request. Nobody sane wants to lose the EU.

If you think anti-trust law that gets actually enforced is "idiotic", you are welcome to stay in your oligarcist hell-hole.

How about you idiot find out what anti-trust means?

I disagree. Search data can clearly be anonymized competently. Also, if anybody else deanonymizes people in there, then under the GDPR, they have 30 days (!) time to inform everybody they identified and to get informed consent. Any use of that data before they have gotten that consent is illegal. Failure to inform people within 30 days is illegal. Holding the data for longer without having gotten that informed consent (experts think 3 months is about the maximum) is illegal.

Hence nobody sane will try to identify people in such data.

You are wrong. While many incompetents have tried and failed to anonymize data in the past, it is well known how to do it competently. Your mistake is thinking you can do this without an actual expert designing things.

Here is a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yep. They should immediately jump on Google: "What do you mean, you do not know how to adequately anonymize search data?"

And apparently some completely incompetent morons even think that is ok and mod my comment down. Stupid and proud of it, apparently.

Which is why, under the GDPR, they not only have to hand over copies of everything from you the have, they also have to delete it all unless they have a valid business reason that pertains to their business with you. Also funny how fast the react when you do a GDPR request. No comparison to their basically non-existent customer support. Apparently those past fines for illegal behaviour had some effect.

The mind boggles.

He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.

He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.

I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.