I think there’s some confusion over the intent here.
Lawmakers in state capitals across the country […]
So based on this, Google is using “state” here to mean a US state and not the more general meaning of government.
For large corporations like Google, each state having its own local regulations (e.g. privacy regulations such as CCPA) is expensive because they have to account for different rules in different places, which means whole teams of legal experts just to be familiar with each state’s regulations and interpret what they mean for operating the business.
It’s also problematic in a technical sense, because on the internet how do you know if a particular user is a legal resident of Texas or Colorado or New Hampshire, and would even knowing that be a violation of their privacy rights?
So the intent here is to push federal regulation over state regulation, because it makes the legal and technical problems simpler.
Ultimately this is an argument against the way the Republican party does things, where they reject federal regulations saying that the states should be allowed to regulate themselves and that federal regulation is an overreach. This leads to weaker protections for citizens and weaker enforcement, which is the Republican party’s real intent. Every US citizen should have privacy protections, not just residents of California.
It’d be great if California’s consumer privacy protections could be applied at the federal level, but as long as the Republicans retain the presidency, either house of congress, or the Supreme Court, it would either never get passed or simply get struck down and returned to the state regulatory level.
Absolutely, that’s the problem that Google is targeting here. Republicans like to claim that federal regulation is bad for businesses, but in reality it’s state-level regulation that makes it harder for businesses to operate.
Not to be super pro-Google, this is purely self-interested for them. But it seems like people are interpreting this as Google being anti-regulation in general, and I don’t think that’s correct.
I think there’s some confusion over the intent here.
So based on this, Google is using “state” here to mean a US state and not the more general meaning of government.
For large corporations like Google, each state having its own local regulations (e.g. privacy regulations such as CCPA) is expensive because they have to account for different rules in different places, which means whole teams of legal experts just to be familiar with each state’s regulations and interpret what they mean for operating the business.
It’s also problematic in a technical sense, because on the internet how do you know if a particular user is a legal resident of Texas or Colorado or New Hampshire, and would even knowing that be a violation of their privacy rights?
So the intent here is to push federal regulation over state regulation, because it makes the legal and technical problems simpler.
Ultimately this is an argument against the way the Republican party does things, where they reject federal regulations saying that the states should be allowed to regulate themselves and that federal regulation is an overreach. This leads to weaker protections for citizens and weaker enforcement, which is the Republican party’s real intent. Every US citizen should have privacy protections, not just residents of California.
It’d be great if California’s consumer privacy protections could be applied at the federal level, but as long as the Republicans retain the presidency, either house of congress, or the Supreme Court, it would either never get passed or simply get struck down and returned to the state regulatory level.
Absolutely, that’s the problem that Google is targeting here. Republicans like to claim that federal regulation is bad for businesses, but in reality it’s state-level regulation that makes it harder for businesses to operate.
Not to be super pro-Google, this is purely self-interested for them. But it seems like people are interpreting this as Google being anti-regulation in general, and I don’t think that’s correct.